Issues and Obstacles with Multimedia Authoring

This paper discusses some of the common threads shared by three dissimilar cases of multimedia authoring which we have experimented with, that of multimedia conference proceedings, multimedia courseware development and multimedia information kiosks. We consider these applications from an academic point of view and review the benefits and pitfalls of academic development while sharing points of hard-learned wisdom. We draw on experiences from some of the projects run at the Dartmouth Experimental Visualization Laboratory (DEVlab), where we have been developing different types of multimedia applications. A multimedia document (or application) can be anything from an electronic book to an interactive course, from an interactive slide presentation to a multimedia newspaper or an orientation tool, from an interactive auto manual to a clinical record. Multimedia authoring systems come in many forms, depending on the different applications that drive them. Applications range widely and include: office documents, conference proceedings, information kiosks, professional brochures, course materials, virtual reality museum presentations and others yet to be discovered