Dateline: 7/12/00

IBM's HotMedia 3.0 is a significant piece of software for authoring "rich media" for Web sites. It let's you put together in a synchronized way, audio, video, panoramic images and 3D graphics. The result of your media efforts are packaged up and can be published in a nice neat Java applet. The result being that the end user does not require a plug in for viewing merely a Java enabled Web browser. Oh and by the way, it's all streamed. Cool stuff! (Why they even won the PC Expo Best Software Award on June 29, 2000)

HotMedia main media selection dialog

HotMedia is the first major project to enable the creation of streamed audio, video, animations, 3D graphics, and more for delivery via Java applets requiring no plug-ins. It smells suspiciously like an MPEG4 authoring toolkit and bodes well both for MPEG4 and IBM.

This really is an feature rich product, not bad since it's free. According to IBM's list of features HotMedia includes:

• Streaming video, with various quality selections, even for users with a 28.8K connection
• 3D - add VRML objects to your Web page without plug-ins
• Transaction and tracking capabilities link your rich media content to online tracking and transaction systems
• Interactive multi-track animations, panoramas, rotations, zooms and scrolling images,
• Streaming audio synchronized with images, HTML and Javascript,
• 360 degree by 360 degree iPIX images (can be created on Windows only),
• Unlimited hotlinks to audio/visual elements, html and Javascript,
• Mouse-click and mouse-over actions with floating tool tips and sound effects,
• event tracking of banner ads
• audio and sound effects,
• seamless transition from initial frame to animations,
• Javascript interface for navigation and custom player control,
• transition effects between images, such as wipes and fades,
• "freeze-motion" action shots,

Let's first look at the most interesting aspect of the tool it's 3D capabilities.

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