Multimedia finds its application in various areas including, but not limited to, advertisements, art, education, entertainment, engineering, medicine, mathematics, business, scientific research and spatial, temporal applications.
A few application areas of multimedia are listed below:
Creative industries
Creative industries use multimedia for a variety of purposes ranging from fine arts, to entertainment, to commercial art, to journalism, to media and software services provided for any of the industries listed below. An individual multimedia designer may cover the spectrum throughout their career. Request for their skills range from technical, to analytical and to creative.
Commercial
Much of the electronic old and new media utilized by commercial artists is multimedia. Exciting presentations are used to grab and keep attention in advertising. Industrial, business to business, and interoffice communications are often developed by creative services firms for advanced multimedia presentations beyond simple slide shows to sell ideas or liven-up training. Commercial multimedia developers may be hired to design for governmental services and nonprofit services applications as well.
Entertainment and Fine Arts
In addition, multimedia is heavily used in the entertainment industry, especially to develop special effects in movies and animations. Multimedia games are a popular pastime and are software programs available either as CD-ROMs or online. Some video games also use multimedia features.
Multimedia applications that allow users to actively participate instead of just sitting by as passive recipients of information are called Interactive Multimedia.
Education
In Education, multimedia is used to produce computer-based training courses (popularly called CBTs) and reference books like encyclopaedia and almanacs. A CBT lets the user go through a series of presentations, text about a particular topic, and associated illustrations in various information formats.
Edutainment is an informal term used to describe combining education with entertainment, especially multimedia entertainment.
Engineering
Software engineers may use multimedia in Computer Simulations for anything from entertainment to training such as military or industrial training. Multimedia for software interfaces are often done as collaboration between creative professionals and software engineers.
Industry
In the Industrial sector, multimedia is used as a way to help present information to shareholders, superiors and coworkers. Multimedia is also helpful for providing employee training, advertising and selling products all over the world via virtually unlimited web-based technologies.
Mathematical and Scientific Research
In Mathematical and Scientific Research, multimedia is mainly used for modeling and simulation. For example, a scientist can look at a molecular model of a particular substance and manipulate it to arrive at a new substance. Representative research can be found in journals such as the Journal of Multimedia.
Medicine
In Medicine, doctors can get trained by looking at a virtual surgery or they can simulate how the human body is affected by diseases spread by viruses and bacteria and then develop techniques to prevent it.
Multimedia in Public Places
In hotels, railway stations, shopping malls, museums, and grocery stores, multimedia will become available at stand-alone terminals or kiosks to provide information and help. Such installation reduce demand on traditional information booths and personnel, add value, and they can work around the clock, even in the middle of the night, when live help is off duty.
A menu screen from a supermarket kiosk that provide services ranging from meal planning to coupons. Hotel kiosk list nearby restaurant, maps of the city, airline schedules, and provide guest services such as automated checkout.
Printers are often attached so users can walk away with a printed copy of the information. Museum kiosk are not only used to guide patrons through the exhibits, but when installed at each exhibit, provide great added depth, allowing visitors to browser though richly detailed information specific to that display.
