MediaCalc
Developed at Interval Research Corporation
1994-1997

MediaCalc was a software prototype for an interactive-multimedia authoring system, developed at Interval Research Corporation between 1994 and 1997. By combining the capabilities of modern media editing systems with an insight from spreadsheets, it embodied a new model for multimedia authoring in which content annotations of time-based media could be operated on by functional dependencies in order to compute new media.

Functions in MediaCalc are applied to media by means of a visual programming language in which function icons are dragged from a palette onto media handles and thereby connected into a network of dependencies. Constraints among media streams, and among abstract streams of different types describing the "contents" of other streams, form a language for prototyping and creating media and software artifacts.

MediaCalc Personnel:
Marc Davis, project co-manager
David Levitt, project co-manager
Gordon Kotik, lead software engineer
Brian Williams, software engineer
Alan Ruttenberg, software engineer
Golan Levin, interface designer

At left is a link to an image of the MediaCalc Timeline interface, across which multimedia streams are linearly spatialized, and connected by functional dependencies.