Berkeley Multimedia Research Center

The Berkeley Multimedia Research Center (BMRC) at the University of California at Berkeley is an interdisciplinary group that studies applications of multimedia technology. BMRC brings together artists, educators, and scientists to develop and experiment with new technologies and applications and to study the social and policy issues they raise. The center was founded in 1995 to foster more work on multimedia systems and applications to improve education and scholarship. BMRC is focusing on four specific topics:

Teaching and Learning

Interactive hypermedia courseware, distance learning, and new classroom and working environments will be developed and studied. Studies will be conducted on the effectiveness of large screen displays and high quality audio, wireless personal computing devices, groupware for collaborative learning and problem solving, and instructional delivery to home or classroom using high quality digital audio/video projection.

Multimedia Authoring

An authoring environment will be developed that integrates existing tools with new tools and novel paradigms for representing content and assessing student learning. A key element will be the smooth integration of content material with interactive simulations and contact with live experts. Besides improvements in authoring productivity, this environment will emphasize reuse of material and retargeting for different platforms. This environment will be used develop interactive courseware that will be delivered using the technologies and concepts developed in our work on teaching and learning.

Digital Libraries

BMRC scientists will be working to digitize substantial collections of material and develop the systems infrastructure and user interfaces needed to search for selected material and deliver it to the user. Our goal is to build a petabyte digital library with documents, images, videos, sounds, music, and scientific data sets that can be accessed using sophisticated search algorithms and content-specific indexes.

Social and Policy Issues

Multimedia applications raise many social and policy issues including telecommunications policy effect on national competitiveness, problems surrounding intellectual property, and the consequences of changing patterns of work and social interaction.

A key element of this work is to use the Berkeley campus as a testbed for development and experimentation. We are implementing a high-speed integrated services network that emphasizes the use of video and on-line services to improve our productivity and effectiveness. This network will be connected to other people and organizations, specifically our industrial partners, using high-speed regional, national, and international networks.

For further information, you can look at the BMRC site and/or contact the center director Professor Lawrence A. Rowe

Berkeley BMRC Video Gallery