Modelling Reactive Multimedia: Events and Behaviours

This paper explores the idea of reactivity in multimedia, and proposes systems which can react to continuously-evolving behaviors as well as to more traditional discrete events. The idea is presented in a scenario as well as in a number of small programming examples.

The illustrative examples are written in the Fran system. Fran provides a high-level programming model for animations, built in the Haskell functional programming language. Whilst we use Fran for illustration—and indeed we argue that the functional paradigm is a natural choice of host for such a system—we should stress that the notion of external behaviors within multimedia is independent of the programming environment chosen and could be incorporated into other systems such as SMIL.