Authoring multimedia documents remains a challenge; unlike a book, a multimedia document has temporal relations which need to be specified at the authoring stage (for instance synchronized audio and video, or text subtitles synchronized to video) and relations that are simply unknown at authoring-time (for instance waiting for a user input before rendering a media object, or waiting upon a user action which will drive the playback of the document in a certain direction). Hypermedia documents, in contrast, contain no concept of time; they are store-and-forward and nothing happens until a user selects a choice. Currently there are a number of authoring tools available that allow authors to create scenarios but very few allow authors to create active multimedia scenarios. By this we mean that the resulting document will not only play itself back but will change its course dynamically, depending on user interactions. The goal of our research was to create such a representation and authoring tool.

In this paper we present a temporal model for interactive scenarios. We provide a new representation for asynchronous and synchronous temporal events. Our emphasis is on allowing authors to create scenarios which offer non-halting, transparent options to viewers. We then contrast and compare related works to ours.

Contact the authors at Multimedia Information Research Laboratory, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada, K1N 6N5, e-mail hirzalla@trix.genie.uottawa.ca.