Can Electronic Books Make the Leap from Paper to Screen? 3 'Cold Fusion' of Image Compression Gets New Respect 9 I/O; Video Alliance; NJ Bell v. Suburban Cable QuickTime at Macworld; CableLabs lets no grass grow Nintendo vc. the State of Minn.; Briefs Mediascape; Events ÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐПŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸ Can Electronic Books Make the Leap from Paper to Screen? 3 One of the biggest selling points for "new media" has been that interactivity creates a new genre for communication that can't accurately be compared to anything that already exists -- the "not a book, not a movie" school of product development. But in the past few months, the most extraordinary action in the content business has surrounded the most familiar, and in many ways the best-loved, communication medium: the book. Take all the wonderful things that books are and add the fact that the most successful computer applications to date were formerly paper-bound metaphors, translated or transferred into the digital domain -- i.e., spreadsheets, word processors, databases -- and it becomes clear why future thinkers would automatically look at another deeply familiar paper-based metaphor, the book, as the next continent to conquer in the digital world. But can it be done? Will people give up the sensual, physical contact with paper, and all the rituals that surround acquiring, opening and reading a new book? Some of the industry's sharpest minds are betting that they will. 'Cold Fusion' of Image Compression Gets New Respect 9 Suppose you could mathematically grow a picture from a seed? That's what image compression based on fractal geometry can accomplish. Derided by skeptics as "the cold fusion of compression" for several years, the fractal alternative to the JPEG/MPEG compression method is now demanding to be taken seriously. Fractal proponents claim decompression can be relatively quick and easy, and can now be done completely in software. Fractal images are scalable and resolution independent. And at higher compression ratios, fractal methods are clearly superior to JPEG. Thus fractal compression might become a market reality in CD-ROM and floppy disk titles before JPEG chips are common. And fractal proponents claim that full motion video with software decompression is now also a reality. 2 I/O Computer game veteran Chris Crawford wants videogames at arm's length 13 Video alliance New group wants to pool technologies 13 NJ Bell v. Suburban Cable Are dueling commercials a case of pot calling kettle black? 14 QuickTime at Macworld An impressive range of QuickTime wares will debut 16 CableLabs lets no grass grow It's actively pursuing broad, pan-industry connections 17 Nintendo vs. the State of Minn. The videogame maker almost achieved nirvana -- crossover to adults. What went wrong? 18 Briefs Videotex becomes interactive services; MPC steps up to '386; Moto has tiny radio modem; MCI meets PhotoCD; Sony reveals new CD technology. 21 Mediascape How still image compression works (or doesn't); the gory details about JPEG 24 EventsThe Metaphoric Leap to Electronic Books Focus The Metaphoric Leap to Electronic Books Can they be sufficiently similar to, and different from, paper books? One of the biggest selling points for "new media" has been that interactivity creates a new genre for communication that can't accurately be compared to anything that already exists -- the "not a book, not a movie" school of product development. But in the past few months, the most extraordinary action in the content business has surrounded the most familiar, and in many ways the best-loved, communication medium: the book. In its "analog" form, so to speak, it is nearly everything that so many wish new media could be: it is portable, intensely personal, interactive. It stimulates the imagination in uncontrollable ways, but it also provides great structure for learning. A book is both art and commerce, form and function, a leopard designed to change its spots. Take all the wonderful things that books are and add the fact that the most successful computer applications to date were formerly paper-bound metaphors, translated or transferred into the digital domain -- i.e., spreadsheets, word processors, databases -- and it becomes clear why future thinkers would automatically look at another deeply familiar paper-based metaphor, the book, as the next continent to conquer in the digital world. The sensual world of books But can it be done? Will people give up the sensual, physical contact with paper, and all the rituals that surround acquiring, opening and reading a new book? Will they give up their pens for margin-scribbling, their bookmarks, their highlighters, for the keyboard (or the stylus) of the computer screen or a reader device? Does anybody really want to read text off a screen? Are there incentives powerful enough to make them? Are there design tools (and designers clever enough) to create electronic text that people actually want to read? For the most part, people aren't wild about the idea. For example, at the ETRE Conference in Opio, France, last year, I led a panel on electronic publishing. Panel attendees to a person scoffed openly at the idea that they might one day want to read any amount of information at all from their computer screens instead of from a piece of paper or a book. A movement afoot. But despite skepticism, the electronic text movement has been afoot for more than a decade now, with traditional publishers getting their ducks in a row for a move into electronic book publishing as soon as it proves itself economically feasible. Michael Hart, director of Project Gutenberg in Urbana, IL, says he's been watching the movement since he started his project in 1971. What Project Gutenberg does is get online in standard ASCII text format books that are in the public domain and immune from copyright protection. There are 24 books in Hart's archives today, but the goal is to have a 10,000-book library and give away a trillion books by the end of 2001. Hart says he's frequently contacted by intrepid publishers who want to take Gutenberg's ASCII books and turn them into commercial products. After so many years pretending it could never happen, content providers, software vendors and traditional book publishers are beginning to rally around the concept that it may, after all, be possible to transfer the reader's affections from the printed page to the electronic screen. Kids have no barriers. Though some adults do have an aversion to reading on-screen, Hart says kids have no such barriers. "You hand a disc to a kid and say it's a book and they don't blink an eye," says Hart. "When I started Project Gutenberg, I thought it was going to be a reference library -- that nobody would ever use it until they wanted to look something up. But I knew it was going to be a success when I was talking to the director of Common Knowledge one day and suddenly there was a huge commotion at her end. She thought her kid had fallen off the roof or something. "Well, it turned out that the kid had been reading our Alice in Wonderland on a computer for the past few days, and the kids from his school had been following him home to read it with him. They hit a funny part and they all fell off their chairs laughing -- that's what the director heard, them falling off their chairs. That was the first time I realized that even I didn't have the imagination to conceive of what Gutenberg was really going to do." And since then, he said, he's discovered that even adults read books "from end to end" on the screen. "I have notes from hundreds of people who've done it," he says. Though certainly many other companies are working on the electronic book metaphor, three companies have clearly placed the horse in front of the cart and developed fully dimensional concepts of what they believe the electronic books should be, and why, before leaping into the fray. Those companies are Microsoft, Slate Corp. and the Voyager Company. In the PC world at least, Microsoft is the acknowledged pioneer in the publishing of CD-ROM-based reference material. Its Bookshelf CD-ROM for DOS computers was released some years ago. Since the release of Windows, the Multimedia Publishing Group developed a version of Bookshelf that includes an encyclopedia with embedded sound, motion video and animation. In addition, the company has some fairly well-developed prototypes of titles it's creating with Dorling Kindersley as part of the deal it signed with the giant publisher in mid-1991. Clearly Microsoft has spent at least as much time thinking about the big picture of electronic books and publishing as almost anyone else in the business (don't forget that it runs its own book publishing operation), and acknowledges there are giant obstacles to effectively bringing printed material to the computer screen. That's why to date Microsoft has focused on publishing reference books. The company is likely to introduce titles based on the DK deal during 1992 and is pretty far along with some prototypes, but a great deal of attention is being given to getting the interface right. "We're all groping to find ways to help would-be customers figure out what 'it' is with this stuff," says Tom Corddry, director of the Multimedia Publishing Group. "It's like est where they tell you, 'Do you get it?' The question is, 'What am I supposed to get?'" Design problems are tradeoffs. The design problems, he says, are centered on the tradeoffs of taking printed material to the screen. "For us there are two big design problems," he says. "One is reducing the damage that you get when you take a book to a computer. The other is, what can you do on top of that? How can you add value so that readers put up with the technology? We get obsessive about that latter concept in particular. With books, at least, it's a starting point: we want books with some magic." Corddry remembers showing a prototype of an interactive application to Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who was unimpressed. "He said, 'You mean you have to sit here and click like a madman all day to get anywhere?'" Corddry recalls. "It dawns on you after a while -- a lot of people have a blind spot that says interactivity is inherently good. The rhythm of it is kind of engaging, but if you end up having to do a lot of interactivity that you didn't have to do before, it's going to make you angry." But making an electronic book, at least a multimedia reference book, sufficiently different from a paper book almost always means making it more complex to use. Corddry says the other end of the dipole is to make as simple as possible a user experience, a more direct translation from an actual book to the screen, which would mean a less confused neophyte and the squashing of some of the value that's gained by having the title on a computer in the first place. "From a user standpoint, it becomes easy but not very valuable," says Corddry. Voyager: With Expanded Books, fiction is the 'next frontier' Microsoft's thorny interface problems today come from trying to make an electronic book personal enough that you feel as if you're actually in some kind of communion with the information, but without gratuitous interactivity. To do so, one must corral all the available media types -- digital video, audio, graphics, animation and text -- into one, interactive, hyperlinked application. But Voyager Company, the Santa Monica-based electronic publisher, decided to skip all the multimedia stuff and cut right to the chase with fiction. Using HyperCard running on Apple's new PowerBook notebook computers, Voyager has designed a simple and elegant text interface around the literal metaphor of a book page, allowing the user to commune with it in the same way he or she would a real book. Power to the reader. Linguist and computer scientist Florian Brody, who with Voyager co-founder Bob Stein has done most of the design work (and has been dubbed technical director) for the Expanded Books project, thinks electronic books are the next step toward delivering more power to the individual reader. "The most important thing that happened was not Gutenberg," he says. "It was cutting up the scrolls into pages -- changing books from a purely linear experience to direct access by page. Expanded Books are the next step -- direct access by word. As we get more power in computers, we'll have the ability to work with the book, to have more direct connection with the book and the information in it. It makes you a more active reader while preserving the very intimate experience of reading." Voyager will debut the Expanded Books at Macworld this month, unveiling Jurassic Park by Michael Creighton, complete with dinosaur pictures and sounds and a new and highly complimentary preface by Creighton for the special Expanded Books edition. Also at Macworld will be the Expanded Books editions of Martin Gardner's Complete Annotated Alice, with renderings of the lovely original artwork, and, of course, the complete Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. All Expanded Books are expected to be priced (intelligently, I might add) at $19.95. Hands-free reading. The most marked benefits of the PowerBook/Expanded Books combo are ones you wouldn't have thought of until you experienced them. For the first time, for example, you have totally hands-free reading. You can drink, eat, knit; if your hands are cold, you can keep them in your pocket until you have to hit the arrow key to turn the page. The second thing you notice is that if you have a backlit PowerBook, you don't have to have a light on in the room to read. And not least by any means, there is no glare off the pages, a maddening thing about reading books by electric light at night. These three features alone are sufficient to make an impression on traveling executives who spend a lot of time on airplanes. Navigation and changing type size, the easy stuff, is too easy to mention. What's significant about Expanded Books, though, is that what they've done doesn't just replicate but also enhances the experience of reading by using the computer's power. Like a book, only better. You can "dog ear" the corners of pages to mark them (without hurting the book, by the way). You can type in the margins. You can mark text with black bars and search for all the pages marked with black bars. You can search for the first occurrence of a word, the previous, the next, the last, all occurrences, and all occurrences in context (this latter is fabulous). You can't read the end. You want to know how far you have left to read? Look at the bar at the bottom of the screen. A marker will show you how far you have come. Are you the kind of person who sneaks a glance at the end of the book first? Brody says it's possible to lock the last chapter of books such as murder mysteries so you can't read the end unless you've read all the previous pages. Will anyone go out and buy an expensive, backlit PowerBook to read Voyager's Expanded Books? If they had the money to burn, they might, but it's not likely. However, if they already have one, it may turn out to be a safer bet than you'd think that they'll have at least one Expanded Book on the hard disk. Why lug around a paperback and a notebook computer? Dizzy with excitement. Adding a powerful computer to the printed page is making New York book publishers, and book authors, a little dizzy with excitement. "The response we're getting is off the map," says Voyager co-founder Bob Stein. "It's not that it's so good, it's that you don't expect it to be so good. This looks enough like a book that people can actually read in this environment. To a person around here [at Voyager], we now prefer to read everything on it." The Expanded Books interface. When author Michael Creighton saw it for the first time, his comment was, "This is a place in which I want to create my books," says Stein. "What he was saying was he wanted to write books that would be read in this environment so he could hang stuff off them he couldn't now. For years I've felt that interactive stuff would not come from all the super-branching things that people did, but from linear narratives with layers built into them -- to explore not alternative directions, but additional layers." Alan Kay wrote a foreword for the Douglas Adams edition, and Stein believes it's the first time the Apple Fellow has ever endorsed a product. But what gets him really excited is the idea of publishing "double-features," the kind of mixed-media metaphor you would expect from a company that also publishes the industry's most respected videodiscs, The Criterion Collection. Two books, one floppy. First, Stein says, he wants to publish Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. "Postman's book starts out saying that 1984 came and went and nobody was concerned because it didn't come true," he says. "They weren't paying attention, because Huxley's vision did. A single floppy could carry both those books -- and together they make such a strong statement." Voyager's also preparing Expanded editions of Timothy Ferris's Coming of Age in the Milky Way, Marge Piercy's Gone to Soldiers and "30 or 40" other books that don't have enough contract on them yet to mention. And when the books are launched in January, Voyager will also launch a forum on the CompuServe Information Service called "The Community of Readers," so people who are reading Voyager's books can talk about them. "I'm expecting to see a tremendous debate about the form, and I want there to be a forum to track it," says Stein. Some time in 1992, Stein says, Voyager will publish the text stack itself, a comprehensive toolkit for people who want to use the Expanded Books shell -- for writers who want to write in it, or publishers who want to publish in it. "I love the idea of uniformity being developed, where there's not 117 different interfaces," says Stein. "Ours is a good start. I'd love to see two or three publishers buy in and give us the kind of resources we need to keep evolving it." Slate's PenBooks: You can take it with you There are great similarities in concept and spirit between Slate's PenBooks and Voyager's Expanded Books. But instead of publishing electronic fiction, Slate, the Scottsdale, Arizona-based vendor and publisher for pen computer applications, is helping customers presenting referential information with its PenBook development tools, scheduled to be shipped in the second quarter of 1992. PenBook consists of an authoring system and a Reader based on the PostScript page description language. Like Voyager, what PenBook produces is designed around the metaphor of the book page. Turn a page by flicking the pen-stylus on the pen computer's touch-sensitive screen. With gestures only, move back and forth a page at a time, a section at a time, or from the beginning to the end of the book. Find all occurrences of a word or number, or just the next occurrence. Electronically "mark up" the book as well, with a traditional (translated) device such as a highlighter, underlining, bookmarks and "white out." Reading and using a PenBook application really does approximate the feeling of reading a "real" book. There is no gratuitous interactivity or pointing or clicking. For the most part, pages are designed not to scroll, so text holds still instead of rolling up and down the computer screen. And a backlit, non-deskbound pen computer not only provides its own reading light, but allows the reader to view the text at a familiar angle. Mark Moore, PenBook's interface engineer, is on a mission to make a PenBook as much like reading a real book as possible. "If someone isn't compelled to read cover to back without printing it out, then I've failed," he says. As important as the user interface is the ease by which a PenBook can be made. PenBook's Mac and PC-compatible $695 "Author" component translates, compresses and stores any document that can be printed to a PostScript printer, including text and graphics; it thus creates a "book file" that can be viewed or read on a pen-based computer. Part of the transform process automatically creates an index of every searchable word or number of text in the book. A PenBook Reader, required for PenBook, is $99 and the company is looking at ways to get it bundled with pen hardware. Right now the perfect PenBook applications are such books as the 600-page manual that all airline attendants are required to carry, as well as technical manuals and customer catalogs. But it's not farfetched to imagine companies publishing real PenBooks -- i.e., actual fictional reading material -- for when pen computers are a market reality. "Initially it's a fleet product," says Debby Meredith, vice president of Slate's development center in San Mateo, CA. "But a secretary can easily make a PenBook. Or executives will be able to pick up a PenBook at the airport to read on the way back. Nothing limits this except the imagination." Where's the big win? The first big win that's necessary to gain any kind of widespread acceptance for the electronic book metaphor is for enough players to ship -- be they MPCs (or MPC consumer players), PowerBooks or pen computers -- to convince the Random Houses and McGraw Hills of the world to come out of the closet with their vast archives of textual material in hand. Not surprisingly, since the gestalt of reading a book includes the book itself and not just its contents, this is a shared hardware-software problem for the new media community. In this sense, companies like Apple, which control both, have a clear edge. When Kaleida (Apple's and IBM's new multimedia spinoff) comes around, it will have a similar edge. Once there are sufficient players, it seems that electronic books will have the potential to kick-start a slow-moving "new media" market. If companies other than Microsoft, Slate and Voyager can figure out how to add value to existing paper-based information by digitizing it, it will be a transforming thing. Voyager's Brody sees the power as spawning a new generation of "active readers." Project Gutenberg's Hart, on the other hand, sees the benefits as running far deeper. Right now, he says, when someone does a research paper, 90 percent of his time is spent doing the research and 10 percent writing the paper. But when the necessary information is in digital form and searchable, he says, the statistic will reverse and we'll spend vastly more time writing and refining our thoughts, not gathering data. "When your paper, which now is nine times better, goes into the library, you start to build a library that's nine times easier to use with nine times better books," says Hart. "Everything just keeps getting better." Denise Caruso Books and Consumer Players: A Couple of Fundamental Flaws None of the electronic books mentioned in the main story are designed to hook up to a TV set or work in a consumer multimedia player such as CDTV or CD-I. Though such titles exist, it's clear that the only way an electronic book will cut the marketplace mustard is if it replicates as closely as possible the features that people cling to about print books. And one of the most important of those is privacy. People don't like others to look over their shoulders while they're reading. Why on earth would anyone want to sit in their living room and let everyone in the house watch what they're looking up in the multimedia encyclopedia? Now think about your teenagers, or about when you were a teenager. What kind of information were you looking up in an encyclopedia or dictionary in those days? Would you want your mother to watch you do it (not to mention what the sound bytes might reveal, even if she were in another room)? After privacy, people like touch -- the feeling of direct manipulation, of having a book in their hands, up close. Again, sitting across the room or even a few feet from a screen of text and pictures is not a way to get physical, so to speak, with information. DataDiscman: so many ways wrong But you'd like a completely different example of how to do an electronic reference book absolutely wrong, then invest a few hundreds bucks in Sony's DataDiscman. When we spoke with Olaf Olafsson of Sony Electronic Publishing in mid-1991, he believed the DataDiscman would find itself a sizable market among mothers who wanted to make sure their children had adequate references at their fingertips for their education. There has almost never been a product so misconceived, misguided and badly designed. I spent two hours with the DataDiscman at a friend's house a couple of months ago. I wasn't just playing: I was actually looking for a specific piece of information. I wanted to know the latitude and longitude of Paris, and was looking in the World Almanac. Let's start with the fact that the text you type on the DataDiscman's eensy-beensy keyboard is in ALL CAPITALS. THAT'S THE KIND OF USER INTERFACE THAT DROVE PEOPLE CRAZY EVEN WHEN THERE WASN'T AN ALTERNATIVE. Next is the small problem of the on/off switch, which is located at the lower right-hand corner of the device, on the front panel. In other words, if you want to move the device closer to you or farther away, and you happen to be right-handed, you almost inevitably will grab the on/off switch to move the device, which turns it off. And unlike more friendly devices, when you turn the machine back on, you are not where you left off. You have to begin your search all over again. Then there's the database and search engine itself. At no point is the user given any idea what is actually in the database or where one might start the search. There are no search menus to speak of, only a long list of blanks to fill in search parameters. I put in Paris, France, latitude, and a score of other things in the time I was honking away at the DataDiscman. What I got for my trouble was pages upon pages of the Helen of Troy-Trojan Horse-Paris myth. After two hours, I gave up. I'd accidentally turned off the machine three times, and completed numerous fruitless searches for an incredibly simple, non-technical piece of data that should have been available at the touch of a finger, or at least down only a couple levels in an intelligently designed hierarchy. I was far beyond frustrated -- if the device had been mine, and not my friend's, I would have heaved it through a window. Denise Caruso Is Fractal Worth Holding Out For? The cold fusion of image compression begins to get some respect Suppose you could mathematically grow a picture from a seed. That is what image compression based on fractal geometry can accomplish. Derided as the "cold fusion of compression" by skeptics for years, the fractal alternative to the JPEG/MPEG Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) method is now demanding that it be taken seriously. Development of image compression technology based on fractal geometry is spearheaded by Iterated Systems, Inc., of Norcross, GA, founded in 1987 by two former Georgia Tech mathematicians, Michael Barnsley and Alan Sloan. This team discovered the underlying mathematics of fractal compression and has refined the algorithms to the point where Iterated Systems is now shipping MS-DOS and Windows fractal compression hardware and software for still images and motion video. Advantages of fractal compression JPEG and MPEG approaches compress image data in part by breaking an image into 858 pixel tiles, then eliminating increasing amounts of the information contained in each tile. Fractal techniques, by contrast, reduce an image to a set of formulas, which, by repeated computations, can replicate the structure of the image without specifically reproducing the original pixel map. With the original fractal products the result is rather like an oil painting produced with daubs of color. Indeed, at very high compression ratios a fractal image can still resemble an impressionist painting more than a photograph. While JPEG DCT methods have the prestige of standards committees behind them, fractal proponents claim several important advantages. Decompression in software. Although fractal compression is relatively compute-intensive, decompression is comparatively quick and easy. Fractal decompression can now be accomplished completely in software. For still images, this does not even require a particularly fast computer. A '286 machine with VGA monitor will do the job. The fact that color photographic images stored in Fractal Image Format (FIF) can be displayed on desktop PCs without need to invest in hardware add-ons has obvious appeal. With software decompression, fractal compression might become a market reality in CD-ROM and floppy disk titles before JPEG chips are common. Although JPEG decompression-in-software is becoming available too, Iterated Systems claims that fractal beats JPEG hands down in speed for software decompression. Iterated claims that full motion video with software decompression is now also a reality. Motion video requires high-end PCs, and the products on the market do not yet produce NTSC quality, but fractal motion video is evolving rapidly. Interated claims that it will be able to achieve software-only decompression results that will be competitive with hardware-assisted MPEG or DVI chips. (See News, p. 13.) Scalable, and resolution independent. Because they are regenerated from fractal formulas, rather than decoded from a representation of the pixel map as in JPEG, fractal images are scalable and resolution independent. In other words, the apparent quality of fractal images is independent of the resolution at which the image was scanned, and it is possible to rescale fractal images to fill the screen or to occupy just a small window. You can also zoom in infinitely on the fractal image without obvious loss of detail, although after a point this detail is mathematically predicted. With appropriate software drivers, files in FIF can be displayed effectively on monitors of differing resolution -- without file conversion. Since it is pixel-based, JPEG, by comparison, is inherently resolution dependent. In theory, fractal images can also be printed at higher resolution than the original scanned images. Iterated Systems does not yet provide direct printer support, however, for the high-resolution output required for publishing applications. For developers of multimedia titles, resolution independence also implies that fractal image files created today will be easier than JPEG/MPEG images to use across platforms and to view on the improved graphics displays of the future. Better than JPEG at high rates. At higher compression ratios, fractal methods claim clear superiority over JPEG. (See illustration on p. 11.) If you must squeeze a 24-bit color, 6405400-resolution image into 10 KB (a 75:1 compression ratio,) then fractal compression, say its advocates, is the only way to go. And, Iterated Systems expects to squeeze that down to only 2.5 KB by June 1992. That would be a 300:1 compression ratio, but, supposedly, with quality acceptable for many applications. Looking toward future evolution of compression technology, fractal proponents maintain that fractal compression becomes relatively more effective vs. JPEG/MPEG as the amount of raw image data goes beyond the current VGA or NTSC standards. Fractal vs. DCT Given the advantages of fractal techniques there are also several yardsticks by which compression technologies can be directly compared, including the amount of information lost, file compression ratios, compression speed, decompression speed and cost. At this point, fractal compression and JPEG are still in the same ballpark on these benchmarks --although fractal advocates have in the past claimed astronomical compression ratios based on best-case examples, such as 10,000:1. As noted above, fractal seems to have the edge when high compression ratios and smallest possible file sizes are needed or when software decompression is desired. Compressing to one-fifth of JPEG. Andy Sinden, managing director of Origin IQ, Ltd. in Surrey, England, has been involved in a number of projects using Iterated Systems' fractal technology. He notes that Origin can compress fractal image files down to one-quarter or one-fifth the size of a JPEG file for applications such as transmitting police mugshots. Origin discovered that fractal images at 50:1, 80:1 and 120:1 compression were still usable for some purposes, while JPEG at those compression levels was not acceptable. Origin is working with Panasonic Business Systems in the UK to develop a picture and document archiving system using fractal compression. Document images that are mostly text will be compressed in more conventional ways, however, since fractal compression is still not optimized for text. Steve Johnson, sales manager at Kerridge Computer Co. in Berkshire, England, reports that his company switched from JPEG to fractal for a photographic image database product, Fotofile, that Kerridge is marketing. A JPEG file that required 60 KB would yield no better quality than a fractal file compressed to 15 KB or 20 KB, they found. Johnson acknowledges that with current products fractal compression is slower than JPEG, and suggests that users might want to consider capturing the image as a Targa file and performing the compression overnight in batch mode. It takes three to four minutes to get satisfactory fractal compression of color photos, according to Johnson, if you want to end up with a 15 KB file. At that small file size, Kerridge has been able to set up an effective color image database on a Novell Netware-based local area network, with the compressed color photos stored on a server and decompressed in software on PC workstations. Fast machine, fast decompression. Slow fractal compression is not necessarily mirrored by slow decompression; fractal software-based decompression methods claim to compete with JPEG firmware-based ones. On a fast machine with ample RAM and an optimal video board, fractal decompression is claimed to be fast enough to be unnoticed. On a lower-end platform, the waiting time for image decompression can be quite apparent. Both JPEG and fractal compression are "lossy" techniques that permit tradeoffs to be made between accuracy and data compression. (See Mediascape, p. 21.) In fractal compression, the operator of the compression system must set the desired compression time or target file size. The operator must also bear in mind what the resulting image quality will be on the display system showing the pictures. Tweaks aren't easy. Learning to tweak these settings takes some training and experience. Of course, for a batch consisting of similar images, the parameters can be set once and the scanning and compression process can then proceed without much thought. JPEG/DCT and fractal compression products are still evolving, and it is too early to declare either a clear technical or market winner. Iterated claims that it has more "headroom" for further improvement in its algorithms than does JPEG --a contention that JPEG partisans hotly dispute. Products and plans For multimedia producers, Iterated Systems' fractal compression is currently available on a choice of three boards ranging from $1,995 to $8,850. Developers' software now shipping for use with the boards includes a DOS/still image/color package for $2,995, a Windows development kit for $3,995 and a DOS/motion video kit for $4,990. The "Floppy Book." For electronic publishers, a fractal image book-on-disk format puts 100 color images (at 10 KB each) and 100 pages of text on a floppy disk. Iterated developed a prototype of such a "Floppy Book" in cooperation with Jones and Bartlett Publishers. The Floppy Book contains several different kinds of images, including illustrations from a children's book, computer graphics, synthesized fractal patterns and natural images fractally encoded. Based on her experience with the first Floppy Book, Alice Peters of Jones and Bartlett sees an important role for fractal compression in permitting publishers to reproduce color pictures inexpensively, as floppy-based supplements to printed works as well as in the form of self-contained Floppy Books. Iterated Systems and Jones and Bartlett will cooperate on another fractal product, a clip art library of 250 color photos (on three floppy disks) for use in Windows-based presentations and Windows publishing software. The package will include fractal decompression and a conversion utility to transform FIF pictures to raster formats such as TIFF and Targa. 100,000 images on a CD-ROM. If 100 high-quality color images on a floppy disk is insufficient for your needs, consider that CD-ROM will hold 60,000-100,000 fractally compressed color slides on one disc. Now that fractal techniques have permitted decompression via software of highly compressed photographic images, when will fractal compression be possible without a fractal encoder board? Iterated says that the answer is "soon." It expects that "fractal for the masses" in the form of a software fractal compression module will be available in the first quarter of 1992. Also, look for important advances during 1992 in the application of fractal geometry to motion video and gray-scale images, and progress in moving fractal hardware to the single-chip level. Is fractal for real? Although the actual nuts and bolts of how it all works are still something of a secret, the apparent magic that fractal compression/decompression can accomplish in shrinking still and motion pictures down to manageable size seems real enough. It is not the panacea that its more partisan advocates would have you believe. Nor is it the "right" answer for every application. But it does appear to be both real and useful. We are going to be very interested in seeing how Iterated does in extending and refining the technology over the coming year. Bernard Banet What's a Fractal, Anyway? Fractal geometry studies a class of geometric patterns, fractals, that are generated from simple formulas. Fractals are produced by starting with an initial shape and infinitely adding new shapes created by repeated simple transformations, such as shrink-move-rotate. Fractal models have been widely used in recent years to study phenomena as diverse as air flow and commodity prices. Fractal concepts have become an important tool for the analysis of nonlinear processes (see James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science, 1987) and for describing biological as well as physical structures. Fractal patterns exhibit the peculiar property of looking similar at whatever scale they are viewed. For example, fractal snowflakes can be generated by repeatedly repositioning and shrinking a triangle. Such "snowflakes" have edges that contain shapes that are miniature replicas of the larger snowflake pattern. On closer inspection, these small snowflakes have snowflake shapes on their edges . . . ad infinitum. At any one scale, the snowflakes get smaller until they become dots, but if you change the scale and zoom in on them, there they are again. Benoit Mandelbrot, the inventor of fractal geometry and coiner of the term "fractal," showed in The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1977) that remarkably natural-looking landscapes, clouds, vegetation, galaxies, etc. could be synthesized as computer graphics by using fractal formulas. These artificial shapes generated by fractal geometry can mimic the irregularity of nature so well that they have been used as "scenery" in Hollywood films. How fractal compression works In the key discovery related to fractal compression, Michael Barnsley demonstrated in the mid-1980s that any image can be imitated by a set of fractal patterns similar to the infinitely shrinking snowflakes described above. (See Michael Barnsley's textbook, Fractals Everywhere, 1988.) Since this breakthrough in the mid-1980s, called the Fractal Transform, Barnsley and his colleagues have developed and continued to improve computer algorithms that can rapidly and automatically translate pictures into fractal formulas. Not all of these procedures have yet been fully revealed by the developers, but it is known that the program analyzes a picture into collections of shapes that resemble each other, except for location, size and orientation. Each such collection of similar shapes can be precisely described as a fractal formula with certain parameters. Barnsley et al. have also developed programs that can regenerate images efficiently from those fractal formulas. Measured in bytes, fractal formulas turn out to be a much more compact recipe for reproducing a picture than a raster bit map; hence, fractal encoding is fractal compression. The redundancy that fractal compression depends on is called "affine redundancy" (as in "affinity"), the surprising similarity of shapes that are apparently scattered throughout any image. (See above illustration.) An image that has low "affine redundancy" can be hard to compress, yielding a relatively large file, but, with fractal techniques, this can be compensated for by allowing more time for the compression programs to run. The time it takes to decompress the image is not affected by this size/time tradeoff during the compression stage. The encoding and decoding algorithms are not simply the same procedures run backwards. The process, in other words, is "asymmetric." In the current implementation, the encoding stage takes much longer to accomplish than the decoding stage. Fractal encoding, at this writing, still requires a hardware fractal compression board and takes several seconds to several minutes per still image or one second per video frame. As noted above, decoding of both still and motion video is accomplished in software alone. Bernard Banet 'Soft' video alliance forms New group wants to pool technologies A new alliance of multimedia technology companies, formalized near Atlanta, GA, in mid-December, has aimed its sights at making it possible for PCs to display NTSC-quality motion video from standard CD-ROM discs and drives, decompressed without a hardware decoder board. Founding members of this software video alliance include TMM (Thousand Oaks, CA), Iterated Systems (Norcross, GA), ICOM Simulations (Wheeling, IL), and UVC (Irvine, CA). According to Taylor Kramer, TMM's vice president of technology, their strategy is to pool their separately developed technologies and release to multimedia producers a full range of hardware and software tools for making full motion, full screen "soft" video a reality on desktop computer platforms. Spreading it around. The allies will favor open architecture, resolution-independent methods which will speed up the spread of TV-quality "soft" motion video from PCs to Macintoshes and other platforms. They believe that they can introduce multimedia titles with software-decoded video very rapidly, and can quickly establish the appeal of software video as an alternative to MPEG, DVI and other hardware-based decompression systems. By not presenting users with the hurdle of a costly (and not universally compatible) hardware investment, soft video could become dominant in desktop multimedia. Because the decompression software can be included on each disc, soft video formats would insure compatibility and could continue to improve technically. Wasting no time. TMM projects availability of an Intel 80486-based producer's workstation in the first quarter of 1992 that will contain both the UVC 7710 compression chip and Iterated Systems' fractal compression board. This system will offer developers the real-time, run-length compression approach of UVC and TMM, especially useful for capturing and editing digital video, together with Iterated Systems' asymmetric and resolution-independent fractal soft video technology, which, the participants claim, will achieve high compression ratios and resolution independence in the distribution discs. (See Focus story, p. 9.) Such a workstation, TMM says, will also include a universal formatter, able to cross-convert various compressed and non-compressed digital still-image and motion-video formats to and from one another. Over the wires. Also in the Atlanta allies' plans for the next two years, according to TMM's Kramer, are digital compressed video transmission over cable and telephone/ISDN networks and ultimately software-decoded "better than HDTV" playback/reception. In the nearer-term, UVC-owned On Call is setting up a satellite-based compressed digital video store-and-forward communications system to serve the cooperating software video companies, multimedia developers and distributors. Bernard Banet NJ Bell v. Suburban Cablevision Or, 'The Case of the Pot Calling the Kettle Black' As Cathleen Black wrote in last month's issue (see Vol. 1, No. 7, p. 9), there is a growing fear that if the telephone companies are allowed to provide information over their own networks, they will do so in a biased and unfair manner, taking full advantage of their ownership of the wire. But in a twist on this scenario, New Jersey Bell, a division of Bell Atlantic, is seeking court action against Suburban Cablevision for initially refusing to broadcast a paid New Jersey Bell advertisement, and then only broadcasting the ad when directly followed by a Suburban Cablevision rebuttal. New Jersey Bell, believing that the cable operator is using its control of the cable network to slow the entry of the telephone company into competing businesses, called upon the state Board of Regulatory Commissioners (BRC) to order Suburban Cablevision "to stop its discriminatory practices immediately." The petition also asks that Suburban, as the owner and operator of a state-granted franchise, be permanently forbidden from such practices and that the BRC determine ways to oversee and enforce such a ruling. "Operation New Jersey." The Bell advertisement was about "Operation New Jersey," an 8-year plan by the telephone company to rewire its network with fiber-optic cable, which would enable it to provide new community services as well as shopping, educational and entertainment programming. Such a system would allow a telephone customer to dial up a competing cable system in order to enjoy its programming. Suburban Cablevision responded by claiming that the Bell ad was part of a concentrated public lobbying effort to gain support for its proposal, now before the New Jersey State Legislature, which would deregulate the telephone company and allow it to wire the state with fiber at a cost of more than one billion dollars. Suburban believes it is acting within its rights in presenting opposing views on an important public policy debate. "It is analogous to trying to prevent a newspaper from printing an editorial on a public policy issue," according to Frank DeJoy, vice president and general manager of Suburban Cablevision. Not black and white But the issue is not so clear cut. As the owner of a state-granted monopoly (no other cable companies are allowed to operate in the geographic region controlled by Suburban), does a cable operator have the right to choose which advertisements will or will not run, or whether a paid advertisement will be "coupled" with a counter-position advertisement --especially one that is produced by the operator itself? Ironically, this is just the type of behavior that the telephone companies have been accused of practicing. Karen Johnson, a spokesperson for New Jersey Bell, said that everyone is assuming that "once we [the phone companies] build the network, we will control both the highway and the trucks that travel over that highway. Here you have a cable [television] company that is doing just that . . . . They are using their monopoly position to sell their franchise system in this area." This case is one of what will certainly be many legal disputes on the state level as the telephone companies begin directly competing with cable operators. The debate already rages on the topic of how the telcos will pay the enormous cost of upgrading their systems to fiber-optic cable without charging the cost back to the telephone customer. New Jersey Bell denies that the upgrade would be paid for by current customers. "The investment will benefit everyone, and will be paid off over the next 25 years -- by customers who choose to use the new services it delivers," said James G. Cullen, president and CEO of New Jersey Bell. But it's hard to see how profits from local telephone service will not be used to fund the transition. The forum is in the courts. Cable operators across the country are scared to death of both situations that are under way in New Jersey: the call for regulation and the almost inevitable entry of the telephone companies into the information services business. But Suburban Cablevision has probably done itself (and the rest of the cable industry) a great disservice by withholding New Jersey Bell's advertisement. It has effectively accomplished what the cable industry (and the newspaper and other industries) have been fearing from the telcos: it has exerted unfair control of a government-granted monopoly in order to hold its competition at bay. David Baron QuickTime hits the ground running Impressive third-party support expected at Macworld Expo At next week's Macworld Expo in San Francisco, Apple and more than 90 hardware and software developers will be showing an impressive range of QuickTime wares for the first time. QuickTime is Apple's system-level software extension for dealing with dynamic media (that is, data files that have a time element to them) as well as managing different types of compression algorithms for both static and dynamic media. The QuickTime extension also introduces the first new Macintosh data type since PICT, which Apple has dubbed the "movie." (You may encounter long-time QuickTime developers spelling it "moov." It seems that the original design team had a thing for cows.) Although QuickTime provides much more than merely the tools to display video windows on a Macintosh, video will certainly be the "hot" application on the show floor. Apple will be hosting a QuickTime showroom at the expo, with emphasis on movie creation, integration and editing, CD mastering, and an applications area with video production, graphic arts, science and engineering and educational applications. The elegance of modularity One of the truly elegant aspects of QuickTime is that it is modular; it will play 12-frame-per-second video in a window "out of the box," but can be easily and seamlessly assisted with hardware or additional software support. A number of boards are now supporting QuickTime for video input. Some of these boards, like the VideoSpigot from SuperMac Technology, were designed specifically with QuickTime in mind. Others, like the RasterOps 364 and RadiusTV, are adding new functionality to previously existing products. Movie creation tools. On top of the hardware, a number of movie creation tools are being announced. Adobe will be releasing Premiere, its slightly revamped version of the ReelTime software developed by SuperMac for the VideoSpigot (see Vol. 1, No. 4, p. 16). Premiere allows the user to arrange video clips in a sequence, add transition effects (wipes, dissolves, etc.), overlay graphics and text (it is Adobe, after all) and most significantly, create visual effects with Adobe Photoshop image manipulation filters. Many of the movie creation software tools allow the user to drag clips into a sequencer, rearrange and edit the clips, and keep a database of information about the movie. But each of these tools offers certain added features that may make it particularly attractive to certain applications. Support for Vbox control. VideoAuthor 2.0 (by HyperPro, a division of Mass Microsystems in Sunnyvale, CA), for example, supports not only video movies, but also allows the user to save PICS animations in QuickTime formats. (PICS is the MacroMind Director animation file format.) VideoAuthor supports the Sony VBox technology, which enables the user to control almost any Sony consumer video player from the computer. The useful 'micon' The most significant QuickTime development tool that we've seen is VideoShop from a new company called DiVA, based in Cambridge, MA. Using technology developed by company co-founder Hans Peter Brondmo while a student at the MIT Media Lab, DiVA employs "micons" or movie icons. With a micon, the user sees a thumbnail of the video clip which cycles through a second or two of the clip. If you double-click on the micon, the full-sized video appears and runs on your screen. In addition, VideoShop extends the folder metaphor of the Macintosh by creating micon-based folders for the storage of video clips, allowing you to see what is inside without opening all of the files. VideoShop also allows you to create QuickTime movies from screen shots. Any session at your computer could therefore be saved as a movie, regardless of whether or not the application you are running is QuickTime savvy. Animations, training applications, corporate presentations, etc. could all be made into movies without any video input. VideoShop provides an optimized driver for real-time recording of video to the hard drive. Other QuickTime authoring tools will be available from Light Source and KnowledgeVision. Animations to go. In addition, QuickTime now makes it easier to create portable animations. With MacroMind Director, for example, an animation would require Director's Player to be resident on the computer. Since QuickTime is an extension to system software, any QuickTime animation will play on any Macintosh without the purchase of run-time players. Version 2.0 of Animation Stand, a high-end, multi-layer animation creation application from Linker Systems (Irvine, CA), will support QuickTime by allowing the animator to preview animations with synchronized audio before the time-consuming task of recording frame-by-frame to video. The timing mechanism of QuickTime assures that the synch between any of the dynamic elements in a movie remain coordinated through a single time code. New Video Corp. (Venice, CA) brought Digital Video Interactive (DVI) to the Macintosh with its NuBus cards based upon the Intel technology. Video compressed with the DVI algorithms are compatible across hardware platforms, including Windows and DOS. In addition, the EyeQ board will save videos in standard QuickTime formats. The DVI algorithms are controlled invisibly through the compression manager, which allows any algorithms to be added to the system and chosen at will. In addition to the DVI algorithms, Kodak will be releasing a PhotoCD developers kit to parties interested in creating hooks to PhotoCD through the QuickTime managers. "Clip movies." As could be expected, a number of companies including Form and Function (F&F, San Francisco, CA) and Alpha Technologies Group (Marriottsville, MD) will both announce collections of video clips. F&F's WraptureReels also includes looping animations. Existing productivity applications Word Perfect and Persuasion are actively supporting the new format, which would allow active windows within a larger document or presentation. Others will certainly follow. Doug Camplejohn, Apple's QuickTime product manager, predicts that QuickTime will spur the use of dynamic data as the rule rather than the exception, because it makes easy the task of incorporating dynamic data into standard applications. "We know of people doing work in Persuasion that Director was having trouble with -- and you didn't have to learn Lingo [Director's internal scripting language], which is a good thing." This is only a small sampling of the many applications expected to be announced at Macworld Expo. All of the companies announcing products as a part of the Apple rollout in San Francisco have promised to ship their products within 60 days. David Baron CableLabs on the move Group is actively pursuing broad industry connections CableLabs, the technology clearing house for the cable television industry, has approved its budgets for 1992, providing some fascinating insights into where the cable industry will focus its efforts this year. Among the new programs CableLabs will initiate are efforts toward the development of delivery systems for interactive and multimedia services. In a related announcement, AndrÇ Chagnon, chairman and CEO of Le Groupe VidÇotron ltÇe and an industry leader in interactive cable television services, was elected to the CableLabs board of directors. CableLabs has also approved $1 million toward research in personal communications networks. CableLabs has also approved the hiring of a high-level computer industry liaison, who will oversee efforts to "facilitate the use of the cable network distribution service provider for the delivery of present and future computer-related data and video applications." Richard Green, president of the Boulder, Colorado-based CableLabs, says he's actively recruiting for the position. Programs currently under way include the research and implementation of video compression technology, as well as a continuing evaluation of high-definition TV (HDTV) developments (both delivery and display), fiber-optic deployment, and "user-friendly" connections between cable TV equipment and other consumer electronics devices. A fascinating range of respondents to RFP In other news, CableLabs has received nine responses to its Request for Proposal (RFP) for the acquisition of equipment for digital compression and delivery systems (see Vol. 1, No. 7, p. 18). The technology is expected to be compatible across a wide range of applications, from satellite delivery of information to cable and fiber transmission networks, as well as decompression units in the home. The nine respondents are AT&T, ComStream Corp., and News Datacom (partly controlled by The News Corporation, the Rupert Murdoch company); C. Itoh & Co. of Japan (which, rumor has it, has submitted a very interesting proposal); The Digital Television Consortium (Oak Communications, Leitch Video International and C-Cube Microsystems); General Instruments Corp.'s VideoCipher Division; Macrovision; Magnavox CATV Systems/Philips Electronics and Hughes Network Systems; Scientific Atlanta/Zenith Electronics Corp.; Thompson Consumer Electronics with the David Sarnoff Research Center; and Toshiba's Imaging and Information Systems Division. All over the map. Note the range of companies that are interested in producing such technology. Some of them are new to the cable and television arena; many of them are also competing for the HDTV transmission standard now before the FCC. They are equipment manufacturers (Oak, Leitch, General Instruments, Scientific Atlanta), telecommunications companies (AT&T), research organizations (Sarnoff), publishers (The News Corp.), financial conglomerates (C. Itoh -- which just made a major investment in Time Warner's cable operations) and a handful of consumer electronics companies (Thompson, Zenith, Toshiba, Philips). Only one of them, C-Cube Microsystems, is known for its advocacy of the open MPEG video compression standard. Industry insiders believe that General Instruments is the strong front-runner because of its relationships with some of the major cable operators. In addition, the appointment of a former Nixon cabinet member as the corporation's chairman may tighten the company's Washington connections. CableLabs will probably pick a first and second choice for the digital service, so the more interesting race may be for second place. A billion-dollar contract. The RFP is currently sponsored by CableLabs, TeleCommunications, Inc., Viacom and Public Broadcast System. It is expected that 20 to 30 additional companies will sign on to the agreement over the next year. The final contract may be valued at over $1 billion. Final selections will be made by the end of 1992. Digital commercial insertion Though this does sound a bit like a surgical procedure, CableLabs has also established the Compressed Digital Commercial/Program Insertion Task Force, which will be issuing a Request for Information (and ultimately a Request for Proposals) on a digital insertion system. Most cable operators use a bank of VCRs, controlled by various custom and proprietary software and hardware packages, to place advertisements between programs or in pre-determined breaks. This is a labor-intensive operation, the image quality is often poor, and the current technology is prone to mechanical breakdowns. In addition, since each operator chooses its own system, there is no compatibility within the industry. A compressed digital commercial insertion system would allow all advertising to be loaded onto a large magnetic computer hard drive (or drives). Then, on pre-programmed schedules, the system would find and decompress the correct commercial advertisement for direct transmission over the network. This would obviate the need for large numbers of tape decks, as well as the manual tracking required for proper broadcast schedules. Such a system could be adapted in the future to the storage and playback of full-length programs as compression and storage technologies develop. David Baron Nintendo takes aim But Minnesota lottery experiment thwarted by politics Known by U.S. consumers only for its video game systems, Nintendo is keenly interested in moving into the market for home financial services. This shouldn't surprise anyone, but apparently it does. Case in point: the good people of Minnesota recently had an allergic reaction to a scheme that would allow citizens to play the Minnesota State Lottery through their Nintendo Entertainment System decks. The trouble apparently was that people had never conceived of a non-video game use for the Nintendo electronics. That the first such use should be gambling -- well! Outrageous! (Previously condemned as brain rot, suddenly the NES deck became a family-and-children icon.) Laying midwestern morality to one side, we think that in view of its long-term plans, Nintendo needs to do some creative repositioning of its gadgets. The Minnesota story. Early in September, the Minnesota State Lottery announced that, beginning in 1992, it would conduct a market test of at-home lottery games using the Nintendo control deck with a special Lottery cartridge. The system would allow online access to popular games such as Lotto, Daily 3 and Gopher 5. There would also be games offering instant results that could be enhanced with on-screen graphics and animation. The Lottery cartridge was programmed by Control Data Corp.'s Automated Wagering Division. CDC runs the wagering operations for eight states, two off-track betting operations in New York, and the Norwegian Lottery. Computer services are clearly a major aspect of its work, but it also handles marketing and support services. The Minnesota State Lottery is its newest customer and has the newest equipment, making a market test of new technology relatively simple from a system and support point of view. Security paramount. Both Control Data and the State are accustomed to high-security operations. After all, consumer confidence in the fairness of the system requires airtight procedures for all games. The Nintendo experiment was no exception. The Lottery cartridge had an impressive list of checkpoints.  User access is by passwords. The user can change the password, and the change is confirmed by mail. To get a password, a player must register in person and show a photo ID.  The cartridge, control deck and modem have unique, registered identifier codes built in. All codes must agree with the host computer records.  Data transmission is scrambled. The modem is unique; ordinary data modems won't work.  The deck shuts itself off if an incorrect password is used or if it is left unattended. It also has certain anti-tampering features.  All plays are recorded and the subscriber gets regular statements of all activity.  All games are prepaid; there is no credit. Players can deposit up to $200, to which they can add winnings up to $1,000.  Only $50 per day can be wagered.  Prizes over $1,000 must be claimed in person at a Lottery office. Smaller prizes are paid by check. Adults only. Besides ensuring security for the players, the State needed to prevent minors from using the system. It also wanted to assuage fears of enticing compulsive gamblers. In view of the small amounts of money that could be spent via the cartridge (and the ready availability of the existing big-stakes games), the State and CDC felt that security was adequate. The State also pointed out that Nintendo control decks are in 32 percent of Minnesota households, and that 50 percent of current game-cartridge users are adults. By treating their Lottery password with the same care as their bank-machine PIN number, parents could be confident that their children were protected from temptation. In the eyes of Lottery officials, the Nintendo market test was just another way of distributing Lottery services. It would be a convenience to the home-bound and a simple extension of the current practice of televising game drawings. Vox populi. But the market test proposal ran into serious opposition. The anti-gambling forces in the state have been increasingly vocal in recent months. Minnesota, after all, is not an "anything goes" state like California. The chairman of the Senate Gaming Regulation Committee stated, "If there was a vote on the lottery today, it would be voted out." (We have our doubts about that. Legal gambling in Minnesota is projected to hit $2.4 billion this year --that's $460 for every man and woman in the state. Those citizens are voting with their pocketbooks.) The key objection, though, appeared to be the public's cognitive dissonance between the idea of Nintendo as a toy for innocent children and gambling as an adult vice. Roger Moe, the Senate majority leader, was quoted in the St. Paul Pioneer Press as saying, "Converting a game which is immensely popular with young children into a gambling tool is not only unethical, but insidiously destructive to society." The potato was too hot. In mid-October, the Minnesota State Lottery announced it was dropping the whole idea. There was some grumbling from sympathetic politicos about the loss of jobs for Control Data, which is based in Minnesota. But Lottery officials recognized that this potato was just too hot. The cartridge that Control Data programmed may have been beyond the pale for Minnesotans, but in Japan it wouldn't even raise eyebrows. Nintendo decks are widely used there for home banking and stock-market transactions. Cartridges are also available for betting on bicycle races, which is very popular in Japan. In a few months, there will be a system for home betting on horse races. Squeamishness notwithstanding. In the U.S., Nintendo plans to deploy a nationwide dialup network for Nintendo Entertainment System decks. No startup date has been announced, though. The network and the communication cartridge were originally designed to support multi-player games with coast-to-coast competition. But Nintendo quickly realized that online shopping, group chatting, electronic mail and news services were a natural extension of the facilities. Nintendo has also signed a letter of intent with Fidelity Investment, a nationwide investment advisory firm, to develop financial services, including stock market information and real-time trading of securities. Fidelity has begun the market research for this project. However, no launch date for the service has been set. The squeamishness of Minnesota's anti-gambling faction notwithstanding, applying the Nintendo deck and its familiar television-based user interface to financial services of all kinds will have powerful appeal. But first, Nintendo will have to educate the consumers that NES is not a computer (a word that conjures fearful images of complexity and frustration) and it's not just a game -- it is a new kind of electronic appliance, perhaps a sort of very remote control box. When that concept takes root, the public clamor for digital communications will take off. Peter Dyson Briefs VIA becomes ISA; shifts from videotex to interactive services Like sand through the hourglass, so are the changing names, affiliations and loyalties of once-stable industry organizations as they decipher the handwriting on the wall. The latest to drop is the former Videotex Industry Association, or VIA, which last month was succeeded by the Interactive Services Association. Though the Washington, DC-based VIA was plagued by what was essentially two decades of bad press, its conferences for the past couple of years have reflected a solid knowledge that the videotex we knew and sneered at was not where the future was headed. Instead, it saw the future was convergence -- of audio, data and video capabilities in all forms of telecommunications-based services such as cable, broadcast and telephone. (Do you think they've been reading this newsletter?) After forming the body itself, ISA immediately convened an executive forum called "Media Shift: From Passive to Active," and panel members included representatives from the Tribune Company, BellSouth Information Networks and the Cable and Business Development Division of NBC. Though as a genre, newspapers, cable companies and phone companies are at war at the moment, all forum panelists seemed to agree that passive media (i.e., regular old TV, plain old phone service, standard daily newspapers) were too expensive, unaccountable, cluttered and remote to "build customer relationships." ISA will sponsor a conference called "Interactivity I: America's Telecommunications Future" on February 13-14 in Washington, DC. All the hottest "convergence" topics will be on the agenda, from "Forging New Partnerships" to "The Connected Community -- An Electronic Mailbox for Everyone." If the group can indeed create a constituency among the archenemies it calls members, it will be an historic organization indeed. We hate to say we told 'em so, but . . . The Multimedia PC (MPC) Marketing Council has finally come the conclusion that a 10-MHz '286 PC is insufficient for the demands of multimedia computing. What a revelation! Especially for Microsoft, which controls the MPC Council and has been luring software developers with the promise of 13 million upgradable PCs already in the market. The new specification calls for a minimum configuration of a '386SX microprocessor. All of the other specifications remain unchanged. It would seem that the market has proved what everyone outside the MPC Council already suspected: the only people upgrading their computers to the MPC level were owners of '386SX-based machines or better. In addition, even the MPC hardware providers were leery of the slower machines, and released on '386 or '486 multimedia computers. Many of the software developers didn't buy the '286 argument either, and refused to develop for that platform, believing that their applications would not run effectively. Windows itself barely runs satisfactorily on such a machine. Members of the MPC Council have said (at least in private) that the standard would be fluid, with changes and upgrades to the standard implemented as necessary. They are sticking to their word. The change is welcome news to developers. "A few could say, 'Why didn't you do it six months ago?' We hope they'll say they're glad we're not so prideful that we can't change it now," said Rob Glaser, manager of the multimedia systems group at Microsoft. The tiniest radio packet modem Motorola's Mobile Data Division recently introduced what it claims is the world's smallest internal radio packet modem, some 73 percent smaller than any other that's been introduced to date. Its predecessor, the RPM400i, is already built into notebook computers like the IBM PCRadio (a big seller in the mobile workforce world) and the Poqet Communicating Computer. But the new modem, in addition to being much smaller, also uses much less power. It's designed to send and receive data over North American wireless data networks such as Ardis, co-owned by IBM and Motorola. The RPM405i signals the start of an era of personal communication devices. The success of the Sharp Wizard, for example, is likely to be intensified by an upcoming model that contains a radio modem. . . . You get the message. So to speak. Sony Irister technology Scientists around the world have long been searching for a way to increase the storage capacity and access speed of erasable optical storage media. By increasing density, more data can be stored on a disc, and that data could potentially be streamed off the disc at a faster rate. While some, like Andreas Bechtolsheim (see Vol. 1, No. 3), have advocated the commercialization of blue-light lasers, which to date are still in the research phase, Sony Corporate Research Laboratories in Japan has created a technology to increase data densities on erasable magneto-optical discs using existing (as well as cheap and ubiquitous) red-light lasers. Sony claims its new technology -- called Irister, for Iris Thermal Eclipse Reading -- can increase the capacity of standard 5.25-inch optical discs by a factor of six. This would enable the storage of four gigabytes of data on one disc. Irister works with whatever laser technology is being used (i.e., red or blue), as it isn't specific to wavelength but to how and what the laser reads off the disc. Therefore, blue laser-based erasable MO discs would show even greater improvements in data densities utilizing Irister, estimated by Sony as 20 times the density currently available. Sony has applied for 35 patents for this technology. As for when we will see products based on the technology, Jonathan Hirshon, a Sony spokesperson, said, "to say that the technology is in the prototype stage is pushing it." New application for PhotoCD Kodak's PhotoCD technology has picked up a new application. MCI, one of the largest long distance telephone carriers, will offer to its largest corporate customers the option of receiving their long distance phone bill, along with graphs, charts and diagrams about their phone usage, on a compact disc. MCI will not be distributing photographs; it has developed software that makes complex telecommunications billing more understandable and accessible to its customers. Called "MCI Perspective," it takes the raw billing data and creates customized graphic information. Previously, this type of information could only be distributed on huge amounts of paper, or mainframe computer tapes. PhotoCD players, when introduced in mid-1992, will display photographs on a television set, but the discs will also be playable on CD-ROM/XA and CD-I drives for use with computers or in publishing applications. Integral to the scanning and playback of the information is the ability to produce economically a single, write-once CD-ROM. The latter development attracted MCI. Kodak expects PhotoCD to be the catalyst to the development of many non-photographic applications that make use of the technologies developed for the system. Mediascape JPEG: Standard Compression For Still Images Last month, Mediascape detailed the technical foundation for the entire digital world: digital sampling of analog signals for sound, still pictures and video. In this two-part article, we will examine techniques from two standards groups -- the Joint Photographic Experts Group, or JPEG, for compressing still images, and the Motion Picture Experts Group for motion video. MPEG will be next month's topic. There is no shortage of techniques for compressing digital information. Computer bulletin boards routinely compress files before making them available to the public, using programs such as Stuffit and PKZip. Hardware products such as Disk Doubler and its many brethren get more mileage out of a computer's hard disk by compressing information on the wing as it is being written, then decompressing it whenever it is read. As a class, all of these products can usually squeeze a file down to somewhere between 60 and 40 percent. But those products labor under an awful constraint: they must be able to reconstruct the data perfectly. If you don't need perfect data, you can compress the data a lot harder. Sounds and images are in this category; the difference between a perfect reproduction and a close facsimile is usually unnoticeable. This is fortunate, because these data types consume prodigious amounts of storage and need all the compression they can get. "Tanstaafl." Information theory reiterates what economics and thermodynamics have long known: "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch." If you want to have a snappy picture with good color range (especially in the highlights and shadows) and well-defined details, you're going to pay for it. Fortunately, you get a choice of how to pay: by using lots of storage (a brute-force approach that requires no special computation), or by using lots of computing power to compress and reconstruct the data. With today's technology, the choice is a toss-up as long as the picture stays on your computer's hard disk; but the minute you want to transmit images to other machines, the scales tip toward compression. Compression works because there is usually a lot of redundant information in the original data. Where there is no redundancy, nearly all compression algorithms make things worse rather than better. There are only two tricks you can use to compress still images. (For moving images, there are a few more.) All of the products in use today are variations on these themes. Trick one: Exploit the statistics. Image data is rarely random. If you know what kind of regularities to expect, you can encode the data very efficiently. A vast number of coding schemes have been developed, each suitable for a different class of regularities. Examples that are relevant here include:  Color-space transform. Although RGB (red-green-blue) data is what cameras generate and monitors require, it really isn't a very compact way to describe color. The trouble is that the RGB color values bunch up at the ends of the scale and are spread thin in the middle. Other color spaces, such as YUV (see the "gory details" sidebar), make more uniform use of all the numerical values. For good-quality color, you need 24 bits of RGB per pixel. By recoding the image in YUV, you can get the same quality with 16 bits per pixel.  Run-length coding. If your data has a pattern that repeats over and over, you can send the pattern once, along with a count of the number of repetitions.  Huffman coding. If some patterns are quite common while other patterns are relatively rare, you can assign the shortest codes to the patterns that occur most often. This is not a new idea; International Morse Code uses it. The most common letter in Western languages is E, which is sent as a single dit; the next most common is T, which is a single dah; and so forth down to Q = dah dah dit dah. (Incidentally, there's a nice story on Huffman coding in the September 1991 issue of Scientific American.) All the above methods allow lossless compression: when you decompress the signal, you get the original back undamaged. (Well, more or less: color-space transforms suffer from round-off errors if you don't maintain enough precision in your calculations.) You can get somewhere between 2:1 and 10:1 compression ratios with various combinations of these techniques. Trick two: Suppress information. As it happens, the human eye doesn't perceive all signals equally; it is tuned to pay more attention to some features than others. The trick, then, is to ditch the features that won't be missed anyhow. For example, the eye is sensitive to fine-edge detail and to smooth color transitions, but not to both in the same place. One such scheme, which was devised by the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) and subsequently adopted as an ISO standard, achieves much higher compression factors than the lossless techniques by selectively ignoring one kind of picture information or the other. The more information you are willing to sacrifice, the higher the compression factor you can get. The redeeming grace is that all of the quality loss takes place in the first cycle of compression and decompression. Additional compression cycles will do no further damage unless you request a higher degree of compression. The only proviso to that last statement is that if you call up a compressed image and edit it (by electronic airbrushing, despeckling, sharpening and so on), you may suffer new damage to the edited portions when you recompress. This should be no surprise; such editing is actually creating new information, which now is being compressed for the first time. How good is JPEG? Of course, if you go throwing information away, you won't be able to reconstruct the image with perfect fidelity. How much information can you throw away before the loss in quality becomes objectionable? As it turns out, for images there's no single answer to this question. For one thing, it depends on the application; an art museum catalog, an engine repair manual and a daily newspaper have very different requirements. Based on the results of commercial JPEG products we've seen, we think you will find that, overall, they give a lot of compression for relatively little ugliness. The size of the output file depends greatly on the content of the original image -- some images just don't compress very well -- and on the amount of data you threw away. Most JPEG compression products let you choose from a range of quality/file-size tradeoffs. As a rule of thumb, for good-quality printed reproduction, you want to keep the compression under 20:1, though some images are hardly disturbed by even 30:1 or more. As you approach 80:1, even the untutored viewer will be annoyed by the degradation in typical images. Room for differences. It is important to note that the JPEG standard does not specify how much information to discard, nor how to decide where to make the cuts. That is left to each implementation. Rather, the standard specifies how to decode a compressed data stream. Thus, there is room for substantial product differentiation, both in selection of algorithms and in the selection of execution platform. JPEG++. It so happens that JPEG compression is very bad for text within an image; the edges are often blurred or jaggy. To combat this, Storm Technology developed a proprietary extension of JPEG, which it calls JPEG++. It allows an operator to select a rectangular portion of an image in which to preserve maximum quality. Within that rectangle, Storm uses only lossless compression techniques and throws away no data at all, so the compression ratio there is fairly low. However, in the rest of the image normal JPEG compression is applied. We see no reason why there could not be other improvements on the compression side. For example, all current products focus on fast compression as well as fast decompression. This symmetry is important in low-volume or do-it-yourself applications such as desktop publishing and office image archiving. But in systems that prepare images for mass distribution on CD-ROMs, it might pay to spend a long time on compression to fully optimize the quality/size tradeoff. JPEG movies. We've used all the space in this article to talk about a technique for still images, when most of the interest in the digital world centers on compressing digital video. The method in our madness is that a moving picture is just a sequence of still images. As we'll discuss next month, the proposed MPEG standard uses JPEG-style compression as a major building block. However, it goes further and tries to squeeze out the frame-to-frame redundancy (i.e., parts of the image where nothing is moving) and thus gains much higher compression factors. That's great -- unless you need to edit the individual frames of a movie, in which case it's terrible. A producer of video sequences may therefore wish to keep every frame as a JPEG still image during the editing process. As a last step before packaging the product, you can re-encode the movie using MPEG algorithms; the conversion is tedious, but you only do it once. Tune in next month for details. Peter Dyson JPEG: the gory details The JPEG compression process begins by converting a 24-bit RGB image (from a desktop scanner, a video frame grabber, etc.) into the YUV color space. The Y value for each pixel expresses the luminance: how the pixel would look on a black-and-white TV. It therefore carries most of the detail information. The U and V values express the hue and saturation of the color. Tiles. The next step is to break the image into 858-pixel tiles and analyze each tile separately. In some regions of the picture, the edges and details are important, while in other regions the key to perceived quality is having smooth shading transitions. Since the eye won't pay attention to both factors in the same place, the algorithm can partially suppress one or the other on a tile-by-tile basis. Cosines. The mechanism for separating these factors is to apply what's known as the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) to each of the Y, U and V signals. This number-crunching process turns a two-dimensional array of image samples into a collection of "spatial frequencies." Low-spatial-frequency components reflect the average value of all pixels in the tile, while high frequencies are generated by the sudden shifts due to sharp edges. A tile with a lot of busy detail will have large numbers in the high-frequency components, while smooth surfaces will have tiny values. When in doubt, throw it out. With this knowledge, an algorithm can decide what data to keep and what to discard by looking at the distribution of components. The way it throws data away is by using fewer bits to represent a given component. Small numbers can simply be zeroed out. That, in turn, means less accuracy when you reverse the transformation and reconstruct the image at the receiving end. Exploit statistics. Finally, you apply run-length and Huffman coding to the data stream. Most of the reduction in file size actually happens here; one goal of the previous steps is to regularize the data so that these coding techniques will be efficient. Unraveling. To decompress the image, just reverse the steps. Expand the Huffman and run-length codes (in that order) to build an 858 tile of spatial frequencies. Apply the Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform to get a tile of pixels in the YUV color coding. Convert the YUV values into RGB (usually by lookup table) and voilÖ! it's decompressed. Then the program can just copy the tile's pixels into position on the screen. JPEG++ decompression. In JPEG++, each tile can be compressed to a different degree. This requires more smarts in the compression program, but on the decompression side, there is no difference between JPEG and JPEG++. An image compressed with JPEG++ can be decompressed by a JPEG program. Peter Dyson Western Communications Forum Feb. 3-5, Anaheim, CA National Engineering Consortium (312) 938-3500, fax (312) 938-8787 If you want to see how the telephone companies operate -- i.e., the people who do the work -- be there. Information services and video dial tone are sure to be central to many a contentious discussion. SMPTE Advanced Television and Electronic Imaging Feb 6-8, San Francisco, CA Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) (914) 761-1100, fax (914) 761-3115 For a front-row seat at the cutting edge of the "collision or convergence" blade, a SMPTE conference is the place. In addition to an educational workshop, this 26th annual event will cover topics of data compression, mass storage, video/audio workstations, and fiber optic and satellite transmission of digital data. Networld 92 Boston Feb. 11-13, Boston, MA Bruno Blenheim Inc. (800) 829-3976, fax (201) 346-1602 As network technology continues to emerge at a rapid clip, culminating a stategy of network development has become a complex and difficult task. This international trade show/conference will focus on the practical applications of new technologies for novices as well as advanced planners and present futuristic visions of global networking. Seybold Seminars '92 Feb. 18-21, Boston, MA Seybold Seminars (310) 457-5850, fax (310) 457-4704 Do not be lulled into thinking that Seybold's twice-annual publishing seminars are only about paper. This year's event will include plenty of state-of-the-art electronic publishing sessions as well as some critical looks at multimedia as a genre. Interactive Instruction Delivery Feb. 26-28, Kissimmee, FL Society for Applied Learning Technology (703) 347-0055, fax (703) 349-3169 This tenth annual conference will take a critical look at the applications and limitations of multimedia and microcomputer/videodisc technology, as well as virtual reality and digital technologies, in education, training and job performance. I/O Readers Respond Will video-games pollute game world? Veteran computer game designer wary of the siren song Chris Crawford President, Chris Crawford Games San Jose, Calif. Ten years ago, computer games and videogames were closely linked. Any big hit on the Atari 2600 was quickly ported over to the various personal computers. But then came the crash of 1984, and all that changed. Anything associated with videogames died. The only computer games to survive the crash were those that were clearly differentiated from videogames. Computer game makers learned a hard lesson: steer a wide course around videogames. But times have changed. Nintendo, Sega, and NEC are the deep pockets of business. Where we skitter along, happy to sell 25,000 units and overjoyed to sell 100,000, Nintendo doesn't even take notice unless it can sell a million. Profits for a single Nintendo game run into millions of dollars; profits in the computer business are often paper thin. Another change is that the technological gap between home computers and videogame consoles has narrowed. The Apple II was far superior to the Atari 2600; the IBM PC was far superior to the 8-bit Nintendo. But an IBM PC with 1 MB of memory, a hard disk and a '286 processor is not a whole lot better than a 16-bit SuperFamicon. Superior, yes, but not as far superior as the earlier cases. The allure of money. So computer game designers have started to blur the dividing line between videogames and computer games. The allure of all that money is just too enticing for the underpaid workers of the computer games industry. The videogames people are all too happy to have our work. The truth is, they need it badly. The videogame industry is in dire need of fresh new ideas. This has nothing to do with the creative talents of the videogame designers; it's not as if they're all a bunch of uncreative dullards looking hopefully to the brilliant and creative computer game designers. It's really just a matter of economics. The cost of producing and marketing a videogame is enormous. They can't afford to take chances on unproven products. The computer games industry, on the other hand, is more experimental, more freewheeling, more open to ideas. The cost of developing and publishing a computer game is far lower than the comparable cost of a videogame. Hence, computer gaming has a more experimental feel to it. We produce a wide variety of games every year, and we have to admit that there are a great many turkeys in that collection. The videogames people can pick and choose the rare winners that come out of the stew. So we appear to have a happy situation that works for both sides. The videogames people provide the big money that keeps our industry alive, and we computer games people provide the fresh ideas that keep their industry going. Everybody wins, right? Not quite. There are second-order effects here, effects that can ruin things for both industries. If this were some sort of hermetically sealed double-blind scientific environment, in which videogames people delivered money and took ideas without the computer games people ever knowing what was happening, all would be well. But the fact is that we computer games people know that those videogames people are out there, checkbooks in hand. They're just dying to give us money, if only we have suitable designs to sell them. We start to think how we can make our games more commercially viable in the videogames market. We adjust our designs to be closer to what we perceive to be the videogames ideal. This, of course, is exactly the reverse of what we need. Our value to the videogames people lies in our freewheeling, experimental style, our willingness to try new and different things. I know this sounds screwy, but the more we try to please them, the less our value to them. It's not that I think that videogames are bad or that videogame designers are cretins. But if videogames, coin-op and computer games merge into some giant called "electronic games," then computer games will suffer because more time, energy and money would be devoted to making games that we sell well in the videogame world. Don't dismiss this possibility: it is already happening. Publishers such as Electronic Arts and Accolade are moving away from computer games and working hard to produce videogames--and both had at one time declared that they had no intention of developing videogames. When publishers spend their development dollars on videogames, there are fewer development dollars for computer games. Many computer game designers will be squeezed out of the business or transformed into videogame developers. Videogames suffer too. The sad thing is that the videogame people will suffer from this, too. They need our inexpensive R&D capabilities, but if most of the R&D money shifts over to videogames, the field of computer games from which they can pick and choose is narrowed. Thus the best way to make the most money from the videogames industry is to maintain our distance from them: close enough to make deals, but far enough that our industry retains its experimental style. If err we must, I would prefer to err toward too much distance. Erring in that direction, we lose a few deals; erring in the opposite direction, we lose our heart and soul. So what should we do -- require separate bathrooms for the two kinds of designers? No. The two sides need to be aware of each other's existence. Videogames people need to know the latest games coming down the pike in the computer games business, and computer games people need to know enough about the videogames business that they can deal with its representatives intelligently. Chris Crawford, a veteran of the Atari Labs in the 1970s, is the author of Balance of Power and Balance of the Planet and many other computer games.