A Component-based Authoring Environment for Creating Multimedia-RichMixed Reality

Abstract

Applications that seek to combine multimedia with Mixed Reality (MR) technologies in order to create multimediarich MR environments pose a challenge to authors who need to provide content for such applications. Founded on a component-based authoring paradigm, production processes as well as tools that serve as a supportive authoring environment for these authors are presented in this paper. For this, not only requirements that stem from multimedia authoring or MR authoring alone have been identified but also authoring tasks that are only present in the creation of multimedia-rich MR content. Concepts for supporting these tasks within a componentbased authoring framework (e.g. the specification of phantom objects) are presented. The resulting authoring tools are discussed - one of their main advantages is that they provide a direct preview of the content for the author. This allows multimedia authors who are not familiar with MR methodologies to quickly gain experience with multimedia-rich MR content creation.