ELSEVIER Displays 17 (1997) 123

Editorial

Displays for multimedia

This special issue of Displays is devoted to multimedia applications. Beyond their common focus on display devices, the papers also touch on a central problem in current multimedia development: designing for use.

When developing technology to engage all human senses, the first step is to understand users and their behaviour. The success or failure of multimedia applica- tions is hence determined by how well they match the “people components”.

Expensive mistakes have resulted from ignoring the importance of this issue in the past. It is worth con- sidering AT&T’s experience with the Picturephone (a videophone) in the 1970s. The development of the Picturephone cost $500 million, and had all the band- width needed for high resolution video communication. But despite this, the Picturephone was an expensive failure for AT&T, even though AT&T predicted, in its 1969 Annual Report, that ‘With perhaps one million sets in use, Picturephone may be a billion-dollar business by 1980’. The reason now identified for this is that the social and psychological ‘drivers’ and other related issues were not properly considered. A wide range of both scientific and market research was conducted by AT&T prior and subsequent to the introduction of the Picturephone. It found that the single most important reason for the failure of the service was nothing to do with technology, but because it was produced without an understanding of human behaviour and without a careful analysis of the types of communication where a visual image might be useful.

The papers in this special issue provide a context for some of these questions, and also provide a good example of how well the technology can work! With contributors from Scotland, The Netherlands, Germany,

Brazil, Spain, England and Northern Ireland it was important to use a medium that enabled quick and global communication, and the Internet was the obvious first choice. All papers were submitted by e-mail. Abstracts of the papers were published on the World- Wide-Web where reviewers were able to select papers for review. Reviewers received the papers by e-mail and returned their comments to me by e-mail. No documents were posted and the issue was completed in just four months.

I would like to thank the reviewers, without whom this special issue would not have been possible:

Delfina Aita Michael Albers Bruce Balentine Bob Beaton Harry Blanchard Daryle Gardner Bonneau Jim Carter Joy Ebben Waldemar Karwowski Jonathan K. Kies Larry Marine Michael Mitchell Regina M. Neese-Barker David Osborne Charles L. Proctor Paula Sind-Prunier Don Williams

David Travis System Concept Ltd

London UK

0141-9382/97/$17.00 0 1997 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved PII SOl41-9382(97)00006-l