We will examine the prospects for "The Full Multimedia Monty ": high-quality media experiences, which (1) fully engage the users' senses of (at least) sight and sound, and with which (2) the user may interact fully.

To be clear, we are talking about experiences which are delivered -- and, we shall conclude, more importantly exchanged -- over digital electronic networks.

Practicable present-day "multimedia" brings together one- and two-dimensional experiences in sight and sound: text, music, stills and moving pictures. The Full Monty will include representations of three-dimensional synthetic environments -- the notorious "Virtual Reality". It may involve further human senses.

Fully-sense-engaging interactive experiences are not available at present, even at the research level, unless you take weak definitions of "fully" interactive and "fully" engaging. (Anyone who's tried interrupting a child playing a -- relatively crude -- video game will realise that "immersion" is not as simple as this.)

But our intention is that the exercise will, along the way, illuminate the prospects for intermediate and tangential technologies. As concrete examples: digital satellite broadcasting is nothing like the Full Monty, because though viewers may become totally immersed in programmes it is barely interactive at all. Neither is the World-Wide Web, because though it is highly interactive it engages users' senses only with an enormous suspension of disbelief. Some technologies involved in each contribute, however, to the feasibility of the Full Monty.

? What interactive multimedia entertainment and information services are likely to become practicable in the next ten years?

The structure of this report

All electronic data-processes can usefully be visualised as onions. The outer skin is the users' experience. At the heart is the physics governing the electrons which represent data, whether those data be the weather forecast or the closing scene of Casablanca. In between are layers of processing, description and analysis. Each of these, in general, relates only to neighbouring layers. (See a simplified example.)

This model helps a great deal in focusing on what (which layers) are relevant to a particular problem or question. As soon, however, as one attempts rigorously to define the boundaries of the onion-layers, or to group them, the existential agonies of Peer Gynt in Ibsen's play, peeling an onion in a futile search of his soul, come too readily to mind. Whatever definition works, for the purpose in hand, is best.

For this study we shall adopt a bold division of multimedia creation and distribution into four sets of layers. Because technological questions are often -- perhaps wrongly -- considered "harder" or "more fundamental", we will start peeling the onion from the inside.

To summarise the subjects of the four sections:

Stuff (which you can pick up)

Delivery of the Full Multimedia Monty depends on processing power, data transport, and human interface (display/sound/...) devices.

The fundamental constraints at this level are the laws of physics: these determine the economics of producing practicable devices (microprocessors, cable and decoders, displays, etc). We immediately meet Moore's Law. This is the fundamental source of, and the key to decoding, the propeller-heads' hype.

Markets also impose constraints on the availability of stuff, as we shall see in particular when looking at transport stuff.

? What sort of processing power, input/output devices, and communication capability are required? What are the bottlenecks and the constraints on the developments of each of these?

Standards (the important part of software)

Software may be ever so clever and ever so difficult to produce. What is important to the market is, however, how the various layers of software communicate with each other.

Way back when Lotus 1-2-3(TM) was the computer spreadsheet program, for example, it understood a fairly stable set of instructions in so-called "macros" with which users could automate repetitive tasks. Competing spreadsheet programs adopted the same set of instructions, so that "macros" written for 1-2-3 would work with them too: a de facto macro standard emerged. Users dealt with the "macro" layer of the "onion", which dealt with the actual spreadsheet program layer through the standard.

Philosophically, a standard is a language; but that term has already been captured by a different meaning in the digital world.

Where there are standards, the internal workings of each layer (as defined for the moment) can be left inside a "black box". Products will compete on their internal functionality -- on how well they implement the standards for communicating with products in adjacent layers. In the case of the spreadsheet programs, some were cheaper than 1-2-3, some were faster, some were both and some were judged to be copyright infringements.

An equivalent user interface can, given a sufficiently developed standards environment, be implemented independently of what lies beneath. The constraints at this level are an interaction between mathematical logic (what is formally sayable) and culture and markets (which possible ways of saying things become common enough to count as language).

? How soon is it likely that standards will be in place so that users can access material from a wide range of content providers? (Users may have a variety of software: the key issue is that each piece of software be able to talk to software from other suppliers.)

Selling (and buying)

None of the layers beneath (or above) make any sense unless there are frameworks in which humans are recompensed for the time they invest in creating them.

How will users pay for content? How will "publishers" buy it? The constraints here are matters of law, and of commercial use and custom.

Coins, cheques, and credit and debit cards could each be described as "standards" for interaction between people's stores of wealth -- for selling. In the digital world, new ways of selling are required. E-cash and digital purses, for example, depend upon software-level standards; but their utility depends not on design but on legal recognition and on acceptance in markets.

? How soon is it likely that means will be in place to control and charge for access? What business models are available for the production and distribution of content and services? What are the legal constraints on these?

Stories (content)

What's it all about, then?

When you turn on the TV late at night, you know the film is old if it's in black-and-white. You know it's really old if the director included shots of calendar pages turning to signify the passage of time between scenes.

In the development of "Full Monty" interactive multimedia, we have barely reached the calendar-page stage.

Depending on your philosophical position, the constraints on "stories" within the Full Monty are either the limits of human imagination, or some probably-yet-to-be-defined synthesis between post-structuralism and Noam Chomsky's notion of an underlying grammar.

? What is the content of "The Full Monty" going to look like? How soon is "native" content likely to be developed? Movies-on-demand are the equivalent of early cinema pointing a fixed camera at a theatre stage.

Uncertainties

The further one gets from the centre of the onion, the greater the uncertainty in predictions.

Holderness's Corollary to the First Law of Forecasting states that, whatever one predicts about communication technology and its uses, something more interesting than that will happen.

At the inner layer of Stuff, the physical constraints are fairly well-understood. The further development of display technology, for example and however, depends on future discovery of useful chemical compounds. In other words, the uncertainty is that we cannot know when a research chemist will say "Aha!". We can, however, look at the time it has taken applied research chemists, actively attacking past problems, to find solutions.

The outer layer of Stories sits between a seething mass of technical developments, and culture itself. Enough said?

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The Full Monty: that is, the whole kit and caboodle, the full whack...