Toward cooperative multimedia interaction

The proliferation of information and services on our global information highways demands mechanisms to support more effective and efficient interaction. This article claims that efficient and effective interaction requires both cooperative and multimedia communication, illustrating this through several applications developed by our group that aim to enhance interaction with complex systems or information sources. After defining the terms cooperative and multimedia and arguing for their centrality in interfaces, we overview key processes in the automated generation of multimedia. We then illustrate these with implemented examples from several domains including information retrieval, direction providing, mission planning and computer maintenance. After describing a visionary system for information access, we conclude by describing our current efforts toward providing content-based browsing and search of video.