Hypermedia in 2018    (Read my thesis on hypermedia here)

Late Vannevar Bush inspired everyone with his essay As We May Think [0]. He designed a hypothetical device called the Memex. Through the microfilm-based device one could store all their important media on there to augment their memory. Ted Nelson and late Douglas Engelbart were heavily inspired by this device and designed the first hypertext systems because of it.

When Ted Nelson coined the term hypertext, he also coined the term hypermedia. Where hypertext means linked text, hypermedia means linked media. What media is would probably be subject for debate. Suffice to say that images, text, audio and video are all forms of media. Therefore, hypermedia simply means that these things can be linked to one another.

When one looks at HTML5 one might claim that it already is a form of hypermedia. I would argue that this is true since an HTML link can refer to solely a video or an image. However, a hypertext document linking to another hypertext document with media embedded in it is arguably not hypermedia, since it is the hypertext that is linked.

Whether HTML5 is hypermedia or not does not matter, what does matter is that the linking mechanism could definitely be improved to better serve ideas that have been pioneered by people behind hypermedia systems. An example of this is what YouTube does nowadays [1]. It is possible to have overlays and when one clicks on such an overlay, one is directed to another YouTube video. From my personal experience I have noticed that this linking mechanism is used to link to other videos that are standalone stories. But what if such a linking mechanism could be used to tell a non-linear story?

Such usage of links has been a big idea in the early days of hypermedia. So while some ideas about hypermedia remained, other ideas have vanished.

The most well-known hypermedia framework is SMIL. It used to be a W3C standard. This is unfortunately not the case anymore [2]. For anyone who wants to know more about this, I would recommend watching the following lecture on YouTube.

One idea that came to light in 2007 is that hypermedia could be used for gaming. Instead of using 3D graphics people would use video, images, text and sound. The idea was to create a quick prototyping framework that allowed for:

This idea has been realized by creating a simple framework. It was meant to be simple, so that non-technical people could have their first introduction to a simpler XML-based tool compared to HTML. In fact, the language was meant to be so simple that the framework acronym has derived its name from it. The hypermedia framework is called the eXtensible Interactive Media Player for Entertainment and Learning. In other words: XIMPEL.

XIMPEL

XIMPEL is a hypermedia framework, with well suited for creating non-linear narratives, gaming prototypes and hypermedia games. While gaming prototypes merely provide a poor man's immersion, it is meant for the beginning stages for game creation. This framework is between storytelling and gameplay through the ideas of hypermedia.

Examples

More information and examples can be found in ximpel.net. Here is one example and here is another example embedded in the page (fullscreen is disabled).

XIMPEL Documentation

If you want to see or know more about XIMPEL. You can look at the documentation. It has some videos demonstrating the framework (including some applications) and some more in-depth technical documentation. Two master theses describing the technical implementation of XIMPEL in-depth has also been included in the documentation.