Authoring Interactive Behaviors

Keynote address at the ACM Multimedia 97 Conference

by Brad A. Myers

Human Computer Interaction Institute School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3891 USA
412-268-5150
FAX: 412-268-5576
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam
bam+@cs.cmu.edu

A complete paper about this topic was prepared for The Ninth Annual NEC Research Symposium: Human Centric Multimedia Community, Nara, Japan, Aug. 30-Sept. 1, 1998. That paper is available in postscript or Adobe Acrobat (pdf) formats.

Abstract of Talk

The tools for authoring multimedia presentations start with sophisticated interactive tools like Director and ToolBook. However, to make the presentations truly interactive requires programming in "scripting languages." These languages have generally been difficult to learn for non-programmers. This talk discusses the state of the art in multimedia authoring. Next, I will present a variety of ways we are studying to make authoring of these interactive behaviors more accessible to non-programmers. One approach is "demonstrational" techniques, where the author shows the system what the behavior should be. We are also investigating new languages which are designed to be more "natural" because they are based on how non-programmers actually think about these tasks.

References For Talk

• Most of the statistics came from my Computer Almanac page: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/numbers.html
• Phantasmagoria game, by Sierra: http://www.sierra.com/titles/phant/
• Interactive Media Company, 1-888-446-8765
• CMU Chemistry Course: "Introduction to Modern Chemistry" by Prof. Paul J. Karol at Carnegie Mellon University. http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/09-105/
• Educational reference: D. Hardaway and R.P. Will, "Digital Multimedia Offers Key to Educational Reform", Communications of the ACM, April, 1997, pp. 90-91.
• Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog: http://www.sega.com/products/
• Small game created for Art History class at CMU: http://www.cmu.edu/acs/telab/PVC/home.html
• Quote from Michael Schrage, MIT Media Lab: Denise Caruso, "Technology; Digital Commerce; The interactive media industry begins to deconstruct its self-made myths," New York Times, 4/7/97, p. D7.
• Star Trek Voyager episode "Worst-Case Scenario". Originally aired May 14, 1997.
• Microsoft FrontPage: http://www.microsoft.com/frontpage/
• SilverScan scanner from La Cie: http://www.lacie.com/scanner.html
• Kodak DC20 digital camera: http://www.kodak.com/daiHome/DC20/index.shtml
• Hitachi MPEG Digital video camera: http://www.hitachi-ce.com/MPEG.htm
• Just Grandma and Me, by Mercer Mayer. CD-ROM by Living Books, A Random House / Broderbund Company.
• MacroMedia Director, http://www.macromedia.com/software/director/
• GLPro 7.x, scripting language, by G-Media, http://gmedia.net/glpro/index.html
• "Motivate" by The Motion Factory, for creating animated 3-D characters, http://www.motion-factory.com/home.html
• Click and Create, Version 1 used to be available from Corel. The current version is called "Multimedia Fusion" and is available from IMSI: http://www.imsisoft.com/mmfusion/index.html
• Gentle Slope Systems: Brad A. Myers, David Canfield Smith and Bruce Horn. "Report of the 'End-User Programming' Working Group," Languages for Developing User Interfaces, Boston, MA, Jones and Bartlett. 1992. pp. 343-366.
• Allen Newell quote: Allen Newell and Stuart K. Card. “The Prospects for Psychological Science in Human-Computer Interaction,” Human-Computer Interaction. 1985. 1(3). pp. 209-242.
• SILK:
  • James Landay and Brad A. Myers. “Interactive Sketching for the Early Stages of User Interface Design,” Human Factors in Computing Systems. Proceedings SIGCHI'95. Denver, CO, May, 1995. pp. 43-50.
  • The Visual Basic 5.0 version is done and the students are in the process of building the Web version.
  • Release information is on the web page: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~landay/silk
• GAMUT:
  • Richard G. McDaniel and Brad A. Myers. “Building Applications Using Only Demonstration,” 1998 ACM International Conference On Intelligent User Interfaces. January 6-9, 1998, San Francisco, CA. To appear.
  • http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~richm
• HANDS: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~NatProg

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