Nsync---a toolkit for building interactive multimedia presentations

Brian Bailey, Joseph A. Konstan, Robert Cooley, Moses Dejong
1998 Proceedings of the sixth ACM international conference on Multimedia - MULTIMEDIA '98  
Creating innovative interactive multimedia presentations requires a great deal of time, skill, and effort. We have developed a multimedia synchronization toolkit, called Nsync (pronounced 'in-sync'), to address the complicated issues inherent in designing flexible, interactive multimedia presentations. The toolkit consists of two primary components, a declarative synchronization definition language and a run-time presentation management system. The synchronization definition language supports
more » ... e specification of synchronous interaction, asynchronous interaction, fine-grained relationships, and combinations of each through the use of conjunctive and disjunctive operators. Pre-computed playout schedules are too inflexible to deal with asynchronous interaction, and a more adaptive presentation management system is required. Nsync's run-time system uses a novel predictive logic to predict the future behavior of a presentation. As the viewer makes decisions, the presentation is updated and new predictions are made in order to maintain consistency with the viewer' s wishes and the integrity of the presentation' s message.
doi:10.1145/290747.290779 dblp:conf/mm/BaileyKCD98 fatcat:njbhxeuy2vcvhjdu5rvbvnanay