Why Do We Call It Multimedia? Masahito Hirakawa Shimane University, Japan.

Why Do We Call It Multimedia?

Masahito HirakawaShimane University, Japan

Multiplicity is nice?

The term multimedia reminds us of the existence of multiple media.

Is it really essential to identify text, picture, voice, and others in a content?

The number of media being adopted is no concern of us.

Everything supports multimedia nowadays.

What is important is how natural and fit the media is in a target application.

An example

Gal-Moji (characters of young girls) or Heta-Moji (awkward characters) Some - mostly young girls - in Japan recognize

Hiragana characters as images and enjoy forming a sentence by a combination of completely irrelevant characters.

Examples

They don’t care about the type of media. What they are interested in is how much the expressiveness of media is.

A sweet example

We would say, it’s a (cheese) cake!

We don’t care what the ingredients are - cheese, cracker, sour cream, sugar, butter, lemon juice, …

Media summary

No boarder in (multi)media. Reference - M. Hirakawa, “From MultiMedia to

UniversalMedia,” International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering (to appear).

(Some) research projects in my lab towards the goal Media understanding Interacting with water

Media understanding

How do media convey the information and affect people? - the way of their understanding and thinking.

A trial: automatic generation of images from narrative text – let’s make a picture book! Text analysis: scene

detection, key character identification

Image generation: assignment of gesture, positioning of characters, and camera work control

Media understanding

A sample resultant imagefor "A Little Princess“

-- for the scene where Sara is scolded for being sad

Interacting with water

Emotional aspect (e.g., touching water generates waves)

A challenge over semantics

We may not catch the meaning of an object as is presented in its expression. Illusion is an example.

We are most likely to specify domain knowledge as complete as possible. Completeness may not be the final goal. What is more important is that the user feels natural.