Multimedia Authoring: A 3D Interactive Visualization Interface based on a Structured Document Model

Multimedia authoring process is inherently a complex and tedious task, users have to specify all the details of a multimedia presentation (temporal coordination, user interaction and spatial placement of data on the user display). In the same time they have to keep in mind a global overview of the entire document. Current document systems uses scripting languages or timelines to specify multimedia documents. A complete specification of all the low−level presentation details puts a heavy burden on the editing task, and the creativity of the author becomes limited by a hight cognitive overload. The complexity of editing multimedia documents is mainly related to the various tasks involved: document organization, temporal synchronization, spatial placement of multimedia objects and resource attribution. It is therefore necessary to perform an analysis of theses tasks to build an efficient authoring interface. In this paper, we present an interface based on a structured document model and multiple interactive views. This synthetic approach relieves the user from low−level and error−prone descriptions by reducing the document complexity. We believe that it is an efficient way for enhancing the overall interface expressive power. Moreover, the structured approach eases the automatic processing of multimedia documents, allowing a rapid production of spatial and temporal layouts starting from high level logical descriptions and presentation directives. In the first part, of the paper we present the state of the art, the multimedia data and document model. In the second part, we describe our user interface and its different views.