Interactivity in Multimedia Documents and Systems

Abstract

SynonymsUser interaction; User inputDefinitionMultimedia interactivity describes the set of possible actions a user can do to change the state of a multimedia system, e.g., the course of a multimedia document’s playback.IntroductionThe rapid growth of network capabilities in the last decade has fostered the diffusion of a wide set of interactive multimedia documents and systems, ranging from multimedia portals and distributed e-learning applications to interactive games and systems for multimedia data retrieval. These applications usually allow users to actively interact with the system rather than being passive recipients of information.The problem of describing, supporting and helping user interaction has been largely investigated in literature. Multimedia systems usually allow two types of navigation facilities to control a presentation [1]: to adjust the current time reference in a presentation playback or to follow a hyperlink. In the first case, the ...