GLASS-Studio: An open authoring environment for distributed multimedia applications

Abstract

Distributed multimedia applications recently gain a large attraction to the multimedia industry. The MHEG (Multimedia Hypermedia Expert Group) is developing an open international standard for the exchange of multimedia presentations and their work has become quite advanced now. This paper describes the MHEG standard and its implementation in the Berkom GLASS project and presents an open authoring environment for distributed multimedia applications in the MHEG context. Our so-called GLASS-Studio is an authoring environment employing the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) technique. The environment provides abstractions from the authoring domain and the underlying technical infrastructure of the GLASS system. GLASS-Studio supports rapid-prototyping and simulation capabilities, enabling an incremental and iterative design process. Real-world metaphors like direct manipulation and drag&drop provide an easy-to-learn user interface. We present a flexible cooperation scheme based on the blackboard methaphor and show how guidance and assistance for the author can be incorporated. Finally we give an overview of our generic tool named TNO which has been used for the implementation of GLASS-Studio.