Multimedia The Wide Spectrum Essay -- Essays Papers

Multimedia The Wide Spectrum In this paper, I will endeavor to provide you with a basic overview as to what multimedia consists of. I will also delve into the visual aspect in the wide spectrum of multimedia to show what it consists of and for a better understanding as to how it fits in. Multimedia first began with games but Web pages, interactive courses, and catalogs with sound and video have now dominated the stage. Not long ago, the term â€Å"multimedia† referred to a room full of slide projectors, tape decks, and movie projectors. Multimedia presentations were hard to put together and even harder to run. Many of them took weeks of preparation and they were then shown only once (Curtin 217). The computer has changed all of that. With multimedia, it is easier to stitch together the various elements and, once finished, the multimedia presentation is available to be shown over and over again. Multimedia is widely used in the entertainment and education fields. For entertainment, you can play computer games that seem almost alive with sound and motion. In education, interactive multimedia programs allow you to study and progress at you own pace and branch into areas of interest when you want to. You can even be a multimedia developer simply by using traditional office applications. Sounds and videos can be embedded in spreadsheet or word processor documents so when recipients click an image or click an icon they get and explanation of key points. Multimedia has entered and clung to the mainstream because of its attention-holding capabilities and effectiveness. It is used everywhere from business presentations to museum exhibits. Holiday Inn, for instance, uses it to train employees. When they click on topics, the system â€Å"talks† to them. It has reduced training time on a new property management system from 14 to 6 days (Curtin 218). Though history, and over recent years, various media have been developed that inform or entertain: paintings, books, magazines, newspapers, movies, radio, and photography ("Multimedia"). Using computers, multimedia fuses two or more of these media together on the premise that the combination is better than any of the individual components. Hence the term â€Å"multi† media. Multimedia can be used for entertainment, corporate presentations, sales presentations, education, training, kiosks, digital publi... ...oth. When done as a series of steps, an animation shows the girl growing old. To make morphing realistic, certain areas of the image, such as the eyes, must be overlapped on the first and last images and locked into place. This way, other parts of the image seen to transform around these fixed points (Curtin 223). Works Cited Curtin, Dennis P., et al. Information Technology: The Breaking Wave. Boston: The McGraw-Hill Companies, 1998. Geiken, C. â€Å"Multimedia Design for the World Wide Web.† NCSA. 17 Dec. 1998. 1 Dec. 1999 http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Training/AdvHTML/multimedia.design.html. Hajicek, Donald J. Design Post. 1 Dec. 1999 http://www.designpost.com/defaultflash.htm. â€Å"Integrated Services Digital Network.† Bell Atlantic. 1999. 3 Dec. 1999 http://www.bell-atl.com/federal/html/isdn.htm. â€Å"Multimedia.† PC Webopaedia. 1998. 2 Dec. 1999 http://webopedia.internet.com/TERM/m/multimedia.html. â€Å"Partial Project List.† Platinum Pictures Multimedia, Inc. 1999. 4 Dec. 1999 http://www.3dcafe.com/ppm/projects.htm. â€Å"Platinum’s 3D Art Gallery.† Platinum Pictures Multimedia, Inc. 1999. 4 Dec. 1999 http://www.3dcafe.com/ppm/gallery.htm.