Digital Media

Media is the plural form of medium, which refers to some material or technique used for
communication. In the old times, people communicated their ideas through cave paintings
using pigments and stains on cave walls. For thousands of years this was the main way of
communication between people but slowly things began to evolve. The paintings were done
on different surfaces though the medium remained almost the same.
In time, new methods of communication were discovered, and developed because the
progress of technology.

Cave paintings
Egyptian Hieroglyphics
Printing Press
Photographs
The telegraph
The Telephone
The recorded sound

The above were invented but these methods of communication still relied on a single medium
to send a message.

Motion picture

The revolution in communication was made by the introduction of motion pictures. Now the
message was sent by a multitude of images as well as a story over a period of time.

Motion pictures with live music (piano, organ)

After a while, these motion pictures improved. They had live music played on a piano or an
organ. So, they used now more than one medium and the medium became media.

Motion recorded sound of music and voices

This step was an improvement comparing with the previous discoveries. Now this media
could be shown over and over again without the need for a live performer to provide a
portion of communication.

Motion picture, sound + BROADCAST => TELEVISION

Television gave the people the chance to watch and hear things that were going on far away
as if they were occurring in their own living rooms.

COMPUTERS = a great invention who revolutionised the designers world.

The first computers used for design were huge and expensive and didnt look nice.
They couldnt print good quality images and the chemicals they used smelled bad.
Eventually, computer technology advanced enough that it could be used to generate simple
images, but the equipment was very expensive and the process time consuming. Thus, movies

produced during this time used models and traditional animation to simulate any computer
screen graphics that were needed as part of a scene.
It was easier and cheaper to use motion picture techniques to produce what was supposed to
be displayed on a computer screen than it was to make the display on an actual computer.
If in the past the film studios used hand-drawn animation to make simulated computer
graphics now they use graphics to produce complex sets and lifelike animation.
With the invention of the silicon chip and the micro-processor things began to develop fast.

COMPUTERS become available to the general public. Not only the film studios,
televisions could use them now, but also the public for their presentations.
NEW MEDIA

New technology meant that the viewer could interact with the media.
Eg. Two people, at either end of a cable, were able to communicate only through Morse code.
Now the Internet can reach million of people at the same time and can be used to
communicate in much more interesting ways than a simple series of clicking noises.

INTERACTIVITY
Video games
In the same way a mystery novel keeps us tense from the first page till the end, the same this
new form of media interact with the user. The best example of this interactivity is in video
games.

CONTENT EVOLUTION FROM USER INPUT

On-line bulletin boards where visitors post messages and images about a specific
topic.
On a busy Website of this nature, the content can change quickly as people add their
own influence.

ASYNCHRONOUS COMMUNICATION
The message sender and the message receiver dont have to be available at the same time
of communication.
The opposite of the asynchronous communication is synchronous communication. An eg. Is
the telephone conversation. (both parties need to be on the phone at the same time).

GLOBAL ACCESSIBILITY
In the past only corporations and governments were producing media for the people to see.
Now almost any person can shoot a video clip (even from their mobile phone) and distribute
it for the world to see. (on youtube)
Some WebPages have a larger audience than many newspapers.

DIGITAL IMAGE
Digital image

Vector type or
Raster type (bmp)

1. RASTER IMAGE made up of pixels which are the smallest parts of an image. The
digital image has a fixed number of rows and columns of pixels.
Raster images can be created with digital cameras, scanners, coordinate-measuring
machines, seismographic profiling, airborne radar and more.
2. Vector images are a result of mathematical geometry (vector)
A vector consists of point that has both direction and length.
An eg. Of combination of vectors and raster is the billboard which contains text
(vector) and photographs (raster)
HOW CAN WE SEE THE IMAGES?
There is special software for viewing the digital images, called: image viewer software. On
the web the formats of the images that can be displayed are: Gif, jpg, png, svg (standard
format W3C)
There are slideshow utilities for displaying the images too.

Resolution (pixels, DPI, inches)

When dealing with graphics files there are 3 properties that go into determining the resolution
of a file.

Pixels:

They are the exact number of dots both horizontally and vertically that makes up the file.
This is the actual resolution of the file. DPI and Inches affect only the size of the image as it
is displayed or printed, but the actual pixels is finite in a bitmapped file.

DPI (Dots per inch): The number of dots or pixels per inch of a printed or scanned
document
Inches: The actual size (either printed or scanned) of an image
Eg. Width x Height
640 x 480 pixels

If we downloaded an image off the internet that has W x H: 640 x 480 pixels and we want to
print it at a high quality, then we can not do anything as there arent enough pixels in that
image.

Image resolution means how many of your images pixels will fit inside each inch of
paper when printed.

1 inch

Obviously, since your photo has a fixed number of pixels, the

more of them you squeeze inside each inch of paper, the
smaller the image will appear on the paper.
Likewise, the fewer pixels you print per inch, the larger the
image will appear on paper. The number of pixels that will be
printed per inch is known as resolution of the image or
image resolution.

Image resolution has everything to do with printing your image.

It has nothing to do with how your image appears on your computer screen, which is why
images you downloaded off the internet usually appear much larger and higher quality on
your screen than they do when you print them.

How high of a resolution value do you need for professional quality printing? The
generally accepted value is 300 pixels / inch.
Printing an image at a resolution of 300 pixels / inch squeezes the pixels in close
enough together to keep everything looking sharp.
In fact, 300 is usually a bit more than you needed. You can get by with a resolution of
240 pixels / inch without noticing any loss of image quality. The professional
standard, though, is 300 pixels / inch.

Digital media
What this mean?
Digital media is a form of electronic media where data are stored in digital (as opposed to
analogue). Data can be stored on a hard disk drive or computer networking. The end
product can be a digital video, augmented reality or digital art.
a) Digital video
b) Augmented reality
c) Digital art
a) Digital video is a type of digital recording system that works by using a digital raster
than an analogue video signal. The equipments for video production digitally were
introduced in the late 1970s to the early 1980s.
Digital video was first introduced commercially in 1986 by Sonny.
b) Augmented reality (AR) is a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-word
environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input

such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. ~ If a view of reality is modified by a

computer, then it is called mediated reality. ~
AR is in real-time and in semantic context with environmental elements, such as
sports scores on TV during a match. This term have been coined in 1990 by Thomas
Caudell, working at Boeing.
c) Digital art is a general term for a range of artistic works and practices that use digital
technology as an essential part of the creative and / or presentation process. It started
in 1970s and includes the computer art & multimedia art. All these are placed
under the name of umbrella term new media art.
The techniques of digital art are used extensively by the mainstream media in advertisement
and by film-makers to produce special effects.
Desktop publishing has had a huge impact on the publishing world, although that is more
related to graphic design.
Digital art can be purely computer-generated (such as fractals and algorithmic art) or taken
from other sources, such as a scanned photograph or image drawn using vector graphics
software using a mouse or graphic tablets.
U.S. Navy personnel using a VR parachute trainer

World Skin (1997), Maurice Benayoun's virtual reality interactive installation