Jovanie Gomez's List: Multimedia Society

With the advances in sensing, transmission, and visualization technology, 3D information has become increasingly incorporated into real-world applications, from architecture, entertainment, and manufacturing to security. One of the fundamental requirements of these applications is the estimation of scene depth information, preferably in real time. Fields such as computer vision, computer graphics, and robotics have studied the extraction of 3D information for more than three decades, but it remains a challenging problem. Multimedia researchers must take the imperfectness of depth information and other multisensory information into consideration when designing their systems, making it a unique research opportunity. This special issue offers an overview of recent advances in 3D acquisition systems and the many multimedia applications that can benefit from 3D integration and understanding

The Role of Media in Society

Most social scientists define our current society as a mass society and believe it was formed at the end of the 19th century mainly by industrialization, urbanization and modernization (Wells, 1997).  The media’s role in this society is fundamentally a function of how this society chooses to use the media.  Furthermore, the media’s relationship with this society is both reflexive—the mass media simultaneously affects and is affected by mass society—and varied.

 

The following pages highlight four examples of important roles the media has in society.