Future Directions for Multimedia

There are many future directions for Multimedia, indeed the multimedia explosion has probably only just began.

There many trends that could be mentioned here, for example:

• developments in multimedia system's hardware
• developments in multimedia system's networking and distributed environments
• developments in multimedia system's design
• developments in Hypermedia Models which we mentioned in the last chapter briefly with RMM for example.
• developments multimedia standards, formats and compression etc.

However, here we concentrate on three emerging technologies/applications likely to have a major impact in the coming years on multimedia:

• Digital Libraries that need Knowledge-Based Multimedia Systems to perform content-based retrieval or indexing of multimedia data
• Interactive Television, and
• High Definition TV