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Multimedia technology which refers to the interactive and computer-based application, is seen as a way to enhance the teaching and learning process as well as promoting active learning among students. However, despite the realisation of ubiquitous Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) infrastructures and practices in much of the developed world, a digital divide still exists in developing countries, such as Malaysia. Although Malaysia has long recognised the importance of the ICTs to encourage national development, studies conducted by the Malaysian government agencies found that the rural areas of the country are lag behind others in terms of technological access and use despite various efforts by the government. This indirectly indicates that the provision of the technology itself is inadequate to encourage the rural community to use technological devices because it is crucial to understand the community and culture before introducing multimedia technology for rural developing regions, especially in education. We conducted initial fieldwork in rural Malaysia at two rural primary schools with different student populations; an aboriginal school and a Malay school to establish the requirements needed by the targeted community. We used three data collection methods; remote questionnaire survey, interview and a practical multimedia creation workshop, to answer our initial research question:- What are the key requirements for multimedia learning technology in the context of a rural village school? We extracted thirteen user requirements from the analysis of the overall study data. Card sorting technique, then, is used to generate thirty design ideas to fulfil different combinations of requirements. The idea of a multimedia creative writing system was chosen for further development, because of its widespread applicability to a variety of taught subjects. This digital storytelling system was named as Get2Gether. The prototyping and evaluation of Get2Gether helped to answer our other two research questions; What is the role of digital storytelling in rural Malaysian classrooms? How do we design and implement low-cost and scalable technology for learning in rural regions? A separate usability test of Get2Gether was conducted in a third school, before a four-week field trial in our two original schools. These revealed a great attraction of the system for students but limited uptake by teachers in conventional lessons. It is found that most of the teachers were not ready to transform their method of teaching although the teachers were aware that technology plays a vital role in contemporary teaching and learning process and requested time to adapt to it. Students, on the other hand, were more than ready to try out the system to create their multimedia narratives in a variety of lessons. The implications for the design and implementation of learning technologies in these settings are discussed.

Photo sharing is becoming a common way of maintaining closeness and relationships with friends and family, and it can evoke pleasurable, enjoyable and exciting experiences. People have fun when sharing photos containing pleasant scenes or friends being caught doing something interesting. There has been a recent increase in studies that focus on the visualisation and sharing of photos using online services or sharing in the home environment using different digital technologies. Although previous studies have focussed on the important issues of photo sharing and visualisation, there is a dearth of research aimed at designing applications that enable people to share and visualise multiple photo streams that originate from multiple sources such as different people or capture devices. In addition, there is a lack of research that links new applications for photo sharing with user experience and the applications' value to the user. This thesis, firstly, offers a new design for synchronous sharing and visualisation of multiple photo streams using temporal and social metadata. Moreover, different features, called transition modes, were added to the system to give a better experience within the system. The experience of photo sharing, however, does not exist without any connection to people or events; it is a social experience depending on people, places and time. Hence, an experimental study was conducted with twenty users, and the results demonstrate high user demand for concurrent presentation of multiple media streams as well as recommended transitions for extending its potential. In the second phase of this thesis, the temporal aspects of multiple photo streams such as manual transition, continuity detection and user desired time were designed and implemented. Following that, the results of the user study demonstrate good comprehension of the users' own and shared photo streams, and their temporal structure, even when presented at relatively high speeds. Users were easily able to contextualise events, recall specific photos and find them using the proposed interface. The final interface is built from the lessons that were learned from the first two phases of this study. In this version, the user was able to share their photos in real time and see them in an ambient display. Our final system for real-time photo sharing as an ambient display was tested in three different trials with three different user groups consisting of extended family, close friends and workplace colleagues. The results showed high user interest for extended family members and in the workplace environment.

Three Dimensional Television (3DTV) and Free Viewpoint Television (FTV) are emerging multimedia applications, which promise to offer a new Quality of Experience (QoE) dimension. In order for such applications to offer an immersive experience for users a large number of viewpoints need to be transmitted, to a point where the high bandwidth utilisation becomes a major concern. One approach to this problem is the utilisation of the so called “depth maps” in Depth Image Based Rendering (DIBR) techniques, where different views, can be reconstructed (rendered) at the receiver side when required, with a fraction of the bandwidth. Therefore the quality and accuracy of the information present in depth maps and its ability to reconstruct the required views has become the subject of much greater scrutiny in multimedia research. Several challenges arise when assessing the quality of depth maps, such as the lack of a proper reference for comparing the available depth maps, especially when it comes to live High Definition (HD) content. The first contribution of this thesis focuses on developing a novel subjective assessment approach, which addresses the presence of disocclusions in rendered views. The goal of this assessment approach is to enable the subjective evaluation of rendered views, to provide results that are more representative of the quality of the depth map utilised in the rendering process. The adopted approach performance has been evaluated through correlating the obtained subjective results with well-established objective metric measurements, such as PSNR, PSPNR, SSIM and VQM. The second contribution of this thesis is concerned with establishing a test data set, which includes different colour sequences together with various depth estimation algorithms and different depth post processing techniques. State of the art depth estimation algorithms were examined such as RSGM, DERS and HRM, in order to obtain a wide range of depth map qualities. The depth map data set is utilised in the DIBR process to generate rendered views, which are in turn subjectively assessed utilising the approach developed in contribution one of this thesis. The assessment is carried out in both a 2D and 3D setup and statistical analysis is utilised to establish observations and conclusions over the depth map performance. The third and final contribution of this thesis is related to a non-reference evaluation approach in assessing the quality of the depth maps utilised. This approach exploits the edges present in the available depth maps and compares that to the edges in the corresponding colour views. Edge pixels in depth maps are then classified into correct and error edge pixels. The obtained results are then correlated with the subjective results obtained in the second contribution. The result analysis of this non-reference model provides clear indications of depth map performance and its dependency on the associated colour sequence selection. The high correlation values with the subjective results were in the range of 75-81%. These correlation values are of more significance when compared to best performing quality metrics (e.g. VQM obtained correlation values of 59%) under the researched scenarios.