Multimedia presentations : the support of passive and active viewing

Abstract

In contrast to conventional printed text which allows for passive viewing only, computer-based presentations can support various forms of user interaction and let the user play an active part at presentation time. As each presentation style has its own strengths and weaknesses, we aim at a multimedia presentation system that supports both passive and active viewing of the generated material. We start from our previous work on the plan-based synthesis of multimedia presentations where all presentation acts have been planned and realized by the system. However, in the approach presented in this paper, we allow certain presentation acts to be planned and/or realized by the user as well. We augment structuring principles for non-interactive multimedia presentations and integrate them into a uniform framework. Finally, we sketch how modules of WIP, our existing presentation system, can be reused and extended.