Remote Access to Interactive Media

Digital interactive media augments interactive computing with video, audio, computer graphics and text, allowing multimedia presentations to be individually and dynamically tailored to the user. Multimedia, and particularly continuous media pose interesting problems for system designers, including those of latency and synchronization. These problems are especially evident when multimedia data is remote and must be accessed via networks. Latency and synchronization issues are discussed, and an integrated system, Tactus, is described. Tactus facilitates the implementation of interactive multimedia computer programs by managing latency and synchronization in the framework of an object-oriented graphical user interface toolkit.