Theme:
Digital technology continues to transform the media landscape. Advances in multimedia have changed our world, revolutionizing entertainment, connecting friends and families around the globe, enriching our communications experiences and enabling major improvements in medical care and education.
We continue to see huge leaps forward in multimedia compression and streaming delivery together with increases in quality and storage capability. Multimedia is becoming more adaptive to available bandwidth, and innovations in fields such as virtual and augmented reality, video gaming and holographic video promise to deliver highly immersive new media experiences.
But what further new technologies are emerging? How will we store and analyze the vast quantity of video that will be generated? What other forms of media will we be using besides single-camera captured video and associated audio? How will we begin to use augmented reality in our everyday lives? Will increasing dependence on new media affect our ability to discern reality from fiction? How will we verify digital integrity to counteract the threat of manipulated content? And how should we think about data governance and privacy in a world almost entirely mirrored by the digital sphere?
This special issue of the ITU Journal invites original research into the state of the art in multimedia as well as the new possibilities and associated challenges appearing on the horizon.
Keywords:
Media; multimedia; virtual, augmented, and alternate reality; video; digital holography; machine learning; performance; QoS and QoE; social media; data management; data encryption; data collection; data ownership; manipulated content; fake news; security and trust.
