DOING FLIPS - FLEXIBLE INTERACTIVE PRESENTATION SYNCHRONIZATION

Multimedia presentation technology has enormous potential for a myriad of applications including academic classrooms, industrial training, a nd business presentations, As presentation technology advances, it is possible to incorporate a wider range of media including variable dura tion media such as simulations and animations, At the same time, users are able to take more control over presentations by controlling the r ate and selection of media being played, To make full use of these adv ances, multimedia systems must support flexible presentations that inc orporate many variations in the may they are played, This paper identi fies three requirements for flexible presentations and derives four re quirements for synchronization of flexible presentations. The paper pr esents FLexible Interactive Presentation Synchronization (FLIPS), a mo del for specifying coarse synchronization for flexible presentations. FLIPS supports a wide range of temporal synchronization specifications , It also provides algorithms for attaining a consistent and coherent presentation state in response to user interaction (e.g., skipping to a different slide or selection) and other state-changing events, Appli cations of the FLIPS model are discussed.