Multimedia Integration Examples
Apollo 17, the last mission to the moon, traveled further from the
Lunar Module than any other mission; the trip took over an hour at an
average speed of about 10 kilometers per hour. It was not possibile
to send television when the Lunar Rover was in motion, and this was
the only flight in which the Lunar Rover carried no motion picture
camera. The trip was therefore documented in only two ways:
- Recorded radio conversations between the two astronauts on the
Moon and another astronaut in mission control in Houston.
- 140 photographs, about one every 30 seconds, taken by the
astronaut that was not driving.
The Apollo Lunar
Surface Journal contains digitized versions of the the audio and
each of the photographs. A single photograph can be shown with the
audio using a Real Audio Metadata file (.ram) as follows:
If we want to show the sequence of pictures that were taken, we can to
use the Synchronized Multimedia Interaction Language (.smil) as
follows:
Here's another way of doing the same thing (sped up for demo purposes):
Editing large SMIL files is an error prone activity; one common
approach is to write a program that generates correct SMIL code for
the content that you wish to display.
Doug Oard