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


The new research described in this talk comes out of my Demonstrational Interfaces and Natural Programming projects.

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


Back to Brad Myers's home page.