Below I have described the technical terms related to the types of technology which are currently in use in the multimedia industry, including a basic description of what each one is all about:

Virtual reality is a computer-generated environment which simulates reality sufficiently for the human senses to experience it. ie. It attempts to imitate reality.

The main uses for virtual reality are in things like flight simulators, where a pilot can learn to fly without actually having to risk their own life in a real aeroplane. All they have to do is use the sensors and controls around them to interact with the computer-generated environment.

You can actually buy virtual reality goods (like data gloves, 3D controllers, 3D Glasses) at Virtual Realities.

If you’ve ever watched a pixar movie (Toy story, A Bugs Life, Finding Nemo. etc) then you’ll know what 3D animation is. It is a sequence of 3D generated images that are shown one after the other, very quickly, to give the illusion/ appearance of continuous movement.

This can be in the form of a series of pre-rendered image or done in real-time, as is the case in computer games. The downside of doing this in real time is that it can be very slow, so you are usually limited to a lower level of detail in the 3D animations possible, while a pre-rendered frame can be as detailed as you like and take hours or even days to render.

A programming language is a language for expressing instructions to a computer. ie. It is a way of telling the computer what to do.

There are many different languages, but they mainly fall into 3 simple types:

• Low-level language
• High-level language
• Scripting language

A low level language is where you write code in a language that the computer understands. Examples include machine code (eg. 01000111) and assembly.

A high level language is where you write the code in a language that you can understand, and then the computer converts this code into a low-level language that it can understand. Examples include Java, C, Visual Basic. etc.

A scripting language is where you write code that a computer application can understand without compiling it into a language that the computer can understand. Examples include HTML, JavaScript and VBScript.

Authoring tools are programs that help to write hypertext or multimedia applications. Example include Macromedia Dreamweaver (see tools section), where you can write web pages in HTML or just use the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor that allows you draw the layout and Dreamweaver will then write the code to do everything for you.