From Interactive to Experimental Multimedia

Perhaps the most dramatic Information Society development witnessed today is the wide availability of social networking capabilities for the users, orchestrated through the wide variety of virtual multimedia communication tools. Mobile and networked interactive multimedia applications are employed to promptly capture or create user-centered content that after being processed and enriched with the appropriate context is relayed back to the community. Tools destined to serve various purposes emerge in various fields including entertainment, marketing, education, engineering, scientific research, medicine, business, art and communication (Jain et al., 2011). In the literature, their popularity is attributed to social multimedia dynamics (Naaman, 2010), combined with the wide accessibility of networking and networked devices (Castells, 2011). Other important factors that allow interactive access to multimedia content include the availability of virtual multimedia-data storage technologies, streaming and content-discovery repositories, simplified URL-based information linking across social software applications, cloud infrastructures and reduced wireless internet-access cost.