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I recently had a chance to witness a lecture by Prof. Adrian David Cheok - the Director of the "Interaction and Entertainment Research Center" in Singapore.

His work on mixed reality, human-computer interaction, fuzzy systems, embedded systems, power electronics, and multi-modal recognition hasn't slowed him down one bit. On the contrary he'd been awarded the Hitachi Fellowship 2003, the "A-STAR Young Scientist of the Year Award" in 2003, and the "SCS Singapore Young Professional of the Year Award" in 2004.

In a way, it's inspiring to listen to such a young successful yet harmoniously down-to-earth figure speak about the future. In a way, it's also a little scary to realize that we are living two or three decades behind the rest of the world.

Though his words of insight may have been directed at a technologically superior country like China or Singapore, the relevance it has in our country is no less because developing Interactive Media needs only knowledge and only a small amount of capital. This and the growing enthusiasm for ICT in Sri Lanka makes this an ideal revenue for us to pursue.

Prof. Cheok's main area of interest was Interactive Media. He believes that two factors alone will tremendously increase the potential of Interactive Media.

1.) The huge content explosion

2.) Rapid data transfer systems

"If we take television 20 years ago and compare it with today you'll see quite a difference," says Prof Cheok. "Those days there were only little transmission coverage and only a several Television Networks running, and therefore a documentary or a feature rich program was only seen few times a year. But now the network coverage has improved and more television stations are here. Now there's an explosion of rich content and science documentaries you see everyday."

Thus because of the content explosion over the Internet, more people will flock to it, and therefore more avenues for creation will come up.

The power of data transmission methods over the Internet is the other area that he emphasized on. Everything is going to be downloaded from the Broadband Internet. Already in Britain one of the largest Internet service providers is teaming with the company responsible for the BitTorrent software to test a new high-speed movie download service.

"All the media now is digital. Driving digital data around in a truck is hugely inefficient and really stupid. What's the point of putting a huge file on a digital disk and shipping it around the world, driving it in a truck - it's a waste of natural resources."

"The change will happen when you'll be able to download several gigabytes of data in about 30 minutes. That's about the time it will take for you to go to the shop and buy a CD," says Prof Cheok. "So if a person figures out that you can stay at home and download it in the same time you can go to the shop and buy it, he'll probably download it."

Through the decades developing Interactive Media has also become simpler. Now you don't need to be familiar with DirectX or Maya to create graphically pleasing environments. You don't need to learn the ways of object-oriented programming to make the sessions interactive. And you definitely don't need to be a computer engineer to create and publish your own application.

Programs like Macromedia Flash, Fireworks and Authorware can get you to create the most complex instances of Interactive Media and all you need is a little tutorial in the Internet to get you started. Master Macromedia Flash completely and you'll easily see that you can create miracles out of actionscript.

The University of Moratuwa teamed up with the Secondary Education Modernization Project (SEMP) last year to conduct a competition inside the University, on creating educational software for A'Ls and O'Ls. The noticeable thing was there were other students from different fields participating, not only the computer engineering undergrads - showing that the creation of Interactive Media is no longer a technical thing.

It's so simple and easy to add special effects, that people are now getting bored over seeing the same old Matrix effects again and again. As a result now it's no longer about what the developer can do, it's about what the end-user wants the program to do. It's about new color swatches and simple things that add attractiveness and uniqueness rather than mind boggling twisted effects that leave the user literally blinded.

In consequence, Interactive Media has become an art, not a technological expertise. And as Prof. Cheok believes, in a couple of years the world of Interactive Media will gain a value never seen before in the ICT industry. And because of the creativity involved in constructing Interactive Media, it won't be a surprise if the field will be sought out and priced higher than plain technical areas like Database Management or Network Administration.

So if you're a born artist or have an uncanny knack at entertaining people; put some of that talent to good use and get with the tools like Macromedia Flash. The field of Interactive Media is getting lucrative at a highly desirable pace - your effort won't go wasted.

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