Business and Advertisement

Multimedia applications are used in businesses to manage company information systems such as in accounting, sales and marketing, and customer relationship management. Multimedia is used in business promotions and presentation purposes. For example the company corporate video is an important promotional tool to attract clients. Other than that, sales promotions employ multimedia contents to promote products and services. Multimedia presentations are also used in showrooms to describe products or services of the organisation.

Company websites encompassing organisational multimedia contents for public relations and marketing purposes have become an online business showcase available 24/7/365 (24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year) for the whole wide world to view.

Multimedia has greatly benefited the business world as it has been applied in various advertising purposes for different products through channels such as the broadcasting media. For example to create appealing advertisements for TV broadcast, millions of dollars have been invested. E-mail advertising is another application of multimedia for interactive promotion of a product or service to individuals or specific potential markets. With the integration of multimedia elements such as video and animation, potential clients and customers are able to interact through the contents of an email.

1.5.3 Entertainment

Multimedia is extensively used in the entertainment industry especially to develop special effects in movies and animations. Animated pictures are used to represent the dynamic aspects of complex scenes through 3D modelling. This model is often used in science fiction (sci-fi) films as well as TV advertisements.

The application of multimedia systems in games makes possible innovative and interactive entertainment that greatly enhances playersÊ experience. The use of multimedia elements in designing games enables more interesting layouts,

exciting experiences, and enhanced interactive settings. The interactive multimedia system is the multimedia application that allows players to actively participate instead of just sitting by as passive recipients of information.

With further new digital multimedia applications in entertainment, future entertainment could be structurally different from entertainment offered in the past.

1.5.4 Medical

Multimedia applications are also utilised in the medical field. For example, in the human anatomy model, the functions of the human body are displayed through the use of multimedia presentation. By using this method, the concepts presented become more effective and understandable for students to grasp. Hence they can relate the process of the human functions to others using the same method.

A medical simulator is another example of multimedia application in the medical field. More recently interactive multimedia anatomy models have also been developed; these are able to respond to actions taken by a student or physician.

MULTIMEDIA CURRENT TREND

The curent trend toward the removal of any conceiveable bottleneck for those using multimedia data, from advanced research organizations to home users, has left to the explosive growth of visual information available in the form of digital libraries and online multimedia archives.

This explosive growth of multimedia data accesible to users poses a whole new set of challenges relating to data storage and retrieval.

The current technology of text-based indexing and retrieval implemented for relational database does not provide practical solutions for this problem of managing huge multimedia repositories.

(Bashir, Khanvilkar, Khokhar & Schonfeld, 2005) Discuss this trend with your classmate in MyLMS forum.

LOCAL MULTIMEDIA CONTENT

CYBERJAYA: The Multimedia Development Corp (MDeC), custodian of the MSC Malaysia Initiative, is increasing its efforts to help develop the local creative content industry.

Its efforts now include the building of the Malaysian Animation Creative Content Centre (MAC3) in Cyberjaya as well as initiating a new business matching programme to develop and promote local content.

Speaking after the National IT Council meeting last week, MDeC chief executive officer Datuk Badlisham Ghazali said MAC3 can help in the unearthing of new talents to help develop the local creative content industry.

[The Star, 28 August 2007]

Discuss in myLMS forum how you would define local creative multimedia content, and obtain your classmates feedback.

Ć Multimedia communication is defined as a human-computer interactive process that involves the digital elements of text, graphic, audio, video, and animation.

Ć The development of multimedia technology has changed the way we work and play.

Ć Interactive multimedia has several capabilities in enabling intuitive interfacing, better comprehension of learning content, enjoyable experience, self-paced interaction, and better information retention by the users.

Ć Multimedia applications can be found extensively in education, business, entertainment, and the medical field.

Computer-Assisted Instruction (CAI)

Al Bouna, B., & Chbeir, R. (2006). Multimedia-based authorization and access control policy specification. Proceedings of the 3rd ACM workshop on secure web, 61-68.

Alty, J.L., Al-Sharrah, A., & Beacham, N. (2006). When humans form media and media form humans: An experimental study examining the effects different digital media have on the learning outcomes of students who have different learning styles. Interacting with computers, 18, 891ă909.

Bashir, F., Khanvilkar, S., Khokhar, A., & Schonfeld, D. (2005). Multimedia Systems: Content-based indexing and retrieval. The electrical engineering handbook, 379-400.

Chen, L. (2006). Dances with multimedia: Embedded video codec design.

Proceedings of the 2006 international conference on compilers, architecture and synthesis for embedded systems, 1-1.

Cohn, J., Kong, J., Malachowsky, C., & Tobias, R. (2006). Design challenges for next-generation multimedia, game and entertainment platforms. Proceedings of the 43rd annual conference on design automation, 459-459.

Garzotto, F., & Forfori, M. (2006). FaTe2: Storytelling edutainment experiences in 2D and 3D collaborative spaces. Proceeding of the 2006 conference on interaction design and children, 113-116.

Heller, R. S., Martin, C. D., Haneef, N., & Gievska-Krliu, S. (2001). Using a theoretical multimedia taxonomy framework. J. Educ. Resour. Comput, 1, 6.

Pobiner, S. (2006). Collaborative multimedia learning environments. CHI '06 extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems, 1235-1240.

Van Nimwegen, C., van Oostendorp, H., Burgos, D., & Koper, R. (2006). Does an interface with less assistance provoke more thoughtful behaviour?

Proceedings of the 7th international conference on learning sciences, 785-791.

Topic

 INTRODUCTION

In Topic 1, we were introduced to basic multimedia concepts. In this second topic, we will learn about multimedia hardware and software. The hardware and software are the components that will determine whether the multimedia needs can be met.

The components which display the data or information that has been processed by the CPU are the output devices. Examples of main output devices are the monitor, speaker, and printer. Several current hardware technologies such as the DDR2-SDRAM (Double Data Rate 2 - Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory) will also be introduced here in this Topic 2. We will also get to know a few multimedia editing tools and other software.