Direct manipulation of temporal structures in a multimedia application framework

Abstract

The design of complex multimedia documents presents new challenges to authoring systems, because spatial and temporal features should be visualized and made accessible in an intuitive and direct-manipulative way. In this study, multimedia presentations are considered as hierarchical compositions of time objects that define serial or parallel synchronization of the inserted media objects. Media composition hierarchies support automatic temporal layout mechanisms. They are integrated into an object-oriented application framework called MET++. It provides direct manipulation interaction on temporal structures in a composition view that displays temporal and compositional relations, allows time transformations on composites, supports the definition of time-dynamic behavior of media objects through time functions, and has a flexible graphical layout in order to visualize context information. Keywords: multimedia composition, audio, 3D graphics, time synchronization, animation, user interfac...