By Masahiro Kawahata, Visual Information System Development Association
Tremendous amounts of effort have been made in developing information systems that play an essential role in supporting an information-oriented society, and the use of such systems has become quite common for the general public today. We already enjoy various advantages from some of the more general, public systems in our daily life, such as seat reservation systems for public transportation, automatic ticket issuing, examining and collecting systems, cash dispensing systems at banks, and stock information systems.
Conventionally, there have been two types of information media in our daily life; mass media, such as newspapers, magazines, radio and television, and more personal media, as represented by telephones and letters. However, as a result of remarkable progress in modern technologies such as data processing, telecommunications (especially fiber optics and satellite telecommunications), and image technologies (such as video disks), new types of communication media have been developed and ways to put them to actual use are being studied from extremely realistic perspectives.
This report concerns the current status of Hi-OVIS (Highly Interactive Optical Visual Information System which has played a leading role in the development of information service systems in Japan, and studies being made regarding its new role in the new media era, as well as future plans for further development.