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1 WHAT IS MULTIMEDIA? People who use the term "multimedia" often seem to have quite different, even opposing, viewpoints. A PC vendor would like us to think of multimedia as a PC that has sound capability, a DVD-ROM drive, and perhaps the superiority of multimedia-enabled micro�processors that understand additional multimedia instructions. A consumer entertainment vendor may think of multimedia as interactive cable TV with hundreds of digital channels, or a cable-TV-like service delivered over a high-speed Internet connection. A computer science student reading this book likely has a more application-oriented view of what multimedia consists of: applications that use multiple modalities to their advantage, including text, images, drawings (graphics), animation, video, sound (including speech), and, most likely, interactivity of some kind. The popular notion of "convergence" is one that inhabits the college campus as it does the culture at large. In this scenario, PCs, DVDs, games, digital TV, set-top web surfing, wireless, and so on are converging in technology, presumably to arrive in the nearfuture at a final all-around, multimedia-enabled product. While hardware may indeed involve such devices, the present is already exciting�multimedia is part of some of the most interesting projects underway in computer science. The convergence going on in this field is in fact a convergence of areas that have in the past been separated but are now finding much to share in this new application area. Graphics, visualization, HCI, computer vision, data compression, graph theory, networking, database systems - all have important contributions to make in multimedia at the present time.