Multimedia technology多媒体技术.doc

Chapter 18 Multimedia technology Interest in multimedia is currently rather pervasive ----entertainment and educational groups are exploring new applications, and the computers, telecommunications, and home electronics industries are actively developing underlying technology. 18.1 introduction When we just had text on screen, the basic user interface was a DOS prompt or maybe a simple list of choices. Now what we have graphics and text at the same time, we can have a much more intuitive mouse-driven graphics based user –interface with pull down menus, as in the Macintosh, Macintosh, Microsoft Windows and Presentation Manager. When we can add photograph-quality images, animation, good-quality sound, and interactivity, then we ought to be able to make computers much more powerful and much easier to use. That’s the concept behind multimedia, the newest buzzword. Multimedia, which typically refers to a syntheses of graphics, animation, optical storage, image processing, and sound, is not a single technology, product, or market. Instead, it is a collection of technologies that proponents believe will one day be joined together. Today, the various technologies referred to as multimedia define a number of individual niches. One of the most important of these is animation, the capability to have moving images on your screen. Animation is tightly tied in with another concept called desktop video----actually creating and manipulating video images, to produce in-house presentations, rough drafts of commercial videos, or training products. Sound will also play a key role in multimedia presentations. Video images also take up a lot of disk space. To handle this, some groups are loading at optical disk for storage, particularly as erasable optical media become more mainstream. Desktop video and animation is all well and good, but what many proponents see is a way of combining all these elements into an interactive system----interactive multimedia or hypermedia. The c