Interactive Sketching of Multimedia Storyboards

Creating innovative interactive multimedia presentations requires rapid exploration of numerous design alternatives early in the development cycle. However, current authoring tools provide poor support for this early design exploration. To gather requirements for an acceptable design tool, I have conducted a series of interviews with professional multimedia authors. Although diese authors expressed interest in using better design processes, tools, and techniques, they were not interested in learning additional complex applications. To address this problem, this dissertation focuses on the development of an interactive multimedia storyboard tool that uses stroke gestures and textual annotations as an input design vocabulary. By operationalizing this vocabulary, the storyboard becomes interactive, thus allowing authors to explore working design alternatives. Once complete, the storyboard specifications can then be used to generate at least a partial implementation in a standard document format.