Digital Content Creation

The very word "digital" has acquired a status that far exceeds its humble dictionary definition. Even the prefix digital, when associ­ ated with familiar sectors such as radio, television, photography and telecommunications, has reinvented these industries, and provided a unique opportunity to refresh them with new start-up companies, equipment, personnel, training and working practices - all of which are vital to modern national and international economies. The last century was a period in which new media stimulated new job opportunities, and in many cases created totally new sectors: video competed with film, CDs transformed LPs, and computer graphics threatened traditional graphic design sectors. Today, even the need for a physical medium is in question. The virtual digital domain allows the capture, processing, transmission, storage, retrieval and display of text, images, audio and animation without familiar materials such as paper, celluloid, magnetic tape and plastic. But moving from these media to the digital domain intro­ duces all sorts of problems, such as the conversion of analog archives, multimedia databases, content-based retrieval and the design of new content that exploits the benefits offered by digital systems. It is this issue of digital content creation that we address in this book. Authors from around the world were invited to comment on different aspects of digital content creation, and their contributions form the 23 chapters of this volume. Front Matter....Pages i-xix Access and Retrieval of Digital Content....Pages 1-8 Screen Play: Film and the Future of Interactive Entertainment....Pages 9-19 Harnessing The Power of Music and Sound Design in Interactive Media....Pages 20-24 Comparative Content Analysis of Virtual Environments Using Perceptual Opportunities....Pages 25-51 Digitization — An Agent for Creativity, Expression and Interaction?....Pages 52-59 Multimedia Challenging Epistemology; Epistemology Challenging Multimedia: Noting this Reciprocity for Multimedia Design....Pages 60-91 Virtual Education — Panacea or Pandora’s Box?....Pages 92-96 An Architecture of a Personalized, Dynamic Interactive Video System....Pages 97-107 Buffy, an SL Development Environment....Pages 108-116 Generating Interactive Television Programs in the PANIVE architecture....Pages 117-126 Interactive Control of Robots on the Internet....Pages 127-139 Smart Documents for Web-Enabled Collaboration....Pages 140-162 A Video Annotation Methodology for Interactive Video Sequence Generation....Pages 163-183 The Creation of an Interactive Virtual Theatre: The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party....Pages 184-201 Subjective Assessment of a Model-Based Video Codec Compared to H.263....Pages 202-228 Model-Based Interactive TV: Scene Capture and Transmission Density Distribution Functions for Bandwidth Reduction....Pages 229-271 Enhanced Avatar Control Using Neural Networks....Pages 272-280 Virtual Heritage:Challenges and Opportunities....Pages 281-293 Marvin:Supporting Awareness through Audio in Collaborative Virtual Environments....Pages 294-303 Children’s Creation of Shared 3D Worlds....Pages 304-315 Experiences With Web Content Creation From a Database....Pages 316-331 Numerical Realization of Realistic Head and Hand Models for Mobile Telephone Safety Verification....Pages 332-342 Rebuilding Communities and Livelihoods in a Post-Conflict Situation: the Potential for Digital Media in Knowledge-Based Activities in Bosnia-Herzegovina....Pages 343-352 Back Matter....Pages 353-354 The virtual digital domain allows the capture, processing, transmission, storage, retrieval and display of text, images, audio and animation, without familiar materials such as paper, celluloid, magnetic tape and plastic. But moving from these media to the digital domain introduces all sorts of problems, such as the conversion of analogue archives, multimedia databases, content-based retrieval and the design of new content that exploits the benefits offered by digital systems. It is this issue of digital content creation that is addressed in this book. Different aspects of digital content creation are discussed in this volume, contributed by authors from around the world. Although each chapter addresses an individual aspect of the digital domain, there are common threads that unite them into an exciting vision of the future "The virtual digital domain allows the capture, processing, transmission, storage, retrieval and display of text, images, audio and animation, without familiar materials such as paper, celluloid, magnetic tape and plastic. But moving from these media to the digital domain introduces all sorts of problems, such as the conversion of analogue archives, multimedia databases, content-based retrieval and the design of new content that exploits the benefits offered by digital systems. It is this issue of digital content creation that is addressed in this book."--Jacket