Multimedia presentation and authoring

The existing authoring tools usually provide an authoring environment where the spatial information and temporal information are edited independently in two different Interfaces, which can inconvenience the users. We created a collaborative authoring system for multimedia presentation, which overcomes this inconvenience. The 3D spatio-temporal editor of our system allows users in different places to author together a multimedia presentation simultaneously in a single unified spatio-temporal space.

Conceptually, every temporal relationship can be described using one of seven relations (‘before’, ‘meets’, ‘overlaps’, ‘during’, ‘starts’, ‘finishes, and ‘equals’). This conceptual representation provides an efficient means for designing an overview of a multimedia presentation. Our authoring system internally represents the edited multimedia presentation using a TRN. A TRN is composed of media objects and a set of temporal relationships among objects, and it corresponds exactly to the conceptual temporal structure of the multimedia presentation. The TRN editor of our system presents graphically the internal TRN and provides users with an intuitive mechanism for representing the conceptual flow of a presentation. The internal TRN and the graphical TRN can be generated automatically from the 3D graphical representation specified by the author of the presentation.