A unified media presentation method for multimedia information networks

Hypermedia systems are very important as platforms in the future multimedia information network services. In order to provide more flexible and sophisticated multimedia presentation, it is desirable to simply and efficiently transmit various media data from the databases distributed over network and present them on the user station depending on scenario so as to semantically integrate into multimedia information objects. In this paper, a new hypermedia system which is based on object-oriented structure to perform two different temporal synchronization methods, "lip synchronization" and "scene synchronization" is introduced. Lip synchronization method performs, fine-grained temporal synchronization between continuous media, such as audio and video. On the other hand in scene synchronization, coarse-grained temporal relation between continuous media and discrete media, such as image, graphics or text is maintained depending on the presentation scenario. Furthermore, several media which are semantically related to each other are unified into a Media Group (MG) to simplify its media treatment. The MGs and their involved processing functions are encapsulated into a Media Object (MO) and easily controlled by message passing procedure. In this paper, implementation of the hypermedia model which performs scene synchronization function between discrete and continuous media in the MOs depending on the presentation scenario, and context switching function between each media presentation is precisely described. Finally "Electric Museum" as a prototype application of hypermedia systems is introduced to evaluate the suggested synchronization mechanism.