True multimedia is a lost art. We had it back in the 90s when software came on discs and it was a high-density, polished product that combined text, audio, video, and interactive elements on the same page. The internet taking over turned everything back into text, and then as bandwidth grew the only thing we thought to use it on was higher and higher bitrate video.
When I was a kid I thought the future was going to be fully-integrated data. Like I would be able to pause a movie and click on anything I was seeing to get more information. Click an actor, get his bio and interviews about the movie and bloopers. Click a vehicle and get its model. Click a special effect and see how it was done or an animal and learn about that animal. Imagine watching Lord of the Rings and being able to instantly read the original lore of any object, location, or character just by clicking/tapping it. Hell, even the smallest things can radically change your experience. Imagine if Wikipedia articles had appropriate background music. I guess there's just no market.
There is absolutely a market for your LOTR example. I think a kickstarter made LOTR or Harry Potter Interactive applications like you are purposing could charge $1,000 maybe.
And I 100% align with your 90's prediction. What we gained going from Encarta to Wikipedia was amazing, but we shouldn't forget that we lost some things too.
I think one problem is that it's difficult to make videos easy for anyone to edit, the way a wiki text page is.
- The skills to edit video are more difficult to acquire, in part because
- The hardware and software requirements can be expensive, and are not universally available
- Once you've made a video, not everyone has the bandwidth to view it in high quality (certainly the first step to editing it)
Wikimedia could hire people to make videos, but they could also hire people to write articles, and (generally?) don't because that's not how they roll.
A Wikipedia-like platform for video would be fascinating, and worth pursuing, but a significant technological and social challenge.
You can already put instructional videos on Wikiversity.
You're right that the editing workflow for raw video is a challenge, but I expect that support for editable animations, interactive simulation, etc. will also be added at some point. It requires some infrastructure for editing securely sandboxed code in-wiki, which is in the works anyway for the upcoming project Wikifunctions.
There's Wikimedia Commons! It even (somewhat) addresses this particular issue by having a system for requesting specialized media-related edits—video editing, photo retouching, SVG editing, mapmaking, etc.
For the unaware, Commons, a repository of media files, is but one of many Wikimedia "projects" (including Wikipedia). It's mostly used for images, but also hosts video, audio (including MIDI), 3D models (only STLs), and PDFs.Aside: considering what the Foundation seems to like doing, I'm surprised they don't do more to promote the "other" projects, especially to Wikipedia contributors—Wikipedia editors (even split by language) vastly outnumber those of the other projects, including Commons and Wikidata, which are multilingual.
Commons' request system connects those who recognize needed edits but cannot make them with those who check the requests pages and are able to. There's the Graphics Lab[0] for edits to existing uploads, and File requests[1] for new uploads that are needed. Judging by the archives, they seem quite underutilized, though that might only be a sign of how few Commons contributors there are. Probably also has to do with the offloading of requests to local pages in many languages of Wikipedia.[2]
There's an interesting variation in the nature of barriers to being able to edit. Hardware and bandwidth cost money, but skills cost only time and software can be free. I'd say the Graphics Lab does decently in "teaching how to fish" through tutorials and lists of FOSS software. This contrasts with file requests, where there's no equivalent, because the most common reason that someone can't take a photo of something is that there physically aren't any instances of it nearby.
This kind of barrier to contribution really isn't specific to media; analogously, not everyone has access to the same resources for researching edits to Wikipedia. Wikimedia's also trying to address that: everyone with >10 monthly edits in any project has free access to the databases participating in The Wikipedia Library.[3] Most are relatively specialized, however (IIRC, JSTOR is the most generally useful of the lot).
>True multimedia is a lost art. We had it back in the 90s when software came on discs and it was a high-density, polished product that combined text, audio, video, and interactive elements on the same page.
Microsoft sold a bunch of titles for things like music. They did quite a nice job as I recall during that period when it was really rather wondrous you could hold all this information in the palm of your hand.
Last time I used Amazon Prime Video, around 2017, it would show info that Amazon deemed relevant for that bit of the show (apparently it's called X-Ray). Back then at least, it wasn't on the same level as what you described but still something.
The danger was it made me want to pause all the time in case I missed something interesting, but by putting the user in control of what they get info on, you could avoid that.
Last time I used Amazon Prime Video, around 2017, it would show info that Amazon deemed relevant for that bit of the show (apparently it's called X-Ray).
X-Ray still exists, but the only way I've ever seen it used is to tell you what the background music is, and the names of all the actors in a scene. But even then, it is often incomplete.
The Kindle has a similar feature for some of its native book: if you long-click in the name of a character it would give you a short description and a timeline of where it appeared in prior parts of the books (with future parts hidden to prevent spoilers).
That was also my dream when I first saw the CD encyclopedia and seeing the first demo of AR using google maps of pointing your phone to a building and seeing information about it and then the introduction of google glass, then it all suddenly disappeared.
Like I would be able to pause a movie and click on anything I was seeing to get more information
I remember the cable companies promising this when everything went "digital."
I also remember when the movie studios promised us one of the big advantages of DVDs over VHS was that we could watch the scenes of a movie from any angle?
And the director / talent commentary tracks, which were sometimes really great (Vanilla Sky comes to mind). I think that was only common for a really brief period unfortunately. To be honest I think it just failed from a market perspective (cost vs revenue). I could be wrong and maybe it still happens a lot?
Suspect the angles thing was the same. Sounded cool but no one wanted it (or to pay extra for it).
There is a movie player that would highlight the character/actor on screen at the moment you hit pause. There is a link to find out more that would take you to the appropriate web page with the info.
I want to say it was google play, but not completely sure.
Amazon Prime Video show you information on the actors in the current scene. If you are (e.g.) chromecasting from a phone you have it continually on the mobile display while the film is on the TV.
When I was a kid I thought the future was going to be fully-integrated data. Like I would be able to pause a movie and click on anything I was seeing to get more information. Click an actor, get his bio and interviews about the movie and bloopers. Click a vehicle and get its model. Click a special effect and see how it was done or an animal and learn about that animal. Imagine watching Lord of the Rings and being able to instantly read the original lore of any object, location, or character just by clicking/tapping it. Hell, even the smallest things can radically change your experience. Imagine if Wikipedia articles had appropriate background music. I guess there's just no market.