Hello Everyone, My name is Ted Williams and I am a cofounder of and the Vice President of Engineering for Interactive Computer Television, Inc or InterACT. (Please feel free to visit our web site at http://interact-tv.com). InterACT is in the process of engineering an advanced hypervideo centric interactive television system. As a part of this development we have been evaluating various languages for inclusion in our systems as a scripting language and at this point are very interested in Tcl/Tk. We are also interested in perhaps integrating Visual Tcl into our authoring tool product line and would very much like to speak with the appropriate person about the technical and business issues of doing so. What we propose is to specify and develop a set of Tcl commands for the control and integration of various streaming media types. Video is the most obvious but we would also be controlling audio streams, MIDI streams, and picture streams (in our system a picture is a single frame stream.) We also wish to specify and develop a set of commands to allow the Tcl program itself to be controlled by the production's clock. This would imply that we wish to tie programmatic flow to the clock of the ongoing production such that a section (or sections assuming a multithreaded environment) is scheduled to run at a given time in the production. This would be done such that when a section does run it does so in sync with the audiovisual portions of the production. The basic idea is that the Tcl code would be machine generated by our authoring tools; honed modified and polished by hand; compiled into a stream of byte codes; and interleaved and embedded within the video stream. A receiver would then reverse the process and run the code, generating a viewer interface and managing the viewer interaction with and navigation throughout the title. We call the overall idea Hypervideo Management Language (HVML) and it is intended to do for the television set what HTML did for the printed page. Finished HVML productions would be distributed on CD-ROM, DVD, and via digital cable and subsets of the productions (with linear rather than nonlinear video material) would be broadcast over air and analog cable. What I am interested in is twofold: First, if there is any way that we can include Visual Tcl in our product distribution. Second, if there is anybody out there that would like to be involved in the specification and development in what we hope will become an open standard in the television industry. There is much more to the story than this. I have purposely avoided discussion of the broad range of applications for this technology. If anyone would like more information email [EMAIL PROTECTED] or to discuss this further please feel free to email me at [EMAIL PROTECTED] or my partner David J. Anderson at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thank you very much in advance for any help that any of you can render. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this most exciting of directions. Regards, Ted Williams --------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the Visual Tcl mailing list, please send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe vtcl [EMAIL PROTECTED]" in the message body (where [EMAIL PROTECTED] is your e-mail address).
[vtcl] Tcl/Tk and interactive television
Theodore and Barbara Williams Tue, 25 May 1999 11:01:41 -0700
