Issues and Obstacles with Multimedia Authoring

Unlike traditional authoring, multimedia authoring involves making hard choices, forecasting technological evolution and adapting to software and hardware technology changes. It is, perhaps, an unstable field of endeavor for an academic to be in. Yet, it is important that academics are, in fact, part of this process. This paper discusses some of the common threads shared by three dissimilar cases of multimedia authoring which we have experimented with, that of multimedia conference proceedings, multimedia courseware development and multimedia information kiosks. We consider these applications from an academic point of view and review the benefits and pitfalls of academic development while sharing points of hard-learned wisdom. We draw on experiences from some of the projects run at the Dartmouth Experimental Visualization Laboratory (DEVlab), where we have been developing different types of multimedia applications.