A course in multimedia is rapidly becoming a necessity in computer Science and engineering Curricula, especially now that multimedia touches most aspects of these fields. Multimedia was originally seen as a vertical application area; that is, a niche application with methods that belong only to itself. However, like pervasive computing, multimedia is now essentially a horizontal application area and forms an important component of the study of computer graphics, image processing, databases, real-time systems, operating systems, information retrieval, computer networks, computer vision, and so on.

Multimedia is no longer just a toy but forms part of the technological environment in which we work and think. This book fills the need for a university-level text that examines a good deal of the core agenda computer science sees as belongıng to this subject area. Multimedia has become associated with a certain set of issues in computer science and engineering, and we address those here. The book is not an introduction to simple design issues-it serves a more advanced audience than that. On the other hand, it is not a reference work 1t is more a traditional textbook. While we perforce discuss multimedia tools, we would like to give a sense of the underlying principles in the tasks those tools carry out. Students who undertake and succeed in a course based on this text can be said to really understand fundamental matters in regard to this material; hence the title of the text.

In conjunction with this text, a full-fledged course should also allow students to make use of this knowledge to carry out interesting or even wonderful practical projects in multimedia, interactive projects that engage and sometimes amuse and, perhaps, even teach these same concepts