| Multimedia is an interdisciplinary, application-oriented technology that capitalizes on
the multi-sensory nature of humans and the ability of computers to store, manipulate,
and convey non-numerical information such as video, graphics, and audio in addition
to numerical and textual information. Multimedia has the intrinsic goal of improving the
effectiveness of computer-to-human interaction and, ultimately, of human-to-human
communication.
While the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) community looks predominantly at the
application layer and the telecommunications community at the lower end of the ISO
OSI stack, little work has been published in bridging the gap between these two communities.
Indeed, the human element is often neglected in Quality of Service (QoS)
negotiation protocols. Not only does this have a negative and undesirable impact on
the user’s experience of multimedia, it also discards the potential for more economical
resource allocation strategies With the proliferation of ubiquitous multimedia in predominantly
bandwidth-constrained environments, more research is needed towards
integrating and mapping perceptual considerations across the protocol stack and building
truly end-to-end multimedia communication solutions. |
