Tutorial 1

Q1) Briefly discuss the history and future of multimedia. How might multimedia be used to improve the lives of its users? How might it influence users in negative ways? What might be its shortcomings?

 

Multimedia is defined as the seamless digital integration of text, graphics, animation, audio, still images and motion video in a way that provides individual users with high levels of control and interaction. The evolution of Multimedia is a story of the emergence and convergence of these technologies.  In simple words for multimedia, it's "more than one medium". For instance, multimedia would be combining a website with video, audio, or text image.

Multimedia is very helpful in our future. Future trends in multimedia technology will increasingly revolve around distributed-multimedia systems, cross-platform user interfaces, and networking architectures and bandwidth. While storage costs, processing costs, and ever more powerful application costs will decrease, the true strength of multimedia technology will be seen in how it adapts to networked environments. For instance, iHolo is a futuristic cellphone that makes use of holographic imaging technology to achieve the separation of the contents of the screen, allowing a completely new experience to the user. Featuring advanced technologies, including touchscreen, infrared, Bluetooth and so on, the multimedia cellphone projects the content on any flat surface, so the users could have a life-size screen to realize different applications with ease.

Multimedia can improve the lives of users in its applications such as today's lifestyle. Users can know the latest news that happening around the world without travelling by using the technologies. Moreover, it brings more entertainment to the user. For example for a mobile phone. In the past, user only use it to call other people. Currently, mobile phone is just like a "PAT", Personal Assistant Tool. Many multimedia applications are invented as part of functions of mobile phone. Users can play online games, watching movie/drama, listen to  the songs, surfing internet (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc). Besides that, nowadays people never scare they get lost because they will use their smart phone to search for the road (the hi-tech GPS applications are Google Maps, Papago, and WAZE). Users can also know their own location through the graphic simulation on the GM..

Nevertheless, multimedia might influence users in the negative ways. Since it's very convenience and easy to carry and use, people may use the multimedia invention and technology in the wrong ways. The most significant is the privacy of the user may be violated. There are some cases happened before. Some users like to use mobile phone or digital camera to capture girls' underwear in the shopping mall and uploaded in the Facebook which is violation human being right. In addition, some users may use the advanced multimedia software to edit the picture in order to create another story line which it's not the truth.

On behalf, Multimedia invention might always be misuse by some unmoral organizations when competes to get something. False news was made and spread by someone based on "edited picture" through Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) or other web resources.

As a conclusion, multimedia has contributed millions of convenience to people nowadays. Users should not misuse it but should help the world to improve the quality of multimedia.

Q3) Multimedia is shifting from being localized (contained on a CD-ROM) to being distributed (available on the World Wide Web). What are some of the implications of this? Who will have access to the presentation? How will you keep it secure? How will you distribute it?

Usage of CD-ROM to store multimedia allows access only to the person having the CD-ROM. By using WWW as a distributing platform, many people around the world can access the multimedia simultaneously. Company can have a widespread market that allows more customers to be captured from all around the world.

The use of passwords, secured database and data encryption have been used to secure multimedia being distributed on the WWW. There are some organizations which can secure the websites, for example, websitesecure.org. The website can be carrying all the necessary information such as video clips, data and updates while the multimedia can be introduced and distributed to the people through advertisement and marketing. Advertisement should be innovative in order to approach users. The development of 'thin client' multimedia kiosk technology revolutionize world of multimedia advertising. "Thin clients" are basically networked computers that will obtain all their necessary resources from remote servers (Internet). This will enable development of kiosks in many public locations such as shopping centres or airports where users have ability to search for pertinent local information, check emails or take advantage of other services such as video conferencing.