Interactive Multimedia Solutions Developed for the Opening of the New Stage of the Alexandrinsky Theatre

This paper focuses on teamwork by the National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics (NRU ITMO) and the Aleksandrinsky Theatre in preparation of opening of the New Stage of the Alexandrinsky Theatre. The Russian State Pushkin Academy Drama Theatre, also known as the Alexandrinsky Theatre, is the oldest national theatre in Russia. Many famous Russian actors performed on the Alexandrinsky’s stage and many great directors. May 2013 marked the opening of the New Stage of the Alexandrinsky Theatre. The theatre complex comprises three buildings: the new stages building, a media center, and the building housing a center of theatre education. Several plays shown simultaneously on multiple stages within the new complex’s buildings constituted the opening gala of the New Stage of the Alexandrinsky Theatre. The works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky were the plays’ unifying theme. NRU ITMO employees developed several interactive theatre project solutions implemented for the opening of the Alexandrinsky Theatre’s New Stage.

The Odrysian Kingdom – a Concept of an Interactive Multimedia Application for Educational Purposes

The presentation of cultural heritage is difficult comprehensive and constantly updated topic. Researchers often focus more on the different techniques to digitize artifacts of cultural heritage. This work focuses on the overall shape and structure of future multimedia application whose specificity is determined by the topic - Odrysian kingdom. Below is presented a concept for structure and content-based information available for individual kings from Odryssae dynasty. Special attention is paid to the presentation of preserved artifacts associated with the reign of specific rulers. The main concept of multimedia application dedicated to the Odrysian kingdom, it is to be used in teaching programs related to cultural heritage and history of antiquity in universities. The aim of designers is that it can be modified easy for use in museums also.

Multimedia Standards

The aim of this paper is to review some of the standards, connected with multimedia and their metadata. We start with MPEG family. MPEG-21 provides an open framework for multimedia delivery and consumption. MPEG- 7 is a multimedia content description standard. With the Internet grow several format were proposed for media scenes description. Some of them are open standards such as: VRML1, X3D2, SMIL3, SVG4, MPEG-4 BIFS, MPEG-4, XMT, MPEG-4, LaSER, COLLADA5, published by ISO, W3C, etc. Television has become the most important mass medium. Standards such as MHEG, DAVIC, Java TV, MHP, GEM, OCAP and ACAP have been developed. Efficient video-streaming is presented. There exist a large number of standards for representing audiovisual metadata. We cover the Material Exchange Format (MXF), the Digital Picture Exchange (DPX), and the Digital Cinema Package (DCP).