MULTIDIMENSIONAL MULTIMEDIA PLAYER AND AUTHORING TOOL

摘要

A tool for generating a standardized multimedia presentation (160) is disclosed as well as a viewer for presenting such a presentation. The tool assists a developer in setting up a number of categories for the presentation, each of which has a number of subcategories. For each subcategory, content files are associated. If the content file is a video, then a module can assist the developer in associating tangential content which will be displayed to the end user at pre-set points during the playing of the video. After the presentation is built, the end user can view the presentation. It is presented to the user through a graphical user interface in the form of a three-dimensional geometric object, such as a 3-by-3 cube (163). The end user can choose any topic from the cubes and then choose any subtopic. The associated content (and perhaps tangential content) is then presented to the end user. The user can freely browse from among the categories and subcategories (167). The presentation player itself is quite flexible and extensible as it is based on a series of scripts which describe the various components of the user interface and the content files to be played for the end user. This allows a single presentation engine to be distributed at one time and then presentations can be distributed which contain their content and any new or modified functionality from the original presentation system.