Modelling Reactive Multimedia: Events and Behaviours

Helen Cameron, Peter King, Simon Thompson

Multimedia Tools and Applications, Kluwer, vol 19, issue 1, January 2003, pp 53-77

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the idea of reactivity in multimedia, and proposes systems which can react to continuously-evolving behaviours as well as to more traditional discrete events. The idea is presented in a scenario as wellasin a number of small programming examples. The illustrative examples are written in the Fran system. Fran provides a high- level programming model for animations, built in the Haskell functional program- ming language. Whilst we use Fran for illustration { and indeed we argue that the functional paradigm is a natural choice of host for such a system { we should stress that the notion of external behaviours within multimedia is independent of the pro- gramming environment chosen and could be incorporated into other systems such as SMIL.

Keywords

multimedia, reactive, dynamic hyperlink, external behaviour

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