Interactive Multimedia on a Single Screen Display

Interactive delivery of multimedia material destined for educational courseware or large reference archives imposes complex constraints on both the delivery system and on the application design. A City in Transition: New Orleans, 1983-86, a cinematic case study of urban change, combines 3 hours of movie sequences; a still frame library of characters, places and maps, mastered on optical videodisc; a wide variety of text documentation; and relevant demographic and economic statistics. Intended for interdisciplinary study of political, socio-economic, and design issues, the project requires that students be able both to use available material and to add new visual material to the database. The interactive version is currently being developed at the Media Laboratory on a Project Athena Visual Workstation, runs under X-windows with a Parallax 1280 board a single-screen high-resolution display. This paper will describe issues and solutions related to clarity and directness of information access; time-linked relationships between movie segments, graphics and text; and the set of user tools which allow viewers to edit video footage, create graphic models and link their notations to the master database.