Multimedia

Multimedia refers to the integration of multiple media forms, including text, music, spoken words, video, illustrated graphics, and still photographs, to communicate unified messages that, ideally at least, are also interactive. Optical data storage made multimedia a watchword in the computer industry in the mid-1980s, and after the release of the multimedia-rich Mosaic Web browser in 1993, combined-media forms have been increasingly apparent on the Internet. When presented using hypertext links, digital multimedia becomes “hypermedia.”

Some of the most powerful and popular forms of modern multimedia are found in CD-ROM video games running on specialized computer consoles like Sony's Playstation, Microsoft's Xbox, and Nintendo's GameCube, all of which contain potent multimedia-rendering processors. Multimedia elements also are present on many Web sites, especially those that use Macromedia Flash software to generate low-band-width animation, video, and sound along with explanatory text. PC-bound CD-ROMs like the Guinness Encyclopedia are also crowded with multimedia elements.

Even traditional TV, already a multimedia platform (although not an interactive one), has recently tried to up its multimedia ante. In 2001, CNN's Headline News service changed format, splitting the TV screen four ways in an apparent effort to mimic the look of a busy multimedia Web site, crowding the news anchor's image into one corner of the screen while flashing two separate textual news stories below and running graphics or video in a fourth segmented space beside the anchor.

Meanwhile, virtual reality (VR) developers, such as those at the University of Illinois at Chicago's Electronic Visualization Lab, are focused on making multimedia an immersive sensory experience that a person can walk into and interact with, rather than something read, heard, and viewed from a desktop computer or television screen.