IEEE MultiMedia

Front Cover

New Products

This article features some of the latest advances in multimedia technology.

Media Impact: Games in the Classroom: Using Games as a Motivator for Studying Computing: Part 1

Editor's NoteIt's no secret that undergraduate computer science enrollment, which has suffered through one of its periodic downturns, seems to have bottomed out but is now on an upswing. This cyclic behavior has been occurring for many years now, producing many exciting ideas concerning how to revamp introductory computer science courses to make them more exciting and relevant, and to show beginning students that computer science entails more than just programming. Georgia Tech, one of the active participants in this revamp, has developed the concept of threads (a means to connect chunks of related knowledge across different courses) and is devising techniques to enrich beginning courses using minirobots and multimedia. The present article, written by Andrew Phelps and his group at the Rochester Institute of Technology, describes a parallel effort to use gaming as a way to improve learning and to demonstrate to students that computer science is indeed exciting and cool.—William I. Grosky

Media Beat: uncharted pages from a voyage of the beagle

Editor's noteAndrew Burrell, one of Australia's leading Second Life artists, has been developing experimental text and sound for virtual spaces for several years. Nonnatus Korhonen is his avatar (see http://palace-of-memory.com). In this article, Burrell discusses his recent mixed-reality installation that works between Second Life's virtual space and a gallery's real-world space. The central concern of the work is self-replicating objects and systems. Burrell describes the ideas behind the work and how he realized it, explaining the difficulties in finding ways to make possible interactive audience engagement between the two spaces.—Maria Miranda

Artful Media: The Sonic Nomadic: Exploring Mobile Surround-Sound Interactions

Editor's NoteNigel Helyer, sculptor and sound artist; Francesca Veronesi, architect; and Daniel Woo, interaction designer; discuss several of their AudioNomad projects, exploring mobile surround sound and interactivity. Cofounded five years ago by Helyer (creative director) and Woo (scientific director), AudioNomad is an art and science research program—a location-aware virtual and augmented audio-reality system. Its software allows a mobile user or vehicle to perform a soundscape. This article discusses some of the challenges in the development of three works: location-aware, surround-sound installations mounted on ships; mobile handheld devices for individual pedestrian use; and interactive surround-sound installations for static museum exhibition.—Norie Neumark

Guest Editors' Introduction: The Many Faces of Semantics

The Semantic Web enables programs and agents to automatically understand what data is about, and therefore bridge the so-called semantic gap between the ways in which users request Web resources and the real needs of those users, ultimately improving the quality of Web information retrieval. This issue presents four expanded articles from The First International Workshop on the Many Faces of Multimedia Semantics.

An Ecosystem for Semantics

The article presents a theoretical approach to semantics that embraces the complex and challenging problems associated with authoring multimedia albums.

Hybrid Tagging and Browsing Approaches for Efficient Manual Image Annotation

This article proposes formal models for two commonly used methods—tagging and browsing—and investigates new approaches to improve the efficiency of manual image annotation.

Dynamic Pictorially Enriched Ontologies for Digital Video Libraries

This article presents a framework for automatic semantic annotation of video streams with an ontology that includes concepts expressed using linguistic terms and visual data.

Interlinking Music-Related Data on the Web

This article describes how Semantic Web technologies can be used to interlink musical data sources that have traditionally been isolated and difficult to integrate.

The AlloSphere: Immersive Multimedia for Scientific Discovery and Artistic Exploration

The AlloSphere is a spherical space in which immersive, virtual environments allow users to explore large-scale data sets through multimodal, interactive media.

Progressive Download for Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service

The project outlined in this report focuses on using progressive-download technology to improve media delivery in wireless Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Services.

Visions and Views: How Much Multimedia Does a Modern Family Need?

The recent joy of becoming a mom not only changed the author's life completely but also inspired new ideas for her multimedia research. At the same time, it triggered new views on the latest achievements of multimedia. This article looks at what kind of multimedia life families live in the 21st century.

Multimedia at Work: Harvesting Resources for Recording Concurrent Videoconferences

Visual communication over IP networks is forecasted to have significant growth in the next five to ten years. This growth will offer interesting opportunities for grid/cluster systems. This paper focuses on one of the many services that must be part of a visual communication infrastructure; a videoconference-recording service. It presents an example of a grid system for recording H.323 videoconference sessions.

Upcoming Events

This department presents publishing opportunities to multimedia researchers, as well as announcing pertinent upcoming conferences.