What is Multimedia?

You have seen the two cat’s eyes that appear on a black screen and the e-cards that you ever received or sent. It’s not an ordinary card is looks like a moving tiny video clip. You may be having an experience of real-time video conferencing with your friends or any relative from any place of the world, or it may be a live delivering of lecture in a single room through your projector. You may have listened about the virtual reality, simulation or 3D animation. Virtual learning is also one of the things like this that you are guided by a video tutorial. What is this all? This is all called Multimedia.

What is Multimedia?

Multimedia is any combination of text, art, sound, animation, and video delivered to you by computer or other electronic or digitally manipulated means. It is richly presented impression. When you merge together the sensual elements of multimedia—dazzling pictures and animations, engaging sounds, compelling video clips, and raw textual information—you can excite the thought and action centers of people’s minds. When you give them interactive control of the process, they can be charmed.

When you allow an end user (viewer of a multimedia project) to control what and when the elements are delivered, it is called interactive multimedia. When you provide a structure of linked elements through which the user can navigate, interactive multimedia becomes hypermedia.

The people who interlace multimedia into meaningful tapestries are called multimedia developers.

Multimedia Project

The software vehicle, the messages, and the content presented on a computer, television screen, PDA (Personal Digital Assistance), or mobile phone together form a multimedia project. If the project is to be shipped or sold to consumers or end users, typically delivered as a download on the Internet but also on a CD or DVD in a box or casing, with or without instructions, it is a multimedia title.

Your project may also be a page or site on the World Wide Web, where you can unite the elements of multimedia into documents with HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) or DHTML (Dynamic Hypertext Markup Language) or XML (Extensible Markup Language) and play media files created in such programs as Adobe’s Flash, Live Motion, or Apple’s QuickTime by installing plug-ins into a browser application such as Internet Explorer, Safari, Google Chrome, or Mozilla Firefox. 

A multimedia project need not be interactive to be called multimedia: users can sit back and watch it just as they watch a movie or the television. Such multimedia project is called linear. In other case, when users are given navigational control and can walk through the content at will, multimedia becomes nonlinear and user interactive, and is a powerful personal gateway to information.

When the source documents such as montages, graphics, video cuts, and sounds merge into a final presentation, this is called Integrated Multimedia.