• CAN ALLIANCES TRULY SUCCEED?

Although it was coincidence that brought both the General Magic and the Kaleida Labs alliances to the pages of Digital Media in the same issue, upon reflection it’s clear they have much in common.

First, of course, is that both spring from the loins of Apple Computer, a company that obviously has more bright stars per square foot than it knows what to do with. Second, both are signposts to a future that requires industry collaborations to launch big ideas. Third, and perhaps most importantly, many eyes are watching both General Magic and Kaleida to see if it’s indeed possible to succeed at what General Magic’s president, Marc Porat, calls “our third technology: alliance management.”

• GENERAL MAGIC IS OFF AND DANCING

The folks at General Magic completely believe that the technologies they’re inventing will do nothing less than revolutionize human communication in the coming century. Even to consider achieving that goal, they’ve had to learn to “dance with the bears” — an alliance of powerful corporate partners including Apple Computer, AT&T, Sony, Motorola, Matsushita and Philips Consumer Electronics. Will their products be sufficiently compelling to make Magic Cap and Telescript the new standards for personal communication?

• KALEIDA READIES PARTNERS LAUNCH

Kaleida Labs — the Apple-IBM joint venture for multimedia technologies— is about to announce officially the charter members of its hardware vendor alliance. If all goes well, the company’s ScriptX technology will greatly increase the universe of compatible multimedia players for vendors and customers, and deliver some sophisticated object-oriented technology into the developer community as well.

• I/O
Interval’s Brenda Laurel discusses post-fad virtual reality.

• CONTENT
The Madness of Roland is an interactive novel by Hyperbole.

• CHANNELS
CD-ROM rentals reveal legal wrinkles in copyright law.

• WILLIS PICKS CIES
Allee Willis is first developer for audience participation system.

• FUJITSU’S MARTY
New player shipped in Japan, but company is coy about U.S.

• IBM IN HOLLYWOOD
Opens f/x studio with T2 director James Cameron et al.

• KODAK OPENS PHOTO CD SPEC …
… and is delivering tools and systems to the desktop.

• IS EDUCATION THE ‘KILLER APP’?
Jostens debunks the myths.

• HDTV REDUX
More standards sniping.

• BRIEFS
Including MPC2; Sikes at Hearst; IPO for 3DO; Southwestern Bell buys cable company; Cost of CD titles; ‘Name That Tune’; Continuum’s interactive digital database; MCI’s high-speed data service; Franklin electronic dictionary; Apple’s PowerCD; What’s in a NAME; On Command Video; Voyager moves; Trimark Interactive.

• EVENTS

GENERAL MAGIC GOT QUITE A START
As Porat says, ‘Now we have to finish it’

General Magic ended more than two years of speculation on Feb. 8 when it finally and officially revealed its corporate strategy and alliances at the Hotel Macklowe in New York. No sooner had the curtain of secrecy been lifted, however, than it was replaced with a new — and in the end, far more critical — anxiety. As president and CEO Marc Porat says, somewhat ruefully, “Now we have to finish it.” We might add, “And it has to work.”

A quick recap. Based in Mountain View, CA, General Magic spun out from Apple Computer’s Advanced Technology Group in mid-1990. Cofounded by Marc Porat, Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld, its mission is to develop technologies that transform communication into a fundamental activity — the technological equivalent of breathing and paying taxes — for networks, information services, classical application software and electronic devices ranging from computers to handheld organizers to telephones and other gadgets that haven’t been invented yet.

These technologies will be licensed to hardware manufacturers, software publishers and service providers, thus (hopefully) providing a ubiquitous platform for an even broader range of developers and information providers to create even more new services, communicating applications and hardware products.

REVOLUTIONS ARE MADE BY DANCING WITH THE BEARS

The folks at General Magic completely believe that the technologies they’re inventing will do nothing less than revolutionize human communication in the coming century. Even to consider achieving that goal, they’ve had to learn to “dance with the bears” — an alliance of powerful corporate partners that they hope will quickly turn Magic’s new technologies into standards.

The bears they’ve selected are pretty good dancers, too. Equity partners to date include Apple, AT&T (the services group, not the products group, which has been rather promiscuous of late), Motorola, and the Holy Trinity of the consumer electronics industry — Sony, Philips and Matsushita. Two of the world’s best known information providers, Mead and News Corp., are also allied with General Magic, though not as equity partners.

But those who read the news stories or attended General Magic’s New York City “coming out” were frustrated by what seemed to be an announcement of no substance, presented in little or no context. There was no demonstration of the two Magic technologies — Magic Cap and Telescript — and nothing was said onstage that surprised anyone who’d been following the rampant pre-announcement speculation in the trade press.

Post-announcement fu. And much to Magic’s chagrin, the day following its big New York debut both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times reported unnamed AT&T officials as saying the company had “exclusive rights” to Telescript for more than two years. Although AT&T issued a statement to the contrary the next day, the damage was done. Once again, it appeared as though another so-called “open system alliance” had shot itself in the foot.

So what’s the real story? Do the partners have any real interest in seeing the technology succeed, or are alliance members just hedging their bets on the latest buzzword? What does their equity investment buy them? Is General Magic’s technology truly available to all comers? Is the technology real? And just exactly what is the technology? General Magic itself was long on metaphor and short on evidence, so what you’ll read below is our best shot at answering these questions given the information constraints we were under.

CLEARING UP THE CONFUSION

We’re pretty clear on what’s happening with the alliance (more on that later), but progress reports on the technology are still a matter for speculation. Despite repeated requests and numerous interviews both offsite and at General Magic’s Mountain View, CA, headquarters, no demonstrations of Telescript or Magic Cap were to be had.

A leap of faith. Founders told us they didn’t give a public demonstration at the February alliance launch for “competitive reasons” (read: they didn’t want Microsoft to see it), and because they wanted to have it closer to being finished before they showed it off. (Later we were told that there had been a “sneak preview” of Magic Cap in the video shown at the announcement, but that fact, it seems, did not come home to roost with the audience.)

In later, private interviews, they continued to shy away because they said those working on the project were too busy trying to finish it to give demos. Though the reasoning seems slightly disingenuous, for purposes of this article (and because we’ve talked to some of the few who’ve seen the technology in action) we’re taking the leap of faith that the technology actually exists, and is functional to some extent.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MAGIC CAP AND TELESCRIPT

That said, the most visible technology under development at General Magic is called Magic “Cap” for “Communicating Application Platform,” and that’s exactly what it is. It is a platform — operating system independent, with a customizable user interface — specifically designed for communicating applications and information services.

It was an early version of the Magic Cap platform, actually, that was the genesis of General Magic. Porat, Atkinson and Hertzfeld (as a contractor) were working on a project deep inside Apple to move the company beyond traditional personal computing. As it became clear that such a project would require collaboration between computing, consumer electronics, communications and information industries, Apple decided to spin the company out of Apple as an independent corporation.

Some cake required. As their plan took shape, however, it became clear that Magic Cap was the icing, and that some cake was required. A very substantive piece of technology, the piece that actually enabled the required “personal intelligent communications” to occur, needed to be invented. That’s when Jim White and Rich Miller, both mail and messaging specialists, joined the team and the development of Telescript began.

No one could have been more perfect for the job than Jim White. White invented what’s known as the “remote procedure call,” or RPC, while working at Xerox. (RPC allows a user to contact and conduct transactions on remote computer via a network.) He also led the development effort on X.400 and was a leading contributor to X.500, two worldwide computer mail and messaging protocols.

He and Miller, a former chairman of the Electronic Mail Association, had formed a consultancy for messaging systems and services called Rapport Communication. When Porat started looking around for the sine qua non of engineering talent, White’s name was on many people’s short lists and over to Magic they went.

SAVED FROM THE GHETTO OF INCOMPATIBLE DEVICES

Their work on Telescript began while Porat’s alliance-building continued apace. But at some point a decision was made that, whether they realized it or not, saved General Magic from being banished to the Ghetto of Incompatible Devices.

When AT&T’s Bob Kavner first hooked up with Magic, he said, AT&T was in the process of spending $10 million to port Go Corp.’s PenPoint operating system (platform for the Eo personal communicator) to AT&T’s Hobbit microprocessor. It didn’t seem like a good idea to him to give up the promised benefits of Telescript just because he didn’t want to use Magic Cap as a platform.

Decoupling was critical. “We thought it would be helpful if the operating system was different from the [communication] language,” Kavner said in an interview with Digital Media. “We knew Telescript was hot, but we also knew that interoperability was an important aspect” of the project.

Although General Magic doesn’t make a point of it, it is obvious to those of us outside the compound that the complete decoupling of Magic Cap from Telescript was absolutely critical to the company’s success — especially since Magic Cap can wear many different, well, hats.

How they differ. Since there seems to be a lot of confusion about how and where Telescript is different from Magic Cap, here’s the official explanation. “Magic Cap is a platform for consumer electronics companies who want to create communication devices, and for developers who want to create communicating software,” says Joanna Hoffman, VP of marketing for General Magic and evangelist for Magic Cap and third-party information providers. “In some incarnations, it will be the operating system and user interface as well.”

Magic Cap integrates Telescript, she says, but Telescript does not require Magic Cap. “The important point,” says Hoffman, “is that Magic Cap and Telescript are very tightly integrated in one implementation only — the Magic Cap implementation. Telescript was developed separately, independently of Magic Cap, to be platform independent, meaning not just independent of hardware, but of operating systems as well. It is quite portable.”

The perfect approach. This was the only possible way to be successful. In a world crammed to the gunnels with incompatible computer systems and computing devices, no matter how brilliant Telescript turned out to be, it could never have made itself heard above the noise if it was perceived as inseparable from Magic Cap — as yet another operating system/applications environment à la Newton, Zoomer, Modular Windows, Macintosh, Windows, Unix, First Person, ad infinitum.

TELESCRIPT: THE LINGUA FRANCA FOR COMMUNICATION

Thus, Magic Cap became Telescript’s “proof of concept,” so to speak, the application platform that would show off Telescript to its best advantage. And Telescript became General Magic’s core technology — a communications lingua franca, Porat says, inspired by the PostScript page description language that revolutionized the publishing industry. In much the same way that PostScript provides sophisticated imaging functionality to a wide variety of devices, Telescript is a programming language that provides sophisticated communication functionality anywhere it resides.

Porat says Telescript is an “open language that’s standard, scalable, can live everywhere,” and allows everything from a low-end PC to a super-fast server to a handheld communications device to an information service to a PBX to become “intelligent.”

What does ‘intelligent’ mean? Telescript’s power and functionality revolve around the use of software agents that are imbued with the capability to conduct many kinds of activities over a network — activities such as decision making, fetching information, locating network resources, providing monitor and alarm functions — and can operate across a multitude of different platforms such as those described above.

Although the results are sometimes the same, this is a fundamentally different activity from the kind of transactions conducted, for example, by automated stock trading programs. White says the difference is that Telescript is a way of expressing intelligence, rather than embedding it.

Stock programs and the like often have a selection of intelligent features embedded in the program’s structure, thus anticipated by the designers of the service — i.e., “if X stock drops below $1.50 per share, sell it.” With Telescript, the intelligence to make those decisions isn’t built into the program. It comes from outside — from you, the user. You make your agent look specifically for what you want to know in the data at hand.

Here’s White’s example of the difference: Let’s say you have a subscription to the Sabre airline ticketing database that allows you to purchase tickets electronically. If the Sabre database has been brought into the Telescript universe (a process that White says does not require a major database overhaul), it would be possible for Telescript “agents” in a customer’s portable computer or handheld device or even portable telephone not only to purchase tickets electronically, but also to monitor the flight as it prepares for departure.

This function does not exist in the database itself, and isn’t even necessarily in the customer’s device. The intelligence is expressed in the agent, which operates autonomously between the customer’s device and the Sabre network as part of a “communicating application.”

So if you’re in an important meeting and time is precious, the last thing in the world you need is to leave the meeting early only to find out your flight is two hours late. A Telescript agent, directed by you, the user, can monitor Sabre and notify you immediately if there are any notable changes to your flight. Using the stock program metaphor, an entire software application would be required; using Telescript, a single autonomous agent could handle the job.

HOW TO MAKE E-MAIL SMARTER

There are many other ways that Telescript can facilitate communication. Today’s electronic mail, for example, is passive and rather dumb. I send you an E-mail message and if you aren’t sitting at your computer, or you’re out of town, it will sit there forever until you retrieve it, no matter how important it is.

But in a Telescripted world, I can send my colleague a message that’s imbued with intelligence. Wrapped around that message are instructions that say, “If she doesn’t see this message within two hours, send it to her assistant. If her assistant doesn’t get it, send it to her pager, then to her cellular phone.” Conversely, my colleague’s Telescripted E-mail system can say, “I’m mad at Denise, ignore anything she sends me.”

Any computer software application can be made Telescript-aware. For example, any address book, calendar or database program could be set up to send and receive messages automatically. An entire series of transactions could take place without human intervention.

Tales of power. Let’s look at this more closely, because it’s quite interesting and General Magic uses it frequently as an example of the power of Telescript.

White says Telescript is designed to be able to live anywhere that digital data can live, or anywhere that can respond to digital instructions. Any application can be made sensitive to communication, any network can be made to respond to agents. A Telescript application could be a single agent, while a calendar application could have a dozen agents. There could be one Telescript element living in the local network to mediate appointments or meetings, and another for E-mail that mediates message flow.

So, let’s say that I’m a dentist (God forbid) and Stella is one of my patients. My Telescripted database notes that it is time for Stella’s checkup. My agent then contacts Stella’s Telescripted smart phone- or computer-based calendar program and queries her electronic calendar agent for times she might be available. (By the way, Porat thinks this example is insane, but it does demonstrate the function of agents in the system.)

If Stella has given permission on her end for such a transaction to occur, my agent and her agent could actually schedule her dental appointment without either of us having to answer a phone or voice mail, or otherwise devote any mental bandwidth to the task.

And Telescript is smart enough to know what’s on the other end of the line as well. “For example, if I sent a lunch invitation with sound and animation to an old-fashioned PC, it would figure out what to do with it rather than fail the message,” says Porat.

He calls this, in a rare prosaic moment, “smart messaging,” and believes its benefits will be so smashing that it will actually promulgate the use of agents.

A NEW WAY OF LOOKING AT SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

Clearly the Telescript environment brings to fruition the concept of “modular” software and the power of object-oriented technology. Why would a software developer write a whole new calendar program when you can write an inordinately clever agent that fixes the stupidities of the one you’ve already got? If Telescript is widely adopted, it’s likely that we’ll see a new area of expertise develop around distributed data communication applications. Batteries of agents will vie for market supremacy, be they airline monitors, newshounds, traffic reporters or mail filters.

Anticipation of the handheld device and wireless market is creating much of the excitement for Telescript applications today, but that won’t happen for a while. In the shorter term, the group that will be best served by expert communicating agents will be businesses that operate via local area and remote networks, or that find they conduct much of their business from the field.

If Telescript performs as promised, it will be able both to increase productivity and to lower the hassle and cost of doing business on a network, whether local or remote. If software developers support Telescript, they may unearth whole new product categories they didn’t even know existed.

“I set out to build a network to not repeat the mistakes I’d been a part of with X.400,” says White of the time he served developing standards by committee. “What we got was custom, intelligent transaction processing, smart messaging, database access, information services and all the rest. It’s big bang for the buck if you think through distribution systems once and for all.”

In addition, Porat says that after the big guys have had their way with General Magic this year and next, his “grass roots lefty vision” leads him to believe that anyone will be able to buy a development kit and start offering information services spontaneously at a very, very low cost of entry.

LET’S HOPE IT’S NOT CONTAGIOUS

Obviously the potential is great, but there are lots of questions to be asked about Magic Cap and Telescript and how they’ll work in the real world. In one meeting, for example, Porat would not even entertain a question about addresses and directories and how you would find people to send them calendar messages, etc. And some work must be done on common data formats between devices, computer systems and telephone networks — a highly non-trivial matter — in order to achieve the goal of true interoperability.

But even more important is the matter of security. Telescript is a programming language that actually has the capability to enter your computer system and change things on your server or hard disk, live and in real time. Of course, it asks permission first. But the last time we checked, sans the permission thing, the concept sounds very much like what we try to prevent computer viruses from doing.

No undocumented features. And even though it would be very difficult to believe that General Magic doesn’t have everyone’s best interests at heart, the truth is that one “undocumented feature,” as bugs are sometimes called, could wreak great havoc not only with many computer systems, but with the credibility and future of General Magic.

White doesn’t go into great detail about the subject of security, but both he and Rich Miller are adamant that the security and integrity of data was uppermost in their minds while designing Telescript. “Security is the most difficult and interesting area for a product like this,” says White. “But do you think AT&T would let software into its network that it didn’t write if it weren’t secure?”

We hope that General Magic’s partners and potential licensees and customers will make Big Noise about security and data protection and privacy. Since Mitch Kapor, cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is on Magic’s advisory board, as is Craig McCaw of McCaw Cellular Communications — both of whom are vocal supporters of data protection — we can only hope these issues are being discussed at high levels within all the companies involved. Such discussion is critical as we move into the era of the so-called Data Super Highway, and a language like Telescript could go a long way in properly setting the stage for the future of secure communications.

SPEAKING OF AT&T, WHAT ABOUT THOSE PARTNERS?

None of General Magic’s ambitions could be fulfilled without some fairly powerful partners. We’ve all seen and heard plenty of horror stories about so-called alliances gone awry, and it pays to approach anything that remotely resembles an alliance with caution. Despite the fact that most of General Magic’s partners have been dabbling in a variety of technologies with a variety of companies — making it hard to tell whether they’re really committed, or whether they’re all just covering their bets — Magic has amassed a rather formidable wedge of companies that in a perfect world may give it the jump-start it needs.

Each partner has a limited equity stake and a seat on the board of directors. Porat says what they get from the partnership is “an early look at the technology and a dialog with senior management,” as well as some level of participation in product design discussions.

Porat maintains that no “exclusive” deals were cut with AT&T or any other equity partners, but the fact that there aren’t enough hours in a day to do what needs to be done now means it’s virtually impossible for General Magic to consider any other large, partner-type players for a while. “We have a responsibility to the current alliance members,” says Porat. “We owe it to them to fulfill our obligation, which is to finish it.”

You are what you eat. Porat says 10 companies approached him within a few hours during a recent conference, and back at headquarters the phone does not stop ringing. Among the suitors are Novell, Lotus, Borland, Microsoft and Intel — all the big names in the personal computing world — but Porat says his focus is on getting Telescript and Magic Cap done. “Most small companies die of indigestion, not starvation,” he says.

But considering the many deals all its partners are making in every imaginable business area, are General Magic’s partners just covering their bets? Porat thinks the question overly cynical. “[The partners] have no approval over design, and they don’t have to build a device if they don’t want to,” he said. “But all the CEOs have gone on the record making certain declarations [of commitment]. They’re all talking to us regularly. They know what we’re doing in detail. If you want to be completely cynical you could say that they’re all just splashing money around, but that’s not happening.”

MANY AMBITIOUS PROJECTS UNDER WAY

In fact, all of General Magic’s six “charter” partners have made what appear to be major commitments to Telescript and Magic Cap. Gaston Bastiaens, head of Apple’s Personal Information Electronics division, says Apple’s first Newton product will be shipped without Telescript because it won’t be ready, but it will be ready for the second Newton, and a simple upgrade will be available. Other execs are on the record as saying Telescript will be part of all Apple products eventually.

And although Sony, AT&T and Motorola are pushing the envelope in their Telescript and Magic Cap product development, equally significant is the addition of Philips and Matsushita to the mix, whose reputations as providers of less expensive consumer electronics devices (Sony is still considered the “premium” consumer electronics label) demonstrates some belief that Magic Cap and Telescript will be around long enough to be driven down in cost.

The most ambitious Telescript project, or at least the one that is most enabling to all the others, is the new Telescript-based network that AT&T EasyLink Services is building especially for General Magic’s technologies.

“We’re working very closely with all the companies in the General Magic alliance, as well as with the companies that are licensing Telescript,” says Bill Fallon of AT&T. “The devices [they're making] are designed to work with our services and vice versa.” Basically the only requirement you need to connect to our service is a device with Telescript on it.” Fallon says he doesn’t want to use the term “bundling” to describe how device manufacturers will market their closely coupled products, but he does expect there to be a close relationship between them.

Designed for wireless. Despite the fact that General Magic doesn’t like to lean heavily on the wireless personal communicator as the sole definition for what Telescript is good at — Porat thinks it will take 10 years before such devices even approach ubiquity, and Telescript will be just as valuable for wire-based communication — the fact that Apple, Sony and Motorola are all building communicating PDAs has given AT&T some very interesting ideas about how to shape a network that can handle smart messaging across a wide variety of devices.

The service it is building, according to Fallon, is classified as an Enhanced Network Service, which is in the same category as the voice mail services that the phone company sells today. He calls it “next-generation E-mail,” configured specifically for Telescripted personal communicator users who are often out of touch with their home-base computers.

Fallon says the idea is to build value inside the network using Telescript, instead of moving a “bag of bits” from one device to another. He says today’s electronic mail systems are analogous to sending a fax. “You dial the fax machine and hit the start button — there’s very little enhancement.”

A SLEW OF NEW CAPABILITIES

But the new AT&T “smart messaging” network, he says, will provide significant enhancements to customers, such as authenticating the user, storing messages, and converting messages from one media to another — i.e., you could send a text file into a network and specify that it be converted to fax and sent to one or many fax addresses at once.

AT&T already provides a service called MailTalk that will “read” you your E-mail messages when you’ve made the egregious error of leaving home without your notebook computer. Though he doesn’t specifically include MailTalk in the new product, Fallon says the service AT&T is building “will be multiple media — the principal media will be voice, data and fax or image. Personal communicators, being the very capable devices they are, will be able to deal with any of those media at any particular time. Our service will be able to support them in various ways no matter what media is being used. If a device wants to be doing fax because that makes sense to a customer, for example, it would make a lot of sense for our network service to provide a variety of fax solutions so that people using personal communicators in our network are being well served.”

The art of store and forward. In other words, the new Telescript network raises “store and forward” to an art form, and is really the technology that enables all the “smart messaging” examples we raised earlier, such as the agents in the Sabre database and Stella’s dentist. In fact, the subscription service you’d use to access the Sabre database would likely be resident in the new system.

“One of the general points we’re making is that store and forward or message-passed communication are a critical component of what is emerging as the personal communications story,” says Fallon. “It’s fundamentally different from today’s point-to-point communication, it’s certainly possible with multiple types of devices, and we and General Magic believe that an enhanced network like this will be a critical component in the success factor for customers using personal communicators.”

Despite the fact that the network is still being built, AT&T participated in last month’s announcement because it believes that its enhanced network service will be extremely attractive to information service providers. The scenario is that a PDA user will be able to subscribe to weather, news, traffic, and maybe even game and entertainment services via the new system, and will be able to retrieve information from wherever she happens to be.

“We want the application-development community to know if they have an interest in serving the emerging personal communicator-owning public with whatever applications they have, AT&T will be a good place for them to keep their eye on,” says Fallon. Mead, News Corp. and Intuit are already building services for the Telescript-based service.

SENDING A MESSAGE TO THE PDA COMMUNITY

Perhaps even more importantly, says EasyLink Services president Gordon Bridge, AT&T wanted to make it clear to other PDA manufacturers that it was backing Telescript. It makes good business sense, he says, and it’s the best thing for the customer, who shouldn’t have to worry about different devices that are unable to communicate. “The world is a dangerous place, but Telescript is not a dangerous technology,” says Bridge. “It shouldn’t scare anyone unless you want to create an alternative approach.”

AT&T is clearly betting that having a smart electronic mailbox that can intelligently examine messages sent to you and decide what to do with them will be critical in a future where there are bazillions of messages flying around the network at any given moment. For the foreseeable future of wireless communication, AT&T’s Fallon says, you’ll pay for it and it will certainly be a more expensive proposition than terrestrial communication. But he believes the ability to filter junk messages until you’re at a lower-cost communications facility, and to receive only the messages you specifically request, will be a better use of wireless for most people and will avoid the $400-a-month cellular bill syndrome.

THE DEVICE GUYS ARE HARD AT IT, TOO

After exploring the new EasyLink service with AT&T, you can imagine that Motorola, for example, is unequivocal in its support of General Magic’s technology. Though it is shy about divulging any product details, Pat Richardson, vice president and director of business operations for Motorola Personal Messaging Products (which is part of the paging and wireless data group), said that the personal communicator it is building would be congruent with the information General Magic has given out, based on Motorola’s expertise in wireless data.

Less shy about its product plans, or at least the reach of them, was former Sony Corp. of America president Ron Sommer (who is on his way to Sony Europe to try to work the same magic in a European recession as he has done in United States).

He believes that Telescript devices, such as the one that Sony is building with Magic Cap, could be an excellent front-end to a TV set, and will provide individuals with links to entertainment-based information services. (Porat likes the idea of “subscribing” to games or interactive fiction, where the network delivers one new character a month.)

And Sommer certainly isn’t limiting the device to a certain size or shape. “When something [like a Magic Cap device] is so personal to you, the business is limited only by creativity. You could use such a device to select a program among 500 channels, off cable and direct broadcast satellite, connect to information services, order tickets, or organize your business,” he says. “It could be a personal device or a set-top box. You won’t throw away anything; you won’t get rid of your PC, for example. And you’ll want to do it in a non-obtrusive way. We’re looking at something less complicated than interactive TV — we’re finding what’s missing in personal communications, in a similar way to what was missing before the Walkman or the Discman.”

A PERFECT BRIDGE BETWEEN BUSINESS AND THE CONSUMER

Sony is particularly interested in Magic Cap, Sommer says, because it is a perfect bridge between the business and consumer markets. “The key issue for Sony is to build on our dominance in the personal entertainment market, but it was always clear that at some point in the convergence, something would happen for us in the overlapping zone,” he says. “The overlap is in personal communicating devices — those will be based on Magic Cap and will use Telescript. Magic Cap, we believe, will become the standard platform in the business. For us, the importance of Telescript comes from the Magic Cap window, which allows us to reach consumers and the professional base too.”

Sommer says that Telescript may eventually become part of other Sony personal information and communication products, including its Pyxis geopositioning device, the Data Discman and MMCD players, its extensive line of computer peripheral products and electronics equipment, and perhaps someday the MiniDisc rewritable optical music player recorder. And it will certainly be connected, via some future information service, to Sony Music and Sony Pictures.

“Initially we’re concentrating on MiniDisc to replace the music cassette,” says Sommer. “But it’s not only for music. CD is one of the fastest growing markets for data storage, and some day MD will be a Magic Cap device that will be built into computers.” He says Sony is looking at the issue, but has no idea when such a product would be available, since its first priority is to use MD to expand its personal entertainment markets.

THE QUESTION REMAINS: HOW OPEN IS OPEN?

Porat calls managing the General Magic alliance the company’s “third technology,” and it is certainly proving to be at least as challenging as the other two. Magic Cap, and particularly Telescript, are clearly seductive, and the company’s biggest pain and pleasure today is that many people want to get their hands on it. Porat and Rich Miller, the VP in charge of licensing Telescript, are unequivocal about wanting to make both Telescript and Magic Cap truly open and available.

The perception of exclusivity with the partners, they both say, is okay with them, because it’s a short-term problem of lack of time and energy, as opposed to policy. As Miller says, “Our partners have paid the freight, so they are first in line. We can serve only so many customers and still maintain our quality standards and schedules.”

But after the AT&T public relations fiasco, he warns against thinking that there are any legal restrictions about whom General Magic can talk to and when. “Our decisions regarding licensing are our decisions,” he says. “This is not a puppeteers’ paradise. If [our partners] could pull those strings, they’d have built the products themselves.”

Miller doubts that any new partnership deals will be made before the products are shown this summer, but licensing discussions continue to take place. “The alliance isn’t frozen,” he says. “One benefit of being a company that doesn’t have a lot of venture capitalists looking for a 10x turn on their money makes us that much friendlier. But we’d have to have a seductive offer vis à vis the value of the technology, its extensibility and the bottom line. Given our partners, given their support, we have the luxury of taking the long view.”

Is Microsoft in view? One of the biggest questions is whether that long view will include Microsoft. Both Porat and Miller confirmed that discussions have taken place “at very high levels” within Microsoft about the company supporting Telescript, but wouldn’t say much more. We assume that, as usual, Microsoft executives wanted to see product blueprints before moving forward, and we also assume that General Magic thought it imprudent to do so at this time.

But we also found it interesting that until very recently, the discussion had not reached the ears of Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft’s highly regarded VP of technology, who is known to appreciate good technology and has no problem with the idea of making deals with other companies. (Myhrvold is quick to point out that “I’m the guy who licensed TrueType [font technology] from Apple at the height of the lawsuit.”)

“I’d like to talk to them,” said Myhrvold, who at the time we talked to him in early March said no one from General Magic has contacted him directly about joining the alliance. (We hear the situation has since been rectified.) “Saying ‘Microsoft will [hurt] us if we don’t show it to them’ becomes self-fulfilling. I’m more than happy to try and entertain suggestions that we be compatible. The market is immature — we’d be willing to give away a little of our edge to make the pie bigger. If there’s no business, then we’re all unhappy campers.”

Miller agrees, and says “there is every reason for me to find a workable and practical way of existing in a world where today Microsoft has absolute lion’s share of platforms that are computers. My job is to make it truly open and available.”

OTHER THAN THAT, MRS. LINCOLN, HOW WAS THE PLAY?

Other than Microsoft, it looks like fairly smooth sailing for General Magic, at least on the Telescript front. Miller says it gets a little stickier arbitrating the areas where Telescript and Magic Cap overlap — the classic problem that Microsoft itself faces. Though the product areas differ slightly, both companies have to convince outside developers that internal groups that compete with third-party developers — at Microsoft, the applications side and at General Magic, the Magic Cap group — don’t get unfair access to core technologies.

Miller says he’s responsible for managing the engineering, business development and marketing for Telescript, and it’s Hoffman’s job to proselytize for Magic Cap, since Magic Cap competes with other PDA platforms. But at this point, obviously, it’s a problem that General Magic will look forward to, since those problems usually arise only after achieving great success.

Doing the dance. Overall, General Magic is having to learn some rather intricate dance steps even to attempt what’s possible with a technology the magnitude of Telescript. Most people roll their eyes when they talk about the company, assuming that it takes an incredible amount of hubris to talk about revolutionizing global communication in one fell swoop. However, if you scratch just below the surface and really listen to what the folks at Magic are saying about what they’re doing, they are actually quite humbled by what they’ve undertaken.

And despite the David-and-Goliath relationship with their partners, they’ve managed to erect some very firm boundaries about how much influence those partners can have. In addition to existing limits on licensing and co-development decisions, Porat says that there’s no chance any of the partners could ever make a go of taking over General Magic because they’re at a standstill — each owns a certain number of shares, but legally can’t buy any more than a certain amount — and may even remain so when the company goes public.

The wild card. Microsoft is certainly a wild card at this point, but it’s unlikely that it will be able to cook up anything even remotely as sophisticated as Telescript on short notice, and equally unlikely that anyone would believe it at this point if it said it did have a Telescript killer. Sources high in the food chain at Sun Microsystems say its new consumer electronics project, called First Person, is not a competitor to Telescript as reported in the New York Times; though the sources would not elaborate, it’s much more likely to be a Magic Cap competitor. But since those are not only expected but already exist, that news is not likely to take much bloom off the rose.

The real bottom line for General Magic, which appears today to have all its ducks nicely in a row, is whether or not the technology will work as promised. This caveat should not be taken lightly, since very few people have actually seen it in action, but considering the parties involved the bet is hardly a long shot. Porat spends a lot of time “level-setting expectations” that the full promise of what Telescript has to offer will take at least 10 years, if not 15 or 20, to reach fruition. He’s promised to have more news this summer; we’re hoping it’s in the form of a fabulous demonstration of Telescript and Magic Cap. But whatever it is, it will have to be impressive enough to keep the momentum going.

Denise Caruso

KALEIDA LAUNCHES ALLIANCE
Partners and ScriptX gearing up for cross-platform titles

Right on schedule, Kaleida Labs — the Apple-IBM joint venture for multimedia technologies — is about to officially launch its partners alliance. When the company “came out” at the Seybold Digital World conference last year, Kaleida promised to announce charter members of the alliance by the end of the first quarter of 1993, which ends March 31.

Aside from its announcements then of Nat Goldhaber as president, and Toshiba Corp. as the first alliance partner, Kaleida has said little else about what it’s been doing. Since Digital World, however, Kaleida has made an enormous amount of progress on ScriptX, a universal scripting language that will allow multiple hardware platforms to play the same digital file without modification.

Several large consumer electronics firms are expected to be included in the charter alliance announcement, and over the next few weeks and months Kaleida will also make public its plans to bring developers, tool makers and hardware vendors, into the fold. ScriptX systems are expected to show up in the market by the first quarter of 1994.

INCOMPATIBLE PLATFORMS WON’T MAKE A MARKET

Though most hardware vendors don’t like to admit it, it is a truism in the retail distribution market that there will not be a successful consumer multimedia industry until a single disc works in any brand or model of multimedia player/computer.

There are a couple of ways to accomplish this. One is somehow to force a standard in hardware so that all the multimedia players and computers are built on the same physical design. Despite some valiant efforts, this hasn’t happened — and never will — for several good reasons, not the least of which is that hardware technology is a stone that’s rolling far too quickly to allow a standard to take hold.

All dressed up. In the case of CD-I, for example, the hardware technology upon which Philips based the CD-I specification was outdated before its development was even completed. Unwilling to obsolete the technology in which it had invested so many millions of dollars, Philips found it was being left behind despite the fact that it continued to tack “improvements” onto CD-I, such as a cartridge to play back full-motion video.

The field is littered with wannabe standards. CD-I, considered a contender in Europe, is incompatible with virtually anything useful except audio and Photo CD. Ditto Apple’s Macintosh, king of computer-based multimedia playback. The Sony MMCD player, despite the fact that it’s based on the very standard DOS operating system, doesn’t even work in any other DOS players without significant modification. The Multimedia PC, based on Windows, wanted to be a standard so badly it even formed its own marketing council, but MPC discs still stand alone and sometimes don’t even work in other MPCs.

Nightmare state. This is the state of the art, and it continues to be a nightmare for title developers. Those who are actually brave enough to create products in this environment must either double or treble their development costs to cover the whole market, or be forced to pick a single platform on which to distribute their product — a painful and ultimately counter-productive activity not unlike clipping the wings of a fledgling just as it is about to leave the nest.

Moving off the periphery. No matter how well meaning, then, pushing for a standard hardware platform doesn’t work. The other route is to come up with a truly common software platform for development and playback of multimedia titles. Not only is software easier and cheaper to revise and update than hardware, but the new generation of object-oriented programs is far more powerful and capable for interactive multimedia.

KALEIDA GOES FOR SOFTWARE POWER

Kaleida’s strategy says that if a layer of powerful software is inserted between the various incompatible platforms and the tools that create multimedia titles, the chicken-and-egg problem of what comes first, titles or platforms, is eliminated; the total universe of multimedia players increases dramatically, and title developers who’ve been waiting on the periphery for a sufficient installed base of platforms to be sold finally have the impetus to jump in.

In addition, such a strategy relieves developers of having to know the details of every piece of multimedia hardware on the market — a task that’s likely to become more difficult, not easier. If ScriptX turns out as well as its creators hope it will, a developer writing a title in Passport Producer Interactive, for example (Passport’s upcoming ScriptX-based authoring software), could hit a “Save as ScriptX” button and the subsequent digital file would play on any ScriptX device, with no modification.

COMPONENTS OF A SCRIPTX SYSTEM

The purpose of ScriptX is to create a software abstraction of a generic multimedia hardware device, so that developers can have a set of platform-independent guidelines and formats by which they can develop titles.

Kaleida works with each hardware vendor to create a device-specific ScriptX runtime environment to enable this kind of universal playback mechanism. When completed, this runtime environment is delivered to the vendor as “executables” to be attached to the device either as a ROM chip or as an extension to the system software of a computer.

Common ground. ScriptX doesn’t guarantee any certain level of performance; what it does guarantee is that the title will find the resources it needs when it plays on a ScriptX device, and that the machine will play ScriptX code from the media at the highest performance level possible based on the constraints of the system.

Thus, a ScriptX title will play at different levels of performance on a Macintosh ScriptX system, a Windows ScriptX system and a Sony MMCD ScriptX system, depending on the capabilities of the native hardware.

Adding some functionality. One of ScriptX’s benefits is that it may be able to provide some vendors with certain kinds of functionality not previously found in their devices.

If the device is a consumer player with very little in the way of built-in functionality such as an imaging model or video codecs, Kaleida has the capability to build some of these features into the runtime environment — features that software developers would have to write themselves if they were working with one device at a time.

Creation of a ScriptX environment is significantly easier for machines like the Macintosh, though, since it has a large number of sophisticated media handling tools built into its system software.

GENERIC TITLE, GENERIC PERFORMANCE

ScriptX attempts to level the playing field for devices but that doesn’t mean a ScriptX device will indeed perform adequately. The price of cross-platform compatibility is likely to be a performance hit, especially if you’re accustomed to seeing your titles on big, fast computers.

At today’s high-pitched level of incompatibility in the device market, a ScriptX title that works exquisitely on a souped-up ‘486 MPC would probably not work as well on a lower-end MPC machine or midrange Mac — or on anything else, except perhaps a high-end Mac — because, as Kaleida says, “You can’t expect a VW to be a Ferrari.”

In addition, to maximize cross-platform performance, there must be as many standardized data formats as possible — formats that Kaleida is working out right now — for everything from audio to bitmaps to codecs.

Losing the fine tune. Dave Kaiser, Kaleida’s VP of engineering, says the need to select a generic definition of a player means the loss of certain fine-tuning capabilities. In fact, he says, a ScriptX title running on a fast PC is likely not to perform as well as if it were optimized for the ‘486 outside of the ScriptX environment.

But Kaleida believes, and we tend to agree, that these tradeoffs are minor and short term compared to the benefits of cross-platform compatibility. As the capability of hardware continues to increase — which seems by now to be a physical law of the universe — and because ScriptX is not dependent upon any one processor or feature set, as more developers and vendors shift their products toward native ScriptX support and common data formats, these problems will fall away.

No holding back. And if what Kaleida tells us is true, content providers who’ve been holding back because of the cross-platform compatibility issues are becoming less coy when they see ScriptX. Kaleida’s developer liaisons claim that “many of the big New York publishing houses” are exploring agreements with the company because “everyone believes it’s time to put their toe in the water. Getting involved now is beneficial even if it’s iterative.”

OBJECT-BASED FEATURES PROVIDE GREAT BENEFITS

Meantime, however, ScriptX does offer some really nifty features. For example, dynamic adaptation is the ScriptX feature, based on object-oriented programming techniques, that allows the title to look at the environment and decides in real time how it can best display itself on the screen — whether it’s in a VGA or NTSC environment, what video codecs it can utilize — and otherwise perform its duties; it then adapts itself to the machine at the time the data is being called off the disc.

But while dynamic adaptation allows maximum performance per device type, the larger world of object-oriented programming allows you to interact with ScriptX data in a way that’s been impossible with the procedural interfaces found in most authoring languages to date.

Interacting, real time. “The classical model is that when you animate something, you compile it and it’s done,” says Kaiser. “But when you compile an animation at runtime, it allows you to change it in real time.”

That’s because when you’re interacting with objects — let’s say the fish and X-ray viewer in Kaleida’s Monterey Canyon title, for example (see illustration, p. 15) — ScriptX can provide them with open-ended capabilities, and the user can combine them in many different ways at runtime.

For instance, a viewer object might have a specialized subclass that’s a magnifier. A fish object might have subclasses that show its internal organs or its skeleton. Used together, a magnifying viewer could show a closeup of a fish bladder, for example, if that’s what the user wanted to do. Such an animation would not have to be programmed in advance. In addition, the basic “viewer” concept could be quickly adapted for use with other types of objects, other animals or machines.

Acting as if. Kaiser says this capability is inherent to ScriptX because it is an object-oriented language, and it’s something very difficult to accomplish using today’s standard authoring tools.

For example, in Macromedia’s Director, Kaiser says an animation of a flame boiling water in a beaker could take months to put together. (He should know; he used to be VP of product development at Macromedia.)

But because ScriptX is object-based, the water can “act” like water, the flame can “act” like a flame and the water boils after the flame has heated it sufficiently. The user could move the beaker away from the flame; the water would then take longer to boil. Move it closer again, or turn up the flame, and the boil occurs sooner. It is not a compiled animation — it happens in real time, based on the user’s interactions and the physical properties that the objects were imbued with when they were created. And, says Kaiser, since you were able to model the property of flame — i.e., heat — it’s quite easy to go the other direction and model the property of ice as well.

Kaleida is now poised to bring these advanced capabilities to a much larger universe via ScriptX. Dynamic adaptation or object-oriented capabilities alone could provide a powerful impetus for content developers to move toward ScriptX, and must certainly be part of the reason that tool makers such as Macromedia and Passport are becoming eager to support it.

HOW DOES THE ALLIANCE WORK?

Depending on where you’re sitting, ScriptX can be a number of things. To title developers, it’s the means to reach a larger number of multimedia players than was ever possible before. For tool developers like Macromedia and Passport Designs, ScriptX is an extension to their existing authoring environments that enables anything created with their products to run on any ScriptX-enabled platform, and gives them access to some powerful new software technologies to boot.

Increasing the universe. Equally important to hardware manufacturers, ScriptX finally provides them with a set of recommended specifications — and even an operating system for a consumer device if they want one — that will increase the universe of multimedia-capable devices without forcing them immediately to overhaul their entire product lines.

Early ScriptX platforms in 1994 will likely include the Mac and IBM computers and workstations running OS/2 right out of the gate; also included will be Apple’s Sweet Pea consumer multimedia product line and other consumer devices built by alliance members such as Toshiba as they become ready to go to market. Considering the volume of developers working on multimedia on Intel platforms, a ScriptX runtime for Windows should be high priority for Kaleida as well.

Free to be. For members of the hardware alliance, ScriptX allows them a certain amount of freedom to differentiate themselves from their competitors while they’re still able to make a “multimedia player” in the aggregate definition. This brings to mind the sort of classical consumer electronics model, where there are high-, middle- and low-end everything, from VCRs to TVs to CD audio players. All play the media they’re supposed to play, but they just do it with varying degrees of elegance and quality.

AN OPEN, ONGOING LICENSING PROGRAM

Although the charter members that will be announced in March will essentially be on the same footing as Apple and IBM — i.e., they will receive some kind of preferential treatment as a result of kicking in early — Kaleida is adamant that what the company is providing is an open, ongoing licensing program to any vendor that wants to support cross-platform compatibility.

They say, “affordable.” Dan’l Lewin, vice president of sales and general manager of licensing for Kaleida, won’t talk publicly about licensing and fee structures for Kaleida’s technology. One might assume, since the alliance is designed to support hardware vendors only, that the fee to software developers would be negligible. And since alliance members do pay some non-recurring engineering costs up front, one might also assume that the royalty structure for vendors will be as affordable as both Lewin and Goldhaber claim it will be.

When posed the question of whether the Kaleida alliance is considering the same kind of setup that Microsoft uses for its hardware partners — i.e., a per-box charge — Lewin will only say that if Kaleida were to adopt such a scheme, it would be at significantly lower cost than what Microsoft charges.

No obligation. In terms of what they’re asked to bring to the table, Lewin says charter members aren’t even under the same obligation as Apple and IBM to provide Kaleida with access to technology — though of course if Toshiba or Philips (if it joins) wanted to throw in specs to their highly acclaimed color flat panel technologies, we doubt anyone would complain.

“It’s just an agreement to work together over the three-year charter membership period,” says Lewin. “They’ll get early access to technical information, and can comment on it, guide us, give us input. We’re going to give them ScriptX executables, account representation, and to take care of their ongoing questions in a priority manner.”

A WAY TO EASE IN NEW TECHNOLOGY

But it is this arrangement between Kaleida and its parents that provides an interesting foundation for how ScriptX itself could evolve. Kaiser says that Kaleida’s agreement with Apple and IBM says that they give Kaleida access to source code for such technologies as QuickTime, for example, and what Kaleida gives them in return is ScriptX executables, nothing more.

Its only agreement, and it’s a vital one, is that it does not share technology secrets between companies. So imagine if Sony joined the alliance, for example, and was willing to bring to the table the necessary hardware specs to its high density blue-light CD-ROM technology if and when it comes to market.

The ease with which new, powerful multimedia technologies could segue into the software development community actually provides some pretty good incentives to join the alliance — especially since it’s clear that Kaleida is working on recommended hardware specifications that will optimize ScriptX performance in the field.

And unlike other consumer platforms such as the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, ScriptX is software, not hardware-based. When it’s time to move to more capable machinery, hardware vendors are free to do so. At this point, however, Kaleida isn’t willing to discuss how it might upgrade the base ScriptX specification.

Working with standards groups. Although Lewin was somewhat coy on the subject, he made it clear that Kaleida will be submitting proposals to standards bodies for cross-platform technologies.

Since Apple and IBM are already signed on, getting the support of Microsoft would be a big win for Kaleida, though the Windows RTE can be done without Microsoft’s consent or permission in the same way that an application developer can write Windows software without Microsoft’s approval.

But Goldhaber, of course, would much rather the relationship be cooperative. “We’d be very interested in bundling ScriptX with Windows and supporting it, even though we’ve never worked with anyone like that,” he says. “We’d also love to have Visual Basic do ScriptX output, and to work with Video for Windows.” To date, however, there’s been no sign that Microsoft is ready to make a deal with the fledgling company.

THE OL’ CAVEAT AT THE END OF THE STORY

It’s becoming kind of a cliché in this industry to be excited about the possibilities of something and be cynical about it in the same breath, and Kaleida does not cause the exception.

Better than they thought. It’s clear that the company’s ScriptX technology is far better than many people thought it would be, and its potential for the future — in terms of performance if nothing else — is far better than the present as vendors and tools developers retrain their sights on data formats and performance features that are slightly more centralized than they are today.

And it’s exciting that the company is getting some good support from the consumer electronics industry, and is likely to get a good deal of support from the computer industry as well.

You can have it. But as we’ve said many times, we wouldn’t change places with the Kaleida management team without an awful lot of money changing hands at the same time. Alliances are notoriously big on altruistic public statements, and notoriously puny when it comes to altruistic action behind the scenes.

We do not doubt that there is a lot of political jockeying going on behind the scenes at Kaleida, and all we hope is that Apple and IBM are both sufficiently committed to the project to get out of their own way and let the best thing happen.

TURBOCHARGE OR A MARKET? YOU DECIDE

In terms of technological prowess: as is true with any standard at any time, there will always be something that runs multimedia titles better and faster than ScriptX. It is the nature of the beast of technology.

But if ScriptX continues along the lines it has to date, it will definitely be the most viable technology for cross-platform development, taking pains to take out the pain for both software developers and hardware vendors who don’t really want make the call on what the standard platform for multimedia will be in the next year.

Kaleida is absolutely oozing with fine programmers who have been around the block with multimedia and know what needs to be done. And they are doing it. Those who are willing to jump on their bandwagon will most definitely be giving up supercharged performance in the short term; what they’re likely to get is a bigger market overall. Given the present state of chaos, it doesn’t sound like there’s much of a choice.

Denise Caruso

THE MADNESS OF ROLAND
An ambitious, and difficult, interactive novel

Hyperbole Studios, 1412 West Alabama, Houston, TX 77006; phone (800) 554-9696, (713) 529-9696, fax (713) 529-9632; price $59.95.

Despite the fact that The Madness of Roland is CD-based, it’s best described as a novel because it is largely a text-based story about the Medieval character of Roland, nephew to Charlemagne and (in this story) the hero of the Siege of Paris by Muslim infidels.

The title, originally designed as a theatrical performance, incorporates elements of dramatic radio plays, film, animation and hypertext. But it is not an interactive novel in the way most people think of interactive fiction. With Roland, the reader’s actions don’t determine how the story progresses. Instead, writer and producer (and performer of the title role) Greg Roach explored a different kind of interactivity where there are multiple character perspectives on the same scenes or events.

There is plenty of historical precedent for the technique in modern literature, and in classic films such as Kurosawa’s Rashomon, but both lack the capability to switch between characters “on the fly” and, obviously, neither could contain Roland’s additional media elements.

Compelling the reader to “think.” Roland is intellectually and artistically rich. The writing, the use of classic works of art and literature, the historical and philosophical references — all compel the reader to think about what is being presented, and how it is being presented. These choices — i.e., whether you choose to rely primarily on the narration and voice over, or read it as a traditional text, or how you choose to follow different characters — change the experience of Roland each time it is read.

The interface to Roland is based on Tarot cards. Each character has his or her own icon/card. As a reader you are free to choose in what order you will navigate the story. Each character also has an associated musical theme. As you choose a character, the story is presented in that character’s voice, although certain story lines are presented as third-person narration. Of course, the narration and the music can be toggled on and off.

Each chapter, and each character’s story within each chapter, has Sun and Moon icons which add, respectively, textual and visual thematic or evocative elements to the story. They do not necessarily directly relate to the story (the text can often be quite unusual in its source materials: Carl Jung, P.D. Ouspensky, Sun Tzu, Carlos Casteneda, Anaïs Nin, and a recipe for pigeon stew, to name a few) but they add dimension and perspective to the scene. The Moon elements are the most interesting, as these are primarily QuickTime movies and animations that are stunningly created.

Roland, however, was not an easy “read.” The different media elements in Roland often conspired to adversely affect each other, especially if you try to go through the story without missing any links or media elements. The first problem was the text itself, which is displayed in a small, rather squiggly font called Genji. In addition, dialog and hypertext links are expressed with different colored or formatted text, resulting in certain screens with four or five different colors of text, some in boldface, and leaving the reader wondering what he or she should be looking for.

With all of these elements available on the screen, including the Sun and Moon icons, different textual links and the audio soundtrack, as much time is spent making sure you haven’t missed any of the media links as concentrating on the storyline. This is especially tricky if you are trying to follow the emotions and actions of a half dozen characters at once.

The QuickTime movies, however, are superb. The movies in Roland include beautiful scenes, vignettes and animations that are some of the best uses of the QuickTime tools and technology that I have seen. Chapter 3 of the novel consists of a five-minute video depicting Roland’s madness after he has been drugged by an evil (and love-sick) enchantress. The movie mixes original video with classical works of art and special effects to create both the images and sense of Roland’s encroaching insanity.

Roach’s other QuickTime work (including the interactive movies The Wrong Side of Town and Big Warm Bear Arms) has dominated the two industry QuickTime Film and Movie festivals for the past couple of years, garnering numerous accolades and citations, including two “Best of Show” awards.

PROBLEMS ARE MANY FOR MULTIMEDIA NOVEL READER

Multimedia novels are problematic. For one thing, it is very difficult (and often physically painful) to read large amounts of small text on a computer monitor. By the time the book is finished, your eyes feel as if they have been put through a microwave oven. (It would be impossible to complete Roland in one sitting. There are several hours’ worth of material to explore.)

Plus, adding interactive media elements does not always accomplish the intended goal of enriching the story. For example, while the stories were being read aloud, I would stop following the text (as most people read much faster than an actor can recite) and jump ahead to the “hot spots” while the story went on in the background. With this method, I got neither the full benefits of hearing the story, nor did I maintain the concentration necessary to read the text. The result was that it was difficult for the story to hold my attention — there were too many distractions.

Even though The Madness of Roland is a novel, thus by definition, text-based, I found myself wanting to shut my eyes, sit back and listen to the story. I didn’t want to interact; I didn’t want to look for hot spots and buttons. The audio became the most important element on this disc — only I wanted an even richer experience. Chapter 6 of Roland began to approach the experience I was looking for; more extensive use of sounds and effects helped to put the listener on the battlefield or in an army camp. I was amazed at how a few audio elements could evoke so much richer an experience.

While I was listening to the story play out, I wondered about the old radio dramas of the ’40s, when talented actors and writers could create gripping mysteries and romances that captured the imagination solely with voices and sound effects. If you’re not familiar with this genre, think of Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds (which was released as a record album some years back), or listen to the news on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. It is one of the few radio programs that can still evoke a scene or location through the use of sound — often better than television news.

Not enough multimedia artists are concentrating on audio as an equal part of the media mix. And I’m not talking about some goofy sound effect every time you click your mouse. Sound, done properly, can be more effective, even if not quite as sexy, as video in setting tone and scene.

Despite whatever Roland might be lacking in the audio department, Roach has created an extremely ambitious product. Nothing in Roland is superfluous (except perhaps for the highlighted text that links to asides or a few words of background). Every element, every movie or animation and every image has been very carefully thought out and exceptionally well done; the actors are clearly talented.

It’s probably a little too ambitious, in fact, to expect that a reader of Roland could manage to absorb so much media in one pass through the novel. One might find that going through the story a few times, focusing on different elements — the acting once, the writing and text the next — leads to a fuller experience of the story. The larger question is whether this is what we will eventually want from our interactive fiction. In any case, The Madness of Roland is a fine start on the road to find out.

David Baron

AN INTERESTING LEGAL WRINKLE
New media and the Copyright Act

Is a new media CD-ROM title like a book, a video or a software program? Which parts of the Copyright Act, which governs legal protection for intellectual property in the U.S., apply? Sitting as it does at the intersection of four publishing industries — books, records, film and video, and software — new media publishing contracts and Affiliated Label agreements are modeled on any one of these industries, and borrow language and business practice from the others as needed.

The longer-term legal implications of this mix-and-match method had not been considered until the rather simple marketing idea of rentals surfaced. Recently new media distributors have announced their intentions to provide a limited number of CD-ROM titles for rent through video rental retailers. They are obtaining permission to rent these titles from the copyright owners, and in so doing have opened the door to questions about how to categorize new media products for legal purposes.

DO YOU LICENSE A TITLE, OR BUY IT?

Some new media titles are copyrighted as software, thus are “licensed” to purchasers for “use” on computers. This is distinctly different from other new media titles, which are simply copyrighted as entertainment products — neither software nor phonographic recordings — and are distributed like any other book or video.

The exclusive rights of the copyright holder apply to entertainment products: he can make the initial sale, reproduce the work, prepare derivative works from the content, distribute copies for sale, and otherwise transfer the ownership of the copyright for the purposes of rental, lease or lending.

With works that are literary, contain music or choreography, or are audio-visual in nature, the copyright holder can further transfer the rights to have the work performed or displayed publicly.

At this point, the First Sale doctrine kicks in. The First Sale doctrine, which is part of the Copyright Act, states that after the initial sale by the copyright holder (if the product is not a sound recording or a software program, in which case other restrictions apply), the buyer can rent or resell the product, but cannot reproduce it or make derivative works from it without permission of the copyright holder.

But you can’t rent software. An amendment to the Copyright Act, which applies to sound recordings or computer software programs on tape, disk and other media embodying the program, prohibits the rental of these titles and the gaining of direct or indirect profit from renting, leasing or lending these titles, without express permission of the copyright owner.

However, this prohibition does not extend to a computer program embodied in a machine or a product (for example, a Sega game machine, a talking doll, etc.) that cannot be copied during the ordinary operation or use of the machine or product. The amendment further maintains that this restriction does not apply to a computer program embodied or used in a limited-purpose computer for computer games or other purposes.

NOT A BOOK, NOT A MOVIE IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE

Again, the issue of categories arises. CD-ROM discs cannot be easily copied (yet). So, is a new media CD-ROM title like a book, a video or a software program? So far, distributors seeking rental rights have always obtained a signed authorization, which implies they are treating the title as software, even if it is published (like a book) with only a copyright disclaimer and no software licensing agreement.

Also, many new media titles exist simultaneously as floppy-based software, and the rights to rent, lease or loan are an extension of a previously signed software contract or an Affiliated Label agreement for a new media title.

Caveat to the reader. It is not the purpose of this short article to examine in depth the Copyright Act and its application to new media. My only intent is to raise a warning flag to all players in new media: Now is the time to get your legal act in order.

Through the chaos of merging the film, record, book and software industries, it is critically important that developers and authors, publishers, distributors and retailers understand the blurry edges of legal rights in these new media, and how these rights affect distribution into retailing, rental outlets and libraries.

For example, distributors want to test the formula of “rent-to-sell-through” in retail. The interest in this formula comes from the success of the purchase of previously rented 8- and 16-bit Sega titles: three out of five titles purchased were rented first.

The price of these games hovers around $49, which matches some CD-ROM titles and which is the price anticipated for most titles within the next year or two. And so the retailers, distributors and publishers are interested in putting out titles for rent, to test the sell-through model experienced by Sega.

Some of the excitement around CD-ROM rentals began at the winter Consumer Electronics Show in January when Compton’s NewMedia announced that it would rent selected titles through 20/20 Video.

Dissension arose when a regional sales manager of a new media distributor conducted a small and legal test run of a title, pressing a limited number of special discs marked “for video rental only” and distributed them through a small number of video retailers in a single region.

Following the video rental model in retailing, the titles were rented, and if not returned, the customer’s credit card was charged with the suggested retail price — in this case, $99. These CD-ROM titles went out for rental, and, basically, were never seen again.

This was a successful test for the publisher and the distributor, who both were very happy. However, it caused the issues of copyright law, and today’s categorization of CD-ROM titles (software versus entertainment products), to come roaring out of the closet.

The rental plans have raised dissension in the industry about the copyright laws that might apply to CD-ROM titles. Titles publishers started to argue among themselves about which category the titles belonged to and whether or not they could be rented, and all were correctly citing the Copyright Act to bolster their various arguments. Some CD-ROM titles are indeed considered software and packaged with an end user license agreement. Thus considered, the end-user never “owns ” the product, but only licenses its intellectual property for use on a single machine. Software is not allowed to be rented without the express permission of the copyright holder.

Other titles are correctly packaged and sold as “finished goods” entertainment products, protected by the Copyright Act only as far as the First Sale doctrine applies — in other words, copies can be made as long as they aren’t for commercial purposes, and purchased copies can be rented for individual, and not commercial, viewing.

These are recent developments and new questions that are now being raised. Most titles are published with careful copyright protection of the creative materials that contributed to its content, either as “work for hire” or in the transfer of the copyright to the publisher of the title.

With the variety of media used, the copyright of a new media title is actually a complex bundle of copyrights. Distributors, publishers, retailers and copyright attorneys maintain that there was too much else to do to create a market for the new media industry to be concerned with copyright protection at the level of detail that may now be required for rentals, leasing and loaning through libraries. The finer points of law were often lost, or simply not considered.

FINDING A PATH THROUGH THE COPYRIGHT ACT

The language and intention of the Copyright Act are clear: to protect the owner and/or creator of intellectual property. But its many amendments are dense with conditions, exceptions and inconsistencies across all four categories of products. It is into this thicket that new media products must descend and find their identity.

This is not a hopeless situation, and if you’re an author or developer, here’s what you should do if you want to be able to rent out your CD-ROM titles.

• First, make certain that all contributors to the content of your new media title have granted you the broadest possible rights to use their material under the Copyright Act.
• Also make certain that your contributors and creatives understand what they are signing over to you in these rights, and that they have the right to grant to you these rights without infringement of any other party.
• Remember that the inclusion of copyrighted sound recordings in the content of your title may prohibit the entire title from being rented at a future time.
• Publishers and distributors should be careful in the development of their contracts and their marketing programs, especially those that allow for rental of titles and sale of titles to libraries for lending.
• Make certain that the rights you are obtaining have been legally granted all the way back to the creative contributors.

DON’T FORGET, PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE

Retailers should be patient with the suppliers of their products, while these converging industries sort out their legal practices. Retailers should also be careful that the rights to rent or lease products have been legally obtained.

All players should acknowledge that the intersection of four publishing industries brings forward four distinct cultures and historic business practices and language. Each culture will assume that its language and practices carry certain assumptions of rights and behaviors, but must remember that these cultural assumptions may not be understood by the “foreign” player.

And, speaking of foreign, the U.S. copyright action is not automatically accepted as law in other countries. International issues are even more complex than our own, from the moral rights of France to the country-by-country customization of copyright law applied to each industry.

LEARN TO THINK ABOUT LONG-TERM CONSEQUENCES

The emergence of a new industry and a new market that is the focal point of four other entertainment industries is as exciting as it is chaotic. We must take care in our business dealings, and constantly think ahead. Think ahead to newer media, to new channels that are not understood yet, to technologies not yet invented, to markets and applications not yet imagined. We must leave ourselves the opportunity to expand into directions not yet conceived, and to protect ourselves from restrictions not yet anticipated.

And, of course, just in case, everyone should indemnify everyone else. It’s the American way.

Joanna Tamer

WHAT DRIVING TO THE STORE WOULD BE LIKE IF OPERATING SYSTEMS RAN YOUR CAR

MS-DOS: You get in the car and try to remember where you put your keys…

Windows: You get in the car and drive to the store very slowly, because attached to the back of the car is a freight train…

Macintosh System 7: You get in the car to go to the store and it drives you to church…

Unix: You get in the car and type GREP STORE. After reaching speeds of 200 miles per hour en route, you arrive at the barber shop…

Windows NT: You get in the car and write a letter that says “go to the store,” then you get out of the car and mail your letter to the dashboard…

Taligent/PINK: You walk to the store with Ricardo Montalban, who tells you how wonderful it will be when he can fly you to the store in his Lear Jet…

OS/2: After fueling up with 6,000 gallons of gas, you get in the car and drive to the store with a motorcycle escort and a marching band in procession. Halfway there, the car blows up and kills everybody in town…

S/36 SSP (mainframe, obv.): You get in the car and drive to the store. Halfway there you run out of gas. While walking the rest of the way, you are run over by kids on mopeds…

OS/400: An attendant locks you into the car and then drives you to the store, where you get to watch everyone else buy filet mignons while you shop in the “priced to sell” section…

(Source: the Internet. Note attached: “This comes from a friend of mine at Microsoft. You may find it humourous…”)

WILLIS PICKS CIES
The world might never be the same

Ever since Allee Willis saw her first CD-ROM title last year, the award-winning song writer, artist, filmmaker and pop culture aficionado has been looking for ways to use interactive technology to “reinvent the mass entertainment market.” Now she just might get her chance.

Willis, who has won numerous awards including a Grammy and a Cable Ace, recently became the first authorized developer of Loren Carpenter’s newly commercialized audience participation technology, which — as a testament to its capabilities — enabled 5,000 people to play a rousing game of interactive Pong during a 1991 Siggraph show (see Vol. 2, No. 2, p. 30).

The technology behind the Cinematrix Interactive Entertainment System (CIES), as it is called, consists of a hardware board still in development that will initially run on Silicon Graphics’ Indigo workstations, and “wands” wrapped in a highly reflective material called Reflexite that can control the computer’s actions.

CIES was invented by Carpenter of Pixar, who recently won an Oscar for his work on the RenderMan rendering software. When completed, the system will be distributed worldwide exclusively by Magic Box Productions of Beverly Hills (see Vol. 2, No. 6, p. 22).

Though Willis says she certainly does not plan to use the CIES for playing interactive Pong, she is cautious to give away too much of how she plans “to walk the world into the 21st century.”

She emphasizes that the work will be a collaboration with members from the entertainment community and technical experts such as Carpenter and Magic Box producer Sally Rosenthal, who told Willis about the audience participation technology during Seybold’s Digital World conference last year and facilitated a meeting between Willis and Carpenter.

“It is a commitment among all of us that we absolutely don’t want to do anything, unless it’s going to create a new form of entertainment,” says Willis, who is writing, directing, producing, scoring and co-designing the interface for her first audience-controlled event.

She says the production will transcend many different media, including television, film, games and live events. “My idea for interactive (products) is very character driven, very story driven,” says Willis. “I have created characters, a place and situations that are absolutely crazy. My characters are true interactive characters; they change over time based on decisions made by the audience.”

According to Willis, some of the 21 characters in her new interactive project might be making a comeback rather than a debut. Several, she says, were first introduced during her famed celebrity “pajama parties,” which have graced the cover of Details magazine and have been the topic of conversation on David Letterman’s late-night TV show.

During these parties, Willis-invented “characters” would walk around and interact with guests, involving them in different activities — from winning a dream date with Fabian to outfitting them in the latest garbage-bag apparel.

“My things in the past have always been interactive,” says Willis. “Now technology is making it a million times easier to do this — to create the energy and the pandemonium essential to the type of entertainment I want to create.”

Willis has been underwhelmed by the interactive technologies such as CD-ROM she’d seen previous to CIES, which should be a functional prototype by May, according to Magic Box’s Rosenthal.

“If you are going to try to create entertainment you have to move at least as fast as the audience,” Willis says. “And if you have a technology that constantly starts and stops, how can you expect an audience to care?”

Willis says that the first incarnation of her project might appear on an already established medium while the technology catches up with her artistic vision. “I am a pop artist, I have ultimate respect for pop culture — I have 17 TVs and they are always on — and I feel very strongly about doing what I am going to do via pop, existing, linear media such as TV and film. I have written a script that is not dependent on when the technology is ready.”

Janice Maloney

FUJITSU SHIPS MARTY
Multimedia player is PC-video game hybrid

Fujitsu, the world’s second largest computer manufacturer, recently began shipping a multimedia player into the Japanese market that some believe could end up competing head-to-head with 3DO if it ever is sold in the U.S.

The FM Towns Marty, an $850 CD-ROM-based multimedia player that plugs into a television set, is targeted toward the home consumer market in Japan as a personal computer-game machine hybrid. Though under the hood it is an Intel 386SX computer with 2 MB of RAM and a built-in CD-ROM drive, the device looks more like an oversized answering machine with a remote control than a computer.

SNEAKING PEEKS STATESIDE, BUT NO PLANS FOR U.S. YET

The Marty initially will be sold only in Japan. To date, the device does not support MS-DOS or Windows, but Fujitsu representatives say that decision is based more on the fact that consumers in Japan don’t look for DOS or Windows compatibility. There is no technical reason why the Marty couldn’t support both platforms if demand existed.

That demand isn’t likely to materialize in the near future, according to Fujitsu representatives, since there are as yet no plans to release the Marty in the U.S. But Fujitsu has been sneaking the Marty around to trade shows in the U.S. for a few months and although the company will absolutely not speculate on its future plans to make the Marty available stateside, it’s clear it does not intend to repeat its past mistakes in addressing the U.S. market.

According to Tom Randolph, president of the FM Towns Support Center in San Francisco, the company is testing market interest in the U.S. and working on a strategy to build a distribution channel for its consumer devices in the States. “Multimedia is a long road,” says Randolph, “and we [at Fujitsu] tend to like to make our mistakes in our domestic market.”

A sleek look in ‘89. Fujitsu’s multimedia strategy began with the original FM Towns personal computer that was launched in 1989 to great fanfare. Despite its sleek look and built-in CD-ROM drive, the machine was a bomb in the U.S. because it was not DOS- or Windows-compatible and few U.S. developers would write software for it.

It was not Fujitsu’s first expensive U.S. mistake. In the mid-1980s, as the PC-clone phenomenon was catching on, Fujitsu and other early PC vendors missed the wave by launching its computers with an incompatible version of MS-DOS.

Even in Japan the Towns machines (supposedly named after a famous scientist) have achieved only modest success after a slow start. PCs are still mainly confined to offices, and a machine with a CD-ROM drive built in was even more of an enigma to the Japanese business market.

NEW CHIPSET DOES HIGH-RESOLUTION ON A TV SCREEN

While the new Marty itself may not make it into the U.S. anytime soon, Fujitsu is considering licensing — to third-party manufacturers both in Japan and abroad — the most compelling component inside the Marty: its chip technology for displaying high-resolution images.

Using what Fujitsu claims is the world’s first “full-digital one-chip video converter,” which is based

on the company’s proprietary Line Interpolation Scanning Technology (LIST), the Marty can display a resolution of 640 by 480 — the same high-quality resolution displayed on computer devices — on a television set. The images in most of the titles we saw during a demonstration of the Marty were exceptional.

STILL RISKY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

The release of the Marty is a risky move for Fujitsu even now. With consumer audio and video equipment in a prolonged slump in Japan, the company is daring to make a play for a slice of the Japanese home consumer market — traditionally the hallowed ground of Nintendo, Sega and, more recently, Philips CD-I game machines.

To do so, the company is promising to deliver more than 400 education and entertainment titles and applications for the Marty by year’s end (there are 250 existing FM Towns titles that will play on the new consumer device), including titles from U.S. companies such as Brøderbund Software and Maxis Software. In addition, Marty can play audio CDs, CD+G (music with graphics) and CD dictionaries.

Despite the risk, Fujitsu representatives say they expect the company to sell more than 250,000 Marty devices in the first year. Fujitsu will sell Marty through “department stores and supermarkets,” according to Akira Kuwahara, Fujitsu’s general manager for personal systems, as well as into its established PC channel: electronics and computer shops in Japan. The company’s PC distribution channel includes 3,000 outlets in Japan that distribute FM Towns systems and its peripherals.

Janice Maloney

IBM BUYS ITS WAY INTO HOLLYWOOD
Opens f/x studio with T2 director James Cameron

Despite its recent and highly visible problems, IBM earlier this month finally announced its plans to build a visual effects company and digital production studio.

The new facility, rumored to involve a $20 million investment from IBM, is called Digital Domain and is being developed collaboratively by IBM with film director-writer-producer James Cameron, Oscar-winning special effects and character creator Stan Winston, and Scott Ross, former head of special effects for Industrial Light & Magic, a division of LucasArts.

If all goes as planned — contracts had not been finalized when Digital Media went to press — Digital Domain is expected to be in full production as early as summer. Winston and Ross will serve on the board of directors of the new venture, to be based in West Los Angeles, with Cameron as chairman.

Part of the plan. IBM will be equally represented on the Digital Domain board. According to Lucie Fjeldstad, IBM vice president and general manager of multimedia, who was instrumental in orchestrating the development of the digital production studio, it has yet to be determined who from IBM will represent its interests in this venture. It is likely, however, that she and Kathleen Earley, director of multimedia alliances for IBM, are in the running for the job. Both of them have spent more than two years developing a business plan and market strategy for IBM to enter into the DPS market.

Ross, who came to IBM and proposed the collaboration after he had met Earley at an IBM focus group more than a year ago, will handle the day-to-day affairs of Digital Domain as president and CEO. Cameron and Winston are expected to define the company’s creative vision and strategic direction.

No role in creative. According to the partners, it is likely that some employees from IBM will come on staff at Digital Domain to help fulfill the company’s technological vision, but the group emphasized that IBM Corporate in Armonk, NY, will not play a role in determining the creative direction of the new studio.

Equity in the company is to be divided among IBM, Cameron, Winston and Scott. IBM owns 50 percent, and the three entertainment industry figures own equal shares of the remaining half. Partners say that profits will be shared as well.

HEAVY ON SMOKE AND MIRRORS, LIGHT ON PLOT

As with many blockbuster special effects events, it was initially easy to get lost in the stars and glitz surrounding the Digital Domain announcement — held at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles, with CNN filming in the background — and miss the lack of real content or direction for this particular joint venture. But once you get past the smoke and mirrors, at the bottom of Digital Domain is IBM scrambling for a turn-around strategy in the wake of its crushing losses.

Throughout the announcement, both groups involved — IBM and the creatives — talked about the “perfect synergy” between the respective partners and evangelized a “ground-breaking” vision for Digital Domain and the future of digital technology. It’s too bad the two groups weren’t really discussing the same vision.

Facility vs. studio. Cameron and Winston pushed the notion of Digital Domain as a sophisticated, fully equipped digital production facility, while Fjeldstad and Earley drove home IBM’s dream of creating a new Hollywood studio, with IBM of course owning the hardware and software tools developed at the digital production studio — as well as owning digital rights to the content created at the studio.

Ross, who was and will remain in the unenviable position of acting as liaison between these two groups, did not say much during the press announcement.

SEPARATING REALITY FROM HOLLYWOOD HYPE

Initially, Digital Domain will be a production service facility, focusing on creating special effects and high-resolution moving images for commercials, movies and location-based entertainment attractions. (Members of the Digital Domain team declined to comment on prospective projects at this time, although they did say negotiations were in the works for several different ventures.)

According to Cameron, Digital Domain will provide an environment where even film directors who make only dramatic movies — i.e., sans high-tech effects — will come to use digital technology to avoid the great expense of a location shoot.

As an example, he cited Martin Scorsese, a well-known director of dramatic films such as Taxi Driver and Cape Fear. If Scorsese wanted to do an epic film on Napoleon, says Cameron, he might go to Digital Domain to create computer-generated backgrounds of “castles and hordes of cavalry” which would then be digitally composited with scenes shot with live actors.

IBM wants a film studio. In contrast, Fjeldstad focused on Digital Domain as Hollywood studio. She says the real goal of the DPS is to get out of the digital production facilities business as soon as possible and begin developing original content for new entertainment media and “next generation” software and hardware tools for use among the entertainment community.

Fjeldstad and Earley both said that IBM expects Digital Domain to produce tools that in the long run have benefits beyond the film industry. According to both, IBM hopes the DPS will generate sophisticated visualization products that will service the medical profession and the construction industry, too.

EVOLUTION MAY REQUIRE REVOLUTION

In addition to its desire to develop and own intellectual property, IBM clearly wants to acquire the ownership and distribution rights to as much digital computer technology as possible. And in the proposed Digital Domain partnership agreement, IBM could potentially do just that — if the company ever creates any tools.

Bizarre and ambiguous. The proposed agreement includes a bizarre and highly ambiguous term that states that ownership of new software and hardware products developed at Digital Domain will be decided by Ross on a case-by-case basis, with IBM getting “first right of refusal.” In other words, it is up to Digital Domain’s president to determine how long a technology developed at Digital Domain should remain proprietary and when to turn it into a commercial product. Once the decision to go commercial is made, IBM gets first chance to acquire the technology. No details were available as to how this might work if all parties involved didn’t agree with Ross’s timeline.

In addition to tools, IBM also wants to acquire the digital rights to content created at Digital Domain, so that it can produce interactive media titles and video games. Although neither Fjeldstad nor Earley would comment on the subject, it is possible that any such acquisitions by IBM might make their way to IBM’s newest multimedia division, Fireworks Partners. Fireworks’ charter includes the creation and distribution of interactive content, among other activities related to multimedia (see Vol. 2, No. 9, p. 15).

Cameron and Winston, on the other hand, seem to have a vested interest in keeping Digital Domain a digital production facility that produces visual effects. Both men already own entertainment-based companies that generate original content.

Cameron, who last spring signed an exclusive five-year, 12-picture deal with 20th Century Fox, owns a production company called Lightstorm Entertainment, which is based in West Los Angeles — just a few blocks from a space under consideration for Digital Domain. Similarly, Winston is the founder of a visual effects film company, Stan Winston Productions. Both companies would be potential clients of Digital Domain.

And since original content actually would be generated at both Cameron’s and Winston’s other studios, IBM might potentially be left without access to any intellectual property that its two creative partners generate.

ACCESS TO MONEY AND TECHNOLOGY

Under this scenario, the win for Cameron and Winston is obvious. The two have access to IBM’s seemingly deep pockets — if you believe the figures being bandied about the entertainment community and computer industry — as well as access to the most advanced digital technology in the world, regardless of computer platform.

As announced, Digital Domain is platform independent and offers the creative partners freedom to work on any computer system, including Silicon Graphics workstations and Apple Macintoshes as well as IBM systems. In fact, Digital Domain is not even obligated to use digital technology. According to Winston, Digital Domain will still use “duct tape and miniature creature models” — traditional methods for creating a special effect — when it is appropriate. “This is not about who has the biggest computer,” says Winston, “it’s about the creativity behind it.”

IBM’s PVS gains star quality. For IBM, however, this venture might very well be about who has the biggest computer. The IBM Power Visualization System, or PVS, which at it low-end configuration costs

more than $320,000, is a RISC-based computer system that has parallel processing capabilities for faster rendering times and provides gigabytes of storage space. Originally created for the scientific visualization community, the PVS is now catching on in the entertainment community.

IBM is making sure of it. In an obvious attempt to steal mindshare away from the film industry’s long-time favorite, Silicon Graphics Inc., IBM has been making the film industry aware of its new tools through equipment donations and technology trade agreements with companies such as Wavefront and Pixar. Both are rumored to have received Power Visualization Systems at no cost in exchange for commitments to produce technology that runs on the system.

IBM competes with customers. IBM also has some paying customers, including some of the largest established visual effects studios in Hollywood, including Boss Film Studios, R/Greenberg Associates’ Los Angeles office and Laser-Pacific Media Corp., a post-production company. Ironically, if Digital Domain opts to install a PVS in-house, it will compete with the companies that actually paid IBM for PVS machines in order to gain an advantage over the many DPS facilities now in existence in Hollywood. According to Fjeldstad, it’s not a conflict since Digital Domain’s goal is to get out of the effects business and create content and products.

It is important to note, however, that Fjeldstad’s vision of a Hollywood studio would be a near impossibility under the existing digital production facility plan for Digital Domain, which would place the DPS under constant production pressure to finish computer-generated visual effects for content projects generated outside of the company.

IS IBM STAR STRUCK WITH ITS OWN CREATION?

During the Digital Domain announcement, both Fjeldstad and Earley of IBM seemed bedazzled by their nearness to Hollywood. When questioned about what she sees as the big win for IBM, Fjeldstad replied, “Who can know what is next? This is a revolution.” She also made the statement that “this venture is more of a journey.”

But IBM is not exactly in a comfortable position for the ride.

To start, IBM’s involvement in Digital Domain has obviously jeopardized the good will of some of its paying customers. Digital Domain clearly trespasses on the established market of some of its newest clients — not a great idea for a company that is trying to transform its image after massive job cuts and earning last year the dubious distinction of posting the largest single-year deficit for any U.S. company in history.

It’s a little late. In addition, from a strictly practical business perspective, it is a little late for IBM — as well as Scott, Winston and Cameron, for that matter — to be getting into the DPS game. As reported regularly in Digital Media, every major movie studio in Hollywood, as well as many independent production companies, has either established or is planning to build in-house digital production facilities.

According to one Hollywood insider, Digital Domain “is going to have to hit the ground running in order to stay alive.” It remains to be seen if the company can do that.

Is cachet enough? IBM also needs to take a hard look at what it really gained by involving itself with Cameron and Winston. There is absolutely no question that both deserve the accolades laid at their respective doors. They are both extremely talented and powerful forces to reckon with in Hollywood and both have proven that they understand what motivates a huge majority of consumers to pony up their money at the movie theaters, with hits such as The Abyss, Terminator, Alien and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Certainly IBM has achieved a sort of Hollywood cachet through its alliance with both of them, but that is not going to help IBM or Digital Domain survive if there is no substance behind the relationship. The two must be more than high-paid figureheads, who use the facility as their personal digital technology lab.

Potentially in Digital Domain’s favor is Ross, who during his tenure at ILM worked tremendously hard to grow the company. He is credited with increasing the staff from 100 employees to more than 300, expanding the company internationally, introducing digital-based high-resolution film technology, furthering the use of computer-based 2D and 3D imagery and increasing revenues by three-fold.

If he can somehow bridge the gap between Cameron’s production facility of today and Fjeldstad’s Hollywood studio of tomorrow, Digital Domain might live longer than IBM’s initial investment and become a viable new entertainment studio. If not, Digital Domain may be destined to become a high-tech training ground for Hollywood directors who come to learn digital production on the back of IBM’s investment, then leave to do their real work somewhere else, unencumbered by rules about who owns what.

Janice Maloney

KODAK OPENS UP PHOTO CD
Company announces software tools, licensing agreements to open standards

Members from Eastman Kodak’s Photo CD Imaging Group have not been sleeping much lately. For the past few months the technical and communications team responsible for the development and evangelism of Kodak’s Photo CD digital imaging technology have been on the road demonstrating some of Kodak’s new Photo CD hardware and software tools and trying to build strategic partnerships and licensing agreements with computer companies, consumer device manufacturers, and applications and hardware vendors.

In short, the company is immersed in an aggressive campaign to open up the Photo CD standard and encourage the native adoption of Photo CD at the operating system level on a variety of devices. Already, Philips CD-I and certain members of the Macintosh, Atari and Acorn families of CD-ROM-based computers can access, read and display Photo CD discs — without requiring any external software or hardware from Kodak. The 3DO Company says it plans to provide system-level support for Photo CD in its Interactive Multiplayer consumer device as well.

In addition Kodak has been wooing several other major computer and consumer electronics companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Silicon Graphics, Commodore and Hitachi to build support for Photo CD into their next-generation system-level software technology or consumer device. If these powerhouses were to adopt Photo CD at the system level — and several of them are expected to make announcements to that effect in the not-too-distant future — Kodak’s Photo CD might very well become the first de facto digital imaging standard.

AN INTERACTIVE SPIN FOR DESKTOP PUBLISHERS

In the meantime, however, Kodak does not plan to sit on its hands and wait. The company, which has been fighting to create a demand for its Photo CD technology since it was announced in 1990, has announced plans to deliver several Photo CD hardware and software tools that will potentially enable commercial publishers and business presenters to use their existing computer systems and software to publish Photo CDs from the desktop.

Authoring software package. By this fall, Kodak plans to ship its own authoring software for the Photo CD multimedia format called Portfolio. Primarily used for entertainment viewing including slide shows and interactive media titles such as Rick Smolan’s From Alice to Ocean, Portfolio discs can hold up to 800 display-resolution images, or one hour of CD audio, or a combination of images, audio, graphics and text.

The Portfolio authoring software includes three distinct applications: an image packer, which initially will convert only TIFF files to the Photo CD format but the company says support for PICT is soon to follow; a copy/merge module, which enables individuals to copy Photo CD image packs from one Photo CD to another, maintaining Photo CD playback compatibility; and a portfolio organizer module, which is similar to the Composing Window in Macromedia’s MediaMaker post-production software.

Portfolio also provides the tools for an individual to combine the audio, text and images to build a story board for a multimedia presentation or title. Kodak’s organizer can organize the information with linear and non-linear sequencing.

Still need a Sparcstation. Initially the software will be Unix-based and will run only on a Sun Sparcstation, since that’s the original production system that Photo CD was designed for, but Kodak says it plans to port the technology to the Macintosh by September. The company also says it will develop the software for the Microsoft Windows multimedia PC platform, although no time frame for delivery on that platform has been announced.

Kodak is not selling this technology cheap. The packaging of authoring tools will be bundled with a $5,995 writable CD-ROM drive. The total price of the hardware/software bundle will probably be just less than $8,000. Publishers will still need to purchase or own the Sparcstation.

Kodak claims it will sell Photo CD Portfolio format discs for about $25. (Kodak claims the estimated price point is in line with the average cost for Sun- and Unix-based applications and says the pricing might drop when the technology is ported to the personal computer platforms.)

Not for fun. The Kodak Portfolio authoring software/writable drive bundle is obviously not for the person who wants to send an interactive holiday greeting card on disc to a few friends and family. (Kodak is adamant, however, that its goal is to bring exactly those capabilities to the consumer market.)

For now, though, the Photo CD Portfolio publishing system is targeted toward Kodak’s commercial market — in particular, electronic publishing houses such as The Voyager Company, as well as in-house corporate audio-visual departments that create company-wide presentations or that generate large amounts of information to be distributed to remote offices.

Kodak claims that the cost savings for these types of organizations are immense. Considering the price tag of generating a business presentation at a slide service bureau — a minimum cost of $12 for a 35mm slide that’s of limited use — customers can quickly amortize the cost of purchasing its publishing system: 600 megabytes at $25 a disc.

Playback of Portfolio-format discs requires one of Kodak’s three Photo CD players, a Philips CD-I player that hooks to a television set, or a computer system with a Photo CD-capable CD-ROM drive, plus software to read and display Photo CD data. Hitachi might soon provide another viewing option. Although neither Kodak nor Hitachi would confirm it, it is rumored that Hitachi plans to produce a Photo CD player device this year.

Like dropping off a roll of film. For individuals who can’t justify the cost of bringing the Kodak production system in-house or don’t want to, Kodak says it is setting up photo finishers across the United States with the necessary equipment, so that people who want to press an interactive multimedia disc can drop off their original materials, and the finisher will build the Photo CD disc for them.

Georgia McCabe, director of Kodak’s worldwide commercial CD Imaging group, says photo finishers, service bureaus and in-house audio/visual divisions will be beta testing the commercial production system by mid-June. When the system is finalized, it is possible that publishing kiosks will be set up in these shops so that the customers can build their own discs, according to the company.

In the near future, Kodak says it will make its Photo CD Portfolio media, authoring software and APIs available at no charge to third-party software developers such as Macromedia or Aldus to encourage their use of the format within their presentation and authoring software.

This would allow commercial producers to create their “storyboards” in the program of their choice — if it supports the Kodak authoring description language — then save it on a computer disk as a Portfolio file format and bring it into a photo finisher, service bureau or for that matter into an in-house corporate production department for actual production of the discs.

Degree of difficulty. At this time Kodak does not plan to provide the technology necessary to write a Photo CD disc straight from one of these applications. The company says its decision is based on its belief that it would be expecting too much of these outside companies to build the necessary support for such a function into their applications.

“It’s not trivial to get data onto a CD-ROM disc,” says Paul McAfee, communications manager at Kodak. “When you write a CD-ROM disc, you need to manage a continuous flow of the data stream to the disc. And these third-party companies would have to build in all the functions needed to collect the data in an unfragmented data stream to the CD-ROM disc. [We believe] they don’t want to write the interface to the CD-ROM writer.”

KODAK TO GRANT LICENSES FOR MASS PRODUCTION OF PHOTO CDS

In the near future, the company also plans to develop a licensing program to allow the mass-replication of pre-recorded Photo CD discs, including the Photo CD Master, Pro Photo CD Master, Photo CD Catalog and the Photo CD Portfolio formats. Prior to this announcement, publishers who wanted to produce a Photo CD disc had to go to a photo finisher or service bureau that used one of Kodak’s Photo CD Imaging Workstation (PIW) systems.

Under the agreement, publishers using approved disc replicators and CD pressing houses will be allowed to mass-produce the contents of a Photo CD disc in the same way they mass produce audio CDs today. Kodak plans to charge the pressing house a “minimal” royalty per disc for the use of the Photo CD format and trademark logo. Kodak says it will negotiate separate royalty agreements for publishers who want to include Kodak software on their discs.

HOW ABOUT A NETWORKED CD-ROM WRITER?

In addition to the software and licensing developments, Kodak has announced an alliance with Meridian Data Systems to codevelop and co-distribute writable CD drives for use in a networked environment. According to Kodak, it is no different from a shared printer, except that instead of printing on paper, the device will print CD-ROM discs.

Initially the NetScribe 1000 system from Meridian and Kodak’s PCD LAN writer will be able to print ISO 9660 standard CD-ROM discs — for data and custom applications. According to Kodak, though, both these writers will support the writing of CD Portfolio discs when Kodak ships the Portfolio authoring software later this year.

Meridian is actually buying the writers from Kodak and “modifying them extensively,” according to a Kodak representative. Meridian plans to sell the device for about $13,995. Kodak in turn plans to buy a certain number of the writers back from Meridian and then sell them as Kodak drives.

According to both companies, they expect some overlap in the channel but believe they have primarily different markets. Kodak says the drive with its brand name will be priced similarly to the Meridian.

THE LONG VIEW: A SIGHT FOR SORE EYES

Kodak made several additional announcements in tandem with those mentioned above. The company is now shipping its InfoGuard-treated media that is supposed to be more durable and longer lasting than existing write-once or mass-produced CDs.

In conjunction with that announcement Kodak released information on its new writable CD publishing software for Windows, which will eventually be available on the Macintosh and Unix platforms. In addition Kodak is finally shipping the DOS version of its Photo CD Access software and the Kodak Photo CD Access developer toolkit, which will enable third-party software developers to build support for the Photo CD file formats into their applications.

According to Kodak, Aldus Fetch, Color Professional from ImageIn, Media Cybernetics’ Dr. Halo, Corel’s CorelDraw, Aldus PhotoStyler, Adobe Photoshop, EFI’s Cachet, Micrografx Picture Publisher and Photo Magic, and Mathematica’s Tempra Access can all read and display Photo CD images today. Each of these applications, if they don’t have support built in, provides the necessary software online or through software upgrades.

Kudos for Kodak. We applaud Kodak. For with each of these announcements, the company has proven that it has finally learned to work within the confines of the computer industry. But we encourage the company to not lose sight of its long-term goal: The real win for Kodak is the native adoption that McCabe has begun evangelizing.

Photo CD everywhere. If, for instance, Kodak were really to achieve through widespread licensing agreements the native adoption of Photo CD into cross-media devices, it would mean individuals could pop a Photo CD disc into many different types of devices that offer built-in support for Kodak’s technology, from a CD-ROM-based Macintosh or Multimedia PC to a 3DO Multiplayer to a Sony five-disc CD audio player, and be able to read and view the contents of that disc without having to purchase any Kodak software or hardware.

In addition, cross-platform applications could handle Photo CD formats as just another image type. And computer scanners could read the files from the desktop. Photo CD technology would be the de facto standard for handling digital images.

Janice Maloney

IS EDUCATION THE MULTIMEDIA ‘KILLER APP’?
Jostens debunks the myths

Despite multimedia’s obvious perfect fit in the education market, the most common perception in the industry is that there’s no way that schools —weighted as they are with tight budgets, obsolete computers and locked-in distribution channels — will be able to support even part of a new media industry.

But according to John Kernan, CEO of Jostens Learning Corp., schools are “where the really neat stuff will happen” in multimedia applications.

At a recent seminar for venture capitalists in New York, Kernan pointed out that educators have always made use of diverse media: Cuisinaire rods, illustrated books, 16mm movies, overhead projectors and whatever else they could get their hands on. Teaching is “media-intensive” at every level. Thus, there is a huge market opportunity for producers of electronic media; education could be the long-awaited “killer application” that drives sales up the hockey-stick curve.

Clearly not everyone believes this. Kernan points to some widely held myths about the education market that may be keeping entrepreneurs away.

Schools have no money. Wrong. School districts annually spend an average of $5,000 per student. Colleges spend $8,000 per student. Education is a huge chunk of the national economy; if you add up the numbers — students, faculties, administrators — the total is equivalent to 25 percent of the workforce.

Some market research indicates that the market for learning materials is as much as $4.2 billion, and electronic materials are 19.6 percent of that total now. By 1996, some estimate that schools will spend 26.6 percent of $6.8 billion on learning materials.

Kernan says computer-based media are increasingly part of that flow of money.

Stuck with obsolete computers. Anyone visiting a computer center in a grade school is likely to find aging Apple IIs and PCjrs, not the powerful graphics machines needed to run the new, media-rich applications.

This might daunt the would-be entrepreneur, but it shouldn’t. Schools buy solutions, says Kernan, and they will buy whatever hardware the solution requires. Jostens sells only bundled systems: fast computers, CD-ROM drives and laserdisc players, installation, training, support and software. This, he says, avoids all chicken-and-egg problems.

Buy through the channel. The notion that schools will buy computers and media players by mail-order or at a local retailer is ludicrous, in Kernan’s view. Schools have purchasing procedures as cumbersome as any in the land; selling cycles are at least nine months long. The key is to field a well-trained sales force.

Kernan expects that the hottest categories in the next few years will include the pre-kindergarten age group, especially for bilingual English-Spanish titles, and prisoners. (We see plenty of parallels between prisons and schools besides mandatory attendance and authoritarian structures. Funding sources, citizen support, governing bodies, a need for remedial learning and public demand for better statistical outcomes are also alike.) Industrial training is another big growth area.

Not that simple. Of course, if it were really that simple, it would already be commonplace. Teachers are still uncomfortable with computer-based approaches. Some were turned off by the brain-numbing drills that were touted a few years ago. Others are just innately conservative.

At the venture capital conference in New York, Ellen Nelson, CEO at Decision Development Corp., pointed out that it took 20 years to get the overhead projector accepted in the classroom.

But perhaps the biggest obstacle to wider use of electronic media is that they haven’t found any champions within the schools. Appealing to the students isn’t enough (after all, they are addicted to video games). According to Tom Snyder, president of Tom Snyder Productions, if it is to be successful, “any educational innovation must find a central adult and benefit him.”

This observation belies the Nintendo Heresy: the notion that games where kids solve math problems while blasting space aliens will be good teaching tools. It doesn’t matter whether the kids like it; it must help some teacher or administrator by lightening his load, cutting absenteeism, improving test scores or whatever the school board is currently cranked up about.

Peter Dyson

HDTV MADNESS REDUX
Plea to TV, computer folks: Let’s get along

For more than five years, a Federal Communications Committee group chaired by Richard Wiley has attempted to hammer out a broadcast standard for high-definition television (HDTV). When the group first was set up, the general impression was that the new standard would be analog and probably there would be only one real contender — the Japanese NHK/Sony MUSE system. Two years ago, General Instruments shocked everyone by proposing a fully digital system at the very last moment. Joined by several other contenders including Zenith, AT&T, MIT and Thomson, extensive tests were undertaken to choose a standard.

At the eagerly anticipated Feb. 24 meeting of the Wiley committee, no one group had been able to prove its standard was best. NHK/Sony had thrown in the towel because it was at least clear that any standard chosen was going to be fully digital. The committee asked for a new round of tests and suggested that perhaps the warring parties could get together and decide on one standard.

BENEATH THE CALM, BATTLES ROYAL RAGE

Underneath this relatively calm-looking process, all sorts of rumors and battles were taking place. The hottest unconfirmed and subsequently denied rumor had AT&T making a deal with Sony on an interleaving standard desired by most television manufacturers. It would certainly be desired by Sony, since today that company makes the only production and editing gear for a digital interleaving standard. AT&T probably could put such a deal together since it was one of the main contenders. Zenith has been effectively out of the technical aspects of the competition for more than a year and General Instruments was happy to share in the licensing agreements.

Such a deal would have been adamantly opposed by U.S. computer companies that feel that a true digital standard should have progressive scan, square pixels and use the SMPTE header/descriptor system. These features would allow products to be made for both the television and computer industries. No television manufacturer would have an advantage and the products would be technically more sophisticated throughout from production through transmission to the end-user set.

Liebhold as overseer. At the meeting, with Sony representatives inexplicably absent, the committee chose Mike Liebhold of Apple to chair a subcommittee to oversee the interoperability parameters of any proposed standard. This should ensure that testing of progressive scan material is given equal status to the up to now only interleaved material used in the tests.

The subcommittee will be obtaining the non-interleaved, progressive scan material from two new machines: one developed at the cost of multiple millions of dollars for intelligence community use, and the other a prototype system being developed with DARPA funds at a start-up in San Diego.

Even if the material is not used by the committee testing for the broadcast standard, it will be used by the computer industry, which is developing its own digital standard. It is expected that the computer industry standard will be ready before testing is done on any broadcast standard.

Tom Hargadon

CHANGES AFLOAT FOR THE MPC SPEC?

Rumors are swirling that the MPC Marketing Council is about to revise the specification for the Multimedia PC. According to Marc Miller of NEC, chairman of the council, “a Level II specification is under consideration and review by the technical subcommittee.” While he didn’t want to discuss any specifics of the changes being considered, such as minimum hardware or processor speed, he said that the changes should be considered “as an evolution of the first-level spec.”

Creating a minimum specification is a problematic task, considering how quickly technology changes. By the time any specification is completely implemented and new software is created to take advantage of it, the next generation of hardware is out. This is especially difficult for an organization that is attempting to define the hardware for the benefit of software developers.

According to Mike Grubbs of Tandy (and the past-chairman of the council), “to define a multimedia spec from a components perspective is futile in a world that changes every four months.”

(The obvious truth of this sentiment is likely to be an excellent marketing tool for Kaleida Labs’ cross-platform authoring tool, ScriptX. See story on page 12.)

The technical subcommittee will continue to evaluate options for the MPC, and an update on the process is expected to be made at the Intermedia conference in San Francisco this week. The council is also expected to announce a certification process for hardware platforms, to ensure that all MPCs on the market truly meet the current specifications.

HEARST NEW MEDIA GROUP HAS SIKES AT HELM

The Hearst Corporation recently made public its plans to play a role in the convergence between entertainment media and digital technology.

The New York-based communications company, which is one of the largest diversified media companies in the United States, has formed the Hearst New Media and Technology Group in New York. To run the new venture, the media giant has hired Alfred Sikes, the former chief of the Federal Communications Commission. Sikes, who left the FCC this past January, is expected to begin work this week.

The New Media Group’s charter is twofold. First, the group is expected to uncover new ways to exploit the corporation’s massive media library, which includes content from the company’s book group, 13 consumer magazines, 17 newspapers, six radio stations and six television stations. According to Sikes, the group will adapt present editorial and programming resources to the new formats and delivery systems being created by advancing technologies.

The second mission of the group is to build worldwide partnerships and alliances with companies that are committed to using emerging technologies to create new information, entertainment and education services for consumers. (To date, no such partnerships have been announced.)

Sikes sees this opportunity as the culmination of his work in Washington. “I now have the opportunity — working with one of the best-endowed publishing companies in the world — to use advantageously the transforming technologies that were pivotal to the vision of Telecom 2000 and my work at the Commission.” Telecom 2000 is a study initiated by Sikes during his tenure at the FCC that examined and researched the media world as it is expected to be at the turn of the century (see Vol. 2, No. 1, p. 9).

Sikes will report to Hearst president and CEO Frank Bennack Jr.

3DO SETS STOCK OFFERING SANS PRODUCT OR REVENUE

The 3DO Company of San Mateo, CA, continues to amaze its prospective competitors. The company, which does not yet have a shippable product but does have a multi-million dollar deficit, has announced its plans to sell 2.1 million shares of common stock at between $10 and $12 a share.

If you consider that this proposed initial public stock offering involves only 10 percent of the company, then 3DO’s total value is estimated somewhere in the $300 million range — not a bad number for a company that has only shown technology demonstrations of its Interactive Multiplayer consumer device and has a $13.2 million loss on the books as of January 31, 1993. According to company representatives, that figure is expected to increase, not decrease, throughout this year.

In addition to the proposed sale of common stock, the company also plans to sell 100,000 shares to Trip Hawkins, 3DO founder, president, CEO and chairman of the board, in a non-underwritten sale. This means Hawkins will get to deal direct and not have to pay the mark-up to brokers that the general public will pay. He will still pay about $1 million for the shares. (The proceeds per share of stock to the company will be the same.)

This is very interesting — and unusual. Usually principals sell stock when a company goes public. In this case it seems that all of the money is going to the company and none to the original investors, which include Matsushita of Japan, Time Warner, AT&T and the Palo Alto venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Despite the risk factor, some industry analysts expect the company to sell out the offering — if it receives the necessary clearance from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. (The process usually takes about six weeks and was still under way when Digital Media went to press.)

Others in the industry are getting belly laughs over the 3DO prospectus, a fascinating document that exposes many weaknesses in the 3DO strategy — not the least of which is the fact that no one knows whether the player’s chips can be manufactured in volume. “3DO is the ultimate transfer of risk to the public,” says Jim Clark, chairman of Silicon Graphics in Mountain View, CA.

Hawkins is obviously hoping his proposed commitment to invest $1 million of his own money in 3DO might instill enough confidence in prospective buyers to counter the high risk of investing in a company with no product.

The fact remains, however, that this resembles a Biotech offering far more than it does a typical computer technology offering. (Biotech, however, doesn’t have competitors the likes of Nintendo or Sega.) The company is going public at a high valuation before it ever ships a product. If it is successful, however, the benefit to 3DO is a substantial war chest, since it is possible the company could raise $30 million from a successful offering.

SOUTHWESTERN BELL BUYS INTO CABLE COMPANY

Southwestern Bell might just become the first Bell operating company in history to purchase a U.S. cable company. In a recent joint agreement announcement with Hauser Communications Inc., the telco stated its intent to purchase two cable systems in the Washington, DC, area for $650 million from Hauser.

According to the terms of the agreement, Southwestern Bell is expected to pay about $2,900 per subscriber for Hauser’s 225,000 cable homes in the Montgomery County, MD, and Arlington, VA, area. (The systems have 68 and 58 channels, respectively.) Given the soft market for cable systems, this appears to be a steep price tag, even for these two affluent communities in the DC area.

The transaction is subject to regulatory approval and will not be completed until after July 1993. Officials at both Southwestern Bell and Hauser say they don’t foresee a problem with acquiring regulatory approval, however.

Although legal under the Cable Act of 1984, it has been near impossible to date for a regional Bell operating company to purchase a cable company outside of its service areas because RBOCs are prohibited from participating in both owning programming and providing long-distance services, but are guaranteed local telephone monopolies. Pacific Telesis, for instance, dropped its efforts to acquire a Chicago area system after waiting for two years for the U.S. District Court Judge Harold Greene to grant a waiver that would have permitted Pacific Telesis to import satellite and other distant signals.

But Southwestern Bell’s interest in cable is part of a growing trend among the RBOCs, which have fought long and hard for the right to deliver lucrative video programming despite their total lack of experience in this market. Ameritech and Rochester Telephone have also announced their intentions to enter the cable television service market in the United States. Each of these companies is proposing to the FCC that it would give up its local monopolies in exchange for the freedom to provide cable television and long-distance phone service.

In effect, the telcos are lobbying for a level playing field, in which all of the telecommunications industries would be able to offer all services. Whether this is the right approach has yet to be seen. The most common complaint is that the owners of the highways or infrastructure should not be allowed to control or own the traffic that flows over those networks, a situation that would severely disrupt cable television operations as they are conducted today.

Southwestern Bell is no stranger to providing cable services. In addition to providing telephone service in the South and Midwest, the telco sells cable service to 1.6 million homes in the United Kingdom and Israel; it also owns a cellular telephone service in the Washington, DC, area.

BEDEVILED BY LACK OF PRODUCT, OR BY ASTRONOMICAL COST?

The multimedia age, such as it is, with more than a dozen potential standards and mostly optical media, is bedeviled by the lack of much interesting product. Sure, you can blame the lack of standards. Or the slow access times in the present standards making interactive video a dream. Or the lousy, kludgy authoring systems. Or, above all, the lack of imagination.

But look at it another way; how much does it cost to develop a product in each of these media?

The real answer is we do not know. Many products have taken several years of a developer’s or developers’ lives and they did not get fully paid. Other times, such as in the case of the Desert Storm product from Warner New Media, the price tag of $60,000 did not really include much of the time spent by executives and others or much in the way of overhead.

Some of us have been asking around about fully paid, fully featured commercial products. No one really wants his or her name connected with these numbers. So here, totally unattributed, are some estimated development costs for different platforms.

Sega. The highest figure we received for a Sega CD title was $1.3 million per title. The company probably goes through many versions, kid-testing and the like. Certainly more of that is done by the big game companies than the other media concerns.

CD-I. The usual number given for a title has been in the $300,000 range but others say, “Oh no, it is more like $800,000.” This higher figure probably includes some overhead charges and authoring development costs as well as the actual costs of putting the title together.

CD-ROM. With some graphics, some video, some interactivity, $250,000 is “a number,” as they say. More text-based titles with simple animation and few search routines, which are quite common in this arena, may come in for around $100,000, but don’t hold your breath.

3DO. No developers have stepped forward yet with numbers. But John Perkins, who helped develop the Isis interleaving technology at Hasbro (where many 3DO folks came from), said it would take more than $300,000 to develop a good half-hour program for his interactive TV desktop system that Canadian cable operator Groupe Vidéoway is marketing for $300 or so. Other educated guesses are $500,000 or more, since Perkins’ Hasbro products cost more than a million to produce.

CDTV. No one talks much. But then, there’s not much to talk about.

Those are some big numbers for small sales. It is no wonder that many early producers are looking at interactive TV as a means of providing interesting programming at lower cost. More on that in a later issue.

PHILIPS JUST MIGHT HAVE A HIT WITH ‘NAME THAT TUNE’

Philips, which has been struggling for more than a year to establish its CD-I players into the home consumer market, has just announced its plans to release a Name That Tune CD-I title that offers instrumental, Muzak-like versions of 600 Top 40 hits from the fifties to present day, including such infamous one-hit wonders as “Billy Don’t Be a Hero.”

Name That Tune, of course, is based on the long-running TV game show, and is “hosted” by Bob Goen, also the latest host of the syndicated television game.

While we can’t imagine any family in the world actually wanting to play this game seriously, the title’s digital Muzak has potential cult appeal for the college crowd and the Baby Boomer generation that is in love with all things kitsch. It might even sell a few CD-I players.

Producer Rosalyn Bugg, who produced Jazz Giants for CD-I prior to Tune, believes in the mass appeal of the disc. “Tune does have a kitsch factor,” she says. “It’s not supposed to be a ‘Mario’ or ‘Sonic.’ What it is, is a social activity game.”

According to Bugg, a viewer can play Tune 15 times before a song repeats itself. And even when it comes up again, it might not appear in the same category. It also has more than 400 trivia questions, including “Which two Bee Gees are twins?” and “What is Paul McCartney’s brother’s name?”

Tune has Goen, the live-action host, walking around an on-screen room, inside a Parthenon-type structure with a black-and-white, checker-patterned floor. The lip-synch to audio is just a hair off, which only adds to the charm.

It took eight months to clear copyrights on all the songs for Tune. Bugg says it wasn’t difficult once she and Phil Cooper, head of royalties at PIMA, got in the door. “We went from music publisher to music publisher, making requests, doing demos,” she says. “Once we did a demo, people were very interested.” Bugg and Cooper did not demo Tune; they presented a sample of CD-I titles.

They then requested the publishers’ music catalogs to go through and select the music they wanted to appear in Tune. Bugg says this process took about three to four weeks and then the two would go back and resubmit the catalog with their requests. According to Bugg, Philips paid $125 for each 12- to 15-second clip of music. (This seems excessive to us, considering the tunes are Muzak and not performed by the original artists, but to each his own.)

Manifesto Music, based in Connecticut, actually produced all the music for Tune. Counting duplicates and remakes, the company produced more than 12,000 pieces of music.

Name That Tune is expected to be released in time for the Christmas season, with a retail price between $30 and $50. Bugg says her next project for CD-I is Wheel of Fortune.

CONTINUUM BEFRIENDS RUSSIAN MUSEUM & BARNES FOUNDATION

Continuum Productions Corp., formerly Interactive Home Systems (see Vol. 2, No. 6, p. 10), has established long-term working relationships with two of the world’s leading art institutions — The Barnes Foundation and the State Russian Museum.

It has acquired non-exclusive digital rights to both collections; digitized reproductions will be incorporated into Continuum’s interactive digital database and related interactive programs.

The Continuum database, developing in collaboration with leading arts institutions, photographers, publishers, videographers, information archives, artists and other cultural and educational resources, will eventually include collections of fine and applied arts, history, science, travel, current affairs and pop culture. It is intended to be a resource for students, educators, artists, scholars and the general public.

Both museums entered into the working agreements with Continuum for an opportunity to expose their collections to a larger audience. The State Russian Museum, located in St. Petersburg, contains the largest collection of Russian art in the world. Due to the vast size of the collection — about 400,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and works of decorative art — the museum shows only a sampling of its work at a time.

The Barnes Foundation in Merion Station, PA, holds one of the world’s finest collections of Post-Impressionist paintings and early French modern paintings and works on paper. Continuum’s non-exclusive rights include seminal works from Matisse, Cezanne, Renoir, Seurat, van Gogh, Gaugin and Picasso.

Continuum, located in Bellevue, WA, was founded in 1989 to explore the delivery of high-quality interactive programming to homes, schools, public institutions and businesses, and to provide image-based services to those in museums and creative communities.

Continuum also has two long-standing relationships with the Seattle Art Museum and The National Gallery of London and non-exclusive rights to several other important international art collections (see Vol. 2, No. 5, p. 20, and Vol. 1, No. 4, p. 18).

MCI TO TEST HIGH-SPEED, TRANS-ATLANTIC SERVICE

Beginning in April, MCI will begin a test run of a high-speed, circuit-switched, bandwidth-on-demand data service between the United States and Europe. MCI International Switchband, as the test service is called, will provide high-quality, contiguous bandwidth for such services as video conferencing, remote printing, imaging, local area network (LAN) connections, radio broadcasting and other high-speed data transfer applications.

The service is designed to offer MCI customers the ability to initiate a digital communications link for contiguous bandwidth that can support multiple data speeds from 256 Kbps up to 1,920 Kbps. A single call will provide a connection that allows flexible data transmission speeds throughout the call.

Test service will initially be provided to a handful of U.S. companies and the United Kingdom in conjunction with Mercury Communications, Ltd. Based on testing results, MCI may make the service available on a wide-scale basis in the U.S. and in additional countries in Europe and the Pacific later this year.

The service is compatible with the standards of European and Asian carriers in the Globand consortium. Globand is a group of European and Asian telecommunications carriers joined to provide a single standard for switched services. Undersea fiber will be the primary transmission medium.

MCI expects primary customers for the service will be transnational corporations, in particular those specializing in finance, engineering, medicine and publishing that have a need to transfer large amounts of data. Since no final decision has been made about whether the service will be offered commercially, no cost has yet been established.

FRANKLIN ELECTRONIC DICTIONARY APPROVED FOR MEDICAID REIMBURSEMENT

Slowly but surely, digital technology is being accepted into mainstream use. New York State has approved for Medicaid reimbursement Franklin Electronic Publishers’ electronic speaking dictionary as an augmentative communications device. Franklin’s Language Master Special Edition is a hand-held electronic language audio device for people who are blind, visually or hearing impaired, learning disabled or dyslexic.

Franklin, working with groups such as the American Federation for the Blind, designed Special Edition exclusively for its users. Among the features of the 5½-by-5-inch device are a specialized interface and customizable keys. Every letter is pronounced aloud as it is typed, and every word, definition and help message that appear on the screen. The keyboard contains raised high-contrast keys, several raised location dots for keyboard orientation, and “where” and “ID,” or identification, keys which verbally tell what function is being used.

In addition, speech speeds, font sizes and frequently executed commands can be adjusted and customized to accommodate the needs of each user. For example, up to 26 frequently used phrases, such as “I would like a glass of water,” can be stored to be spoken at any time.

The content of Special Edition is a comprehensive dictionary and thesaurus by Merriam-Webster that contains more than 300,000 definitions, 500,000 synonyms, spelling corrections for more than 110,000 words, and an electronic grammar book. The device, which became available in May 1992, retails for a suggested price of $500.

Although Special Edition is of benefit to its users, the $500 price tag is prohibitively high for many potential users. Reimbursement by New York State’s Medicaid program is a welcome step forward in making the technology available to a larger pool of people. New York is the first state to approve Franklin’s device for Medicaid reimbursement. However, Franklin is actively seeking similar sponsorship from other state and federal medical institutions across the nation.

APPLE REVEALS PARTNERS FOR NEWTON, DEBUTS POWERCD

Apple’s Personal Interactive Electronics division chose the CeBIT show in Hannover, Germany, last week to make several key announcements.

Apple previewed its PowerCD, the first of what Apple claims will be a line of CD-ROM-based multimedia products from PIE.

The portable device, which is a CD-ROM, Photo CD and audio CD player, is equipped with SCSI and video out rolled into one and can connect with either a computer or a television screen. It is expected to be shipped this summer. No price has been announced.

Regarding its Newton personal digital assistant technology, Apple revealed the names of four new companies that have agreed to develop and license products based on Apple’s Newton.

Joining Gaston Bastiaens, vice president and general manager for Apple PIE, were members from Sharp, Siemens Private Communications Systems Group, Cirrus Logic and Matsushita.

Sharp, Apple’s partner in the development and manufacture of the Newton PDA technology, announced that it plans to license the ARM chip technology, which is central to the Newton family architecture, from Apple.

Siemens Private Communications Systems Group outlined its strategy to collaborate with Apple on the development of NotePhone, a combination of Siemens-Rolm telephony and Newton technology that will provide access to telephone and fax features.

Cirrus Logic plans to develop and supply Newton compatible chip sets for use by licensees of the Newton operating system and for Apple itself in members of its planned Newton product family.

Matsushita rounded out the announcement with its agreement to license the Newton OS from Apple for use in future products. Both Apple and Matsushita made it clear that they are part of a mutual admiration society and are interested in potentially cross-licensing additional technologies from each other.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?
A network for media education

A national media education group called the National Alliance for Media Education (NAME) has opened up shop in Oakland, CA, with a $50,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Its charter is “to provide a way for people in the field to network, and to bring media education into the mainstream of education,” says Robin White, project coordinator.

During its first year, NAME will compile a media arts education database and publish a regional directory of organizations involved in the field. The directory will list media educators and organizations by region and by area of expertise.

The group will also produce public education materials that provide an overview of media education in the U.S. The education materials will contain descriptions of model media arts education programs, information about media arts and student-produced videos. Both the directory and the resource materials will be available to interested parties, White said.

Although the working group, functioning under the auspices of the National Alliance of Media Arts & Culture (NAMAC), is funded for a year’s term, NAME is planning for the future. Long-term objectives are to facilitate a national support network for teachers, to promote national awareness and understanding of media education, to develop a diversified funding base for media education, and to seek opportunities to integrate media education across the curriculum.

NAME is seeking involvement from artists, educators and others in the field of media education. For more information, contact Robin White,

c/o O.E.P., 84 Wooster St., Suite 503, New York, NY 10012; phone (212) 941-5944, fax (212) 941-5947.

ON COMMAND AT HILTON HOTELS

On Command Video, a specialist in on-demand video services and member of the First Cities alliance (see Vol. 2, No. 7, p. 11), has inked an agreement to provide Hilton Hotels with in-room interactive services and entertainment.

On Command will allow guests in Hilton’s 50 managed and owned hotels on-demand access via television sets to a variety of programming and interactive services, ranging from cable television and on-request pay-per-view to guest check-out, electronic messaging, room service and guest satisfaction surveys. Hilton’s franchise properties will have the option of using the system as their existing video contracts expire.

The On Command system relies on a bandwidth switch and sophisticated tracking software technology to transmit video and other services on demand.

The analog system works much like a telephone in which a “caller” is connected to video. Via television remote control, viewers may select a desired service from their TV screen. A request signal is transmitted along coaxial cable to an On Command site where a VCR or laserdisc is activated to begin playing the video. Guest check-out and electronic messaging services are similarly interactive.

Since coaxial cable is already installed in most U.S. hotels, an on-site switch and electronics are the only additional hardware that are needed to establish service. The switch and electronics are managed at each site location. On Command president and COO Bob Snyder claims the system could just as easily reside in a cable network, although no such setup is yet in service.

Founded in 1989, On Command has acquired extensive experience in on-demand video and interactive services and the backing of an impressive parent company. It is majority owned by Comsat Corp., the largest owner and user of the global Intelsat and Inmarsat communications satellite networks. Parent company Comsat Video Enterprises (CVE), a division of Comsat Corp., uses satellite and eight channels of bandwidth to deliver on-demand entertainment to the hospitality and entertainment industries.

Comsat is committed to exploring new opportunities in on-demand delivery services. Late last year, it joined the First Cities alliance to construct a ubiquitous nationwide network for the delivery of multimedia (see also Vol. 2, No. 7, p. 11). Charlie Lyons, president of CVE, sees the project as an opportunity to find the leading technology in pay-per-view delivery.

On Command estimates it will serve more than 120,000 rooms nationwide by the end of 1993.

THE VOYAGER CO. MOVES TO NEW YORK

The Voyager Co. of Santa Monica will soon be based in New York City. Long considered the seminal multimedia publishing company, Voyager decided not to renew its lease on its legendary beachfront office property and is moving most of its multimedia production facilities to the East Coast, where it will join company founders at Janus Films.

The publishing community in New York has consistently given Voyager a warm reception for its intelligent treatment of books in the electronic format. Voyager pioneered the Expanded Book series for the Apple PowerBook, providing another and unique outlet for many authors ranging from Neil Postman to Susan Faludi and Michael Crichton. Voyager co-founder Bob Stein is delighted at the turn of events. “In Los Angeles, we’re a pimple on the movie industry,” he says. “In New York, we’re heros.”

Stein says Voyager is starting to do quite well. “The CD-ROM market is actually starting to happen,” says Stein. “And we wanted all the partners to be together for the tactical, day-to-day stuff.” The company has already opened a new editorial office in Manhattan; Stein will move in June, and the rest of the company will move during the summer and into the fall.

The Criterion Collection, Voyager’s highly regarded laserdisc collection, is likely to remain in Los Angeles, and Stein says some of the multimedia development and marketing personnel may move to San Francisco. “To the extent that San Francisco will be the West Coast center for multimedia, we’ll put Voyager right in the key place.”

TRIMARK BEGINS INTERACTIVE DEVELOPMENT

Trimark Holdings, Inc., an independent film developer and distributor, is looking to cash in on its library of film properties with a new subsidiary called Trimark Interactive. The venture has its sights set on a growing interactive entertainment and video game market.

Heading the group are Kelly Flock, former acting general manager for LucasArts Entertainment Co. Consumer Software Division, and Trimark chairman Mark Amin. The venture is starting small — Flock is the first full-time employee — and plans to stay that way, adding no more than 20 employees within the year.

Flock, who has more than eight years’ experience in distribution, production and strategic marketing of consumer entertainment software under his belt, knows that technology companies are volatile and what is hot one minute can be old hat the next. “The industry is moving so quickly that no one can tell where it is going. You have to be ready to turn on a dime.”

For this reason, title development will be external. With title development outside the company, it won’t cast its fate with that of any one technology, but can develop for whatever technology is making money. The company will consider developing for any proven platform or technology.

“We’re not in business to evangelize a certain technology or platform,” says Flock. “We are running this as a business. This is not a sandbox. We are not a Microsoft able to afford millions in R&D. Our goal is to be self-funding soon.” Amin predicts the new venture could bring in as much as 25 percent of total sales for Trimark, which amount to $54 million annually.

Trimark has a dozen or more film properties in its library. However, not all of these films will become digital properties of Trimark. “When you start to get into film properties, you have to take it on a case-by-case basis,” says Flock. The company is seeking scripts and working with film crews to develop films that have interactive aspects.

The first products will be 16-bit video games for Nintendo and Sega on Trimark film properties such as Warlock and Leprechaun. The company plans to have three or four titles out by Christmas, according to Flock.

Trimark is anticipating the rollout of 3DO’s first titles. It won’t be a participant in the rollout, but as Flock says, “If it works, we will be very interested.” The company hasn’t ruled out developing for Philips’ CD-I either, although it has no immediate plans to do so.

After tackling the entertainment market, Trimark Interactive will look to the computer market, and then to the CD-ROM market. It is also considering potential future opportunities when interactive entertainment is available via cable, fiber optics or direct broadcast satellites.

CORRECTION: DEGRAF COLLABORATED WITH WAHRMAN

In last month’s Colossal goes interactive article (Vol. 2, No. 9, p. 14), we incorrectly stated that Brad deGraf was the sole creator of the first real-time performance of a computer-generated character and of the first theme park attraction to use computer animation. Both of these projects were actually created in collaboration with Michael Wahrman, who cofounded the now-defunct deGraf/Wahrman with deGraf.

Wahrman, a computer animation designer who is based in Los Angeles, is working on a virtual environment experiment with Ralph Winter, producer of Walt Disney’s upcoming feature Hocus Pocus, as well as consulting on digital production and entertainment for IBM Research. We regret the error.

ANATOMY OF A FAD
Post-virtual reality: After the hype is over

This article, in slightly different form, will appear as a chapter in the paperback version of Brenda Laurel’s book Computers as Theatre, available this summer from Addison-Wesley. Laurel is a senior researcher at Interval Research in Palo Alto, CA.

A lot has happened in the evolution of interactive media in the two years since Computers as Theatre was published. By the end of 1991, movie producers, cable TV executives and theme-park entrepreneurs began to talk about “passive VR” (an oxymoron if there ever was one), and the term “virtual reality” had begun to spread like an oil slick over anything new and sexy in the world of interactive entertainment.

Meanwhile, hip young Northern Californians, initially at the forefront of VR enthusiasm, began to make jokes about “face-sucking goggles.” As the first mainstream books, movie, and TV shows picked up on the hype, the younger and more creative contributors to the VR community began quietly mutating.

In late 1992, VPL Research — pioneers in the development of enabling VR technology and wellspring of the pop-culture phenomenon — laid off most of its employees.

CHANGING THE SHINGLE TO SOMETHING LESS TAINTED

As the VR “meme” started to flame out in Northern California in 1992, many of us began scrambling to change the words on our shingles from “virtual reality” to something less tainted — telepresence, augmented reality, immersion technology. Anything to get some distance from the all-too-vivid spectacle of the hype-fueled VR-road-and-media show that rocketed VR pundits to the pinnacle of pop culture and then sent us burning back into the atmosphere, noticing too late that we were in the decaying orbit of a fad.

“Hey guys,” little voices shout from the capsule as it begins to glow, “We weren’t done yet… we were just beginning…”.

VR and video games. As a fad phenomenon, there is a striking similarity between VR and the video game business, most particularly Atari. Although it funded a long-term research lab for two years, Atari turned a deaf ear and an empty pocket to the kinds of innovation that could not be wedged directly into the installed base of hardware.

It also shunned innovation that did not fit easily into the rapidly congealing cultural milieu of its products. Atari’s most glaring error (under the Warner regime) was to grossly misunderstand the pace and magnitude of technological change, mistaking the metabolism of computers for that of packaged goods.

Finally, Atari was blind to the fact that it was developing not a consumer-products company, but a medium — one that depended as strongly on content as on technology for its appeal, and which would be ultimately driven by the dynamic between them.

Making it stupid. “At Atari,” the internal jingle went, “we’re making it stupid.” We all knew we were in the grips of an organization that had, to put it kindly, a temporally bounded agenda.

Young idealists burning with the promise of new technology found themselves in a pop-culture factory that catered to its own status quo. We got to do our work in a wonderland — a place with seemingly endless resources and all kinds of slack for creative people — if only we would couch what we were doing in the vernacular of what-was-happening-now.

‘MAKE THE TECHNOLOGY SING AND…TRANSFORM THE MOVIES’

But once you had the culture-making bug, you began to see something of where things might go and what they might become — and that’s where the problems began. They said, “license the latest movie hit and make it into a game” — and some of us thought, “make the technology sing, and maybe it will transform the movies.”

Management turned a fire hose on these strange new stirrings, but the money kept on coming. Million-dollar hackers barely out of their teens drove sports cars into the sea; marketeers consumed pounds of cocaine and ate guns for dessert. Such were the torments of the Fad Mentality.

Most of us lived. Some of us went on to the next thing. For me the next thing was what came to be called VR. An amazing amount of good work got done between 1982 and 1992, before the VR fad started to flame out. Much of it was done by the survivors of the Atari phenomenon. One good thing about living through both of them is that you learn that it’s not the end of the ride — it’s just another local minimum on the roller coaster.

ALL THAT DIED WAS THE HYPE

What went away when the fad died? Primarily, the hype. The hype positioned VR as a technology with the potential for creating a radically new entertainment medium almost instantaneously. It promised that entertainment and technology companies would emit “hi-res, hi-touch” consumer VR products in the short term. It provided the palpable icons of head-mounted displays and datagloves — encrustations on our bodies that we would be willing to put up with for the enormous rush they would enable.

Many people hypothesized that this new form of entertainment would replace both video games and TV. The more hopeful among us declared that it would transform the very nature of human communication.

Firing an entire lab. But the consumer products were not forthcoming. Movie executives that invested millions in the Great Next Thing stepped back in dismay when they did not see hi-res movies in their head-mounted displays. Mattel introduced, then shelved, the PowerGlove, firing its entire VR lab at the same time. Showroom jockeys learned that, after the hype is over, VR probably won’t sell a kitchen or an automobile. VR pundits learned, or should have learned, that the worst thing you can do is fire up public expectations when you can’t deliver product by Christmas.

The train wreck was not as bad as it might have been, because many interesting lines of thought were involved, each with its own momentum. They did not begin with VR and they will not end with it. VR was a monolithic icon for a complex network of ideas. Although the momentary nexus has passed, the work — and the vision — continue.

THE GENESIS OF VR’S TECTONIC ACTIVITIES

While it is true that the threads that make up VR all began before it had a name, the particular constellation of ideas that coalesced caused some serious tectonic activity.

The premise of involving the senses in interactive computing began with Ivan Sutherland’s forays into the world of graphics. Likewise the sense of hearing, which had found comfortable homes in signal processing and video game embellishment, suddenly became a full-fledged concern when VR kicked down the door to the senses. These lines of development, once separate, found new potency as they were integrated by those who wanted to make VR happen in the real world.

Put that there. In the interface domain, experiments such as Schmandt and Hulteen’s “Put That There” used gesture to make speech less ambiguous. Though they still gave primacy to language as the mode of interaction, “Put That There” and other experiments at the MIT Media Laboratory were nonetheless early to recognize the notion of multisensory interface, and it is perhaps to their credit that the folks at the Media Lab valiantly resisted entering into the “VR” domain at all.

The related notion of sensory immersion also has some roots in the Media Lab, with the work of Michael Naimark and Scott Fisher, among others, in the late ’70s and early ’80s. These folks noticed that something qualitatively different happens to you when your senses are surrounded compared to when you are simply gazing at (and listening to) a screen.

A drop from the hose. Naimark took to testing the idea with surround environments filled with relief projections, while Fisher economically placed it on our heads. Both were inspired by the observation that our channel of communication with present-day computers is a drop from the firehose of human bandwidth.

Both, of course, had their predecessors, but both broke new ground in bringing our attention to the nature of the effects that immersion could induce and the domain of research that concerns itself with how we orchestrate them.

THE NOTION OF THE VANISHING INTERFACE

Implicit in much of this work was the notion of the vanishing interface. Before VR, however, the vast majority of work that was done in the interface domain took for granted the notion of the computer as an explicit party to the interaction, and satisfied itself with making that interaction smooth, tractable, “natural” — nay, “intuitive.”

It is truly astounding to me that this notion has such tenacity. If it had happened in the domain of film, we would all go to see projectors instead of movies. By positing that one may treat a computer-generated world as if it were real, VR contradicts the notion that one needs a special-purpose language to interact with computers.

Blowing out the pane. In fact, it throws out the idea of the interface as a cognitive artifact, tool or anything else that should impinge upon our experience. “Direct manipulation” becomes direct sensory encounter, and the pane is blown out of the interface window.

Another tenacious idea, and one that was pioneered by Scott Fisher and others long before VR was a household word, is the concept that Fisher named “viewpoint-dependent imaging,” the idea that all imagery should be constructed from the point of view of an individual human located in the virtual environment.

YOU WILL NEVER SEE THE WORLD IN OVERVIEW

Because of this founding principle, it is hard to create an “establishing shot” in VR — David Zeltzer and his team at MIT spent the better part of a year on the problem. In fact, there is no such thing as an establishing shot in nature — no “overview,” no “camera’s eye.” Unless your spirit animal is a bird of prey, you will not see the world in overview except as an artifact of cinematic or graphical convention.

VR is utterly a first-person point-of-view medium, congruent with the human sensorium. The notion of point of view in VR is the manifestation of each person’s relationship to the world he inhabits. It is evidence that VR showed no prejudice in the throwing out of conventions — it questioned film as rigorously as interactive computing.

Getting the feel. If one is to get the feel of a place, one must walk around it, sniff it, pick things up, feel the presences of other beings with all the senses. The theatre reflected this impulse in the transition from proscenium to thrust and arena staging, and more recently in the blendings of performance, ritual and improvisation that characterized the theatrical avant-garde of the late ’60s.

Somehow in the world of computing, the proscenium, the overview, the schematic, the “graphical representation” have become the norm. But VR reminds us of what we are good at; namely, perceiving the world from a located and situated vantage point.

Involving the sensorium. Alternate views are prostheses that are helpful under some circumstances, but which do not activate all of the circuitry that evolution has so magnificently prepared for us. The premise here is that, when presented with a representation that involves the whole sensorium, a person will respond holistically — and that the whole will be more than the sum of its parts.

Here is the primary means by which feel, hunch and intuition may enter. While drama produces something like this effect by orchestrating emotion, VR produces it through sensory immediacy: the first-person point of view.

Finally, as a proponent of a dramatic notion of what human-computer interaction is all about, I could not be more pleased by developments to this point. Our experiences with VR to this point also substantiate the idea that human interactions with virtual environments are enhanced by dramatic form and structure and complex emotional textures.

As we turn toward what is new, I am encouraged by the rising importance of the social, cultural and artistic aspects of human-computer interaction.

POST-HYPE, NEW BRANCHES OF INQUIRY

New branches of inquiry, like diverging and reconverging waters, have grown out of the idea of virtual reality.

For example, VR has reinvigorated and recontextualized the study of human sensation and perception. Game designers know in their gut that good audio makes people think they are looking at higher resolution pictures, but the converse is not true. While much is known about the human visual or auditory or tactile senses, relatively little is known “scientifically” about how these senses combine.

Interacting with body and mind. The study of sensory combinatorics — how vision affects hearing, for instance, or how the two in concert affect emotion — was almost exclusively the province of the arts until VR came on the scene. I find it cause for celebration when science in the arts can do something more robust than measure the galvanic skin responses of audience members during the last scene of Hamlet. The premise that we may interact with technology through our bodies and our minds has given us occasion to reconstruct our understanding of ourselves.

Similarly, VR has heightened interest in the notions of technologically mediated and shared presence. Before VR became an object of cultural interest, the focus of work in the domain of virtual presence was on productivity, as manifest in teleoperations, teleconferencing and collaborative work.

Shifting to social. As the notion of VR recombines with technologies such as the telephone and computer networking, we are forced to shift our gaze from the economic to the social and cultural dimensions of group activity. This necessitates a broadening of our concept of what our technology is for and how it is related to a much wider domain of human intercourse.

FACILITATING THE MOVE FROM STRUCTURE TO RELATIONSHIP

As I have watched people participate in both multisensory and textual shared environments, my view of structure in dramatic interaction has changed. As an activity becomes

less “artifactual” (like painting or literature) and more ephemeral (like conversation or dancing), sensory immediacy and the prosody of experience gain primacy over structural elegance in the realtime stream of events.

In shared virtual worlds, structural elegance becomes much less about the progression of events and more concerned with facilitating the emergence of patterns and relationships. Shared presence and sensory immersion evoke constructive activities on the part of human participants to a much greater degree — and in more structurally interesting ways — than I had imagined. Perhaps because it is so disjunctive, this turn of mind encourages me that we are beginning to witness the emergence of a new paradigm.

Joining technology and culture. In a way, Medieval troubadours and jongleurs were the cultural lightning rods of their day. They performed the entire range of human archetypal characters and situations, charged with mythological energy and theatrical savoir faire, and the rawness and openness of their performances made them privy to the deep, unspoken energies that rippled through their audiences.

It was a dialogue, albeit asymmetrical, which kept certain cultural fires burning. Some say that they were also the wandering keepers of secrets, and that in their representations lay the officially suppressed arcana of archaic knowledge and wisdom. I doubt that many of them saw themselves as omniscient priests, but rather as the figures that Spoonman (a.k.a. Mark Petrakis, storyteller and hacker) calls “Killer Clowns.” They tricked you and made you laugh, even as they told you the truth.

THE BENEFITS OF BEING ON THE VR CIRCUIT

One benefit of being on “the VR circuit” was that it put me in contact with people all over the world as they pondered this new cultural icon. The aspect of VR that I find most fascinating is how it has been received and worked over by the cultures with whom I have discussed it.

From its strange childhood in military and government labs, VR emerged as a Major Concept in the pop-culture scene. It was hailed as the techno-wave of the future, with potential to transform everything from movies to medical imaging. It was also demonized as the latest in mind-control drugs and the world’s baddest war machine.

Renewing the reality debate. Philosophers adopted it as a platform for renewed debates about the nature of reality, the evolution of global culture, and the relationship of technology to the body and the physical world. Nearly everyone agreed that a head-mounted display would give you a look inside Pandora’s black box. The mythos of VR continues to be a key ingredient in the pop-culture view of how the world is changing — a many-faceted icon for the coming weird times. Why?

In the book Through the Vanishing Point, Marshall McLuhan mused about how new technologies change our consciousness:

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Anything that raises the environment to high intensity, whether it be a storm in nature or violent change resulting from new technology, turns the environment into an object of attention. When it becomes an object of attention, it assumes the character of an antienvironment or an art object. [McLuhan and Parker, 1968]

Such antienvironments, McLuhan believed, “open the door of perception to people otherwise numbed in a nonperceivable situation.” Shakespeare was barking up the same tree when he said that drama “holds the mirror up to nature.” Media represent us to ourselves in a multidimensional way — beyond the content of any particular representation, the characteristics of the medium itself give us insight into the invisible cultural context. Whoever discovered water, as the saying goes, it certainly wasn’t a fish.

TRANSFORMING THE NOTION OF CONTROL

If McLuhan was right about antienvironments, the media-making impulse may be a built-in species-level survival mechanism. It this sense, VR manifests humanity’s need to encounter and transform the notion of control.

No matter how you look at VR, the control issue is center stage. The public and the press are worried about mind control — is VR addictive? Can it be used for brainwashing? Can “special interests” — from secret police to commercial advertisers — alter our beliefs and desires with hypnotic potency? Will it be used as a way to deny and circumvent the blood-and-guts realities of war? Will it replace condoms and cosmetic surgery? Will it replace the real live lovers with electronic sex?

Good reason to fear. What we fear is the loss of control — over our minds, our society, our government, our bodies and our sexuality. And with good reason.

VR functions as an antienvironment that boosts our awareness of conditions that already exist in our culture, but to which we have become, if not completely numb, at least increasingly resigned and mute. VR and its progeny may ultimately function to demonstrate that a hierarchical notion of control is a toxic philosophy in the contemporary world — not only in terms of culture and art, but also in terms of our relationships with individuals, societies and environments, and especially in terms of how we define and measure our own freedom and self-esteem.

Changing the notion of leader. There is an interesting parallel here, as researcher Rob Tow pointed out to me, between our understanding of control in a human culture and the way that scientists puzzle over the notion of control in the flocking activity of birds or schools of fish.

In the nineteenth century, a good deal of effort went into figuring out which animal was the “leader” and how that individual managed to orchestrate the behavior of the group. Some sociologists and political scientists are still more comfortable propounding theories that are based on utterly unexplained means of communication, or on “historical forces” to accommodate a command-and-control paradigm, than they are to explore control as an emergent phenomenon in group behavior.

In the late twentieth century, new metaphors of communication and control have emerged from biology and cybernetics and are making their way into sociology, politics and the general culture, just as the Von Neumann architecture is being supplanted by massively parallel computers. Networked virtual communities offer tantalizing evidence of emergent social organizations with novel topologies, lacking explicit leadership.

As a result, we are forced to abandon the notion that there is an “author” and a “user” and to replace it with an idea of collaboration, where control of the shape of the experience is shared. Form and structure emerge. As long as designers continue to see themselves as authors of one-to-many experiences, all of us will only be bottom-feeding on the fringes of fundamentally non-interactive forms.

SUBCULTURE, GIVING RISE TO NEW CULTURE

The VR subculture has begun to blend at the edges with those who are transforming music, video and computers into a context for interactivity in communal and orgiastic dimensions — what was known in the late ’80s and early ’90s as “the rave scene.”

The same tribal impulses, also predicted by McLuhan, show up in the burgeoning diversity of the Internet world and in the trends toward personalization and sensory immediacy in multimedia. These movements are driving the evolution of technology and culture with a passion that begins to tap not only the intellectual, but also the sexual and spiritual energies of a generation.

They are the early manifestations of a huge new wave of narrative vigor and joyous cultural polyphony — the double of political fragmentation and ethnic strife that currently characterize the geopolitical dimension of human culture. They flow like water around rocks on a hillside, dividing and rejoining — rushing, we sense, toward a grand convergence hidden in the canyon.

The purpose of passion. In 1991, Jean-Louis Gassée wrote:

“We humans are in love with our tools because they help us become more than we are, to overcome our limitations and extend the boundaries of what is possible to do with our brains and bodies.”

I think it’s significant that Gassée used the word “love.” It is not an “objective” word. Spearheaded by a techno-subculture, virtual reality became a meme that has had an enormously emotional impact on the collective imagination. Our relationship to the idea has been passionate, as expressed in both our hopes and our fears.

In a particular way, our passionate response to virtual reality mirrors the nature of medium itself: by inviting the body and the senses into our dance with our tools, it has extended the landscape of interaction to new topologies of pleasure, emotion and passion.

A similar transformation occurred in the Middle Ages, when theater exploded out of the textual universe of the monastery into the sensory fecundity that gave rise to Commedia dell’Arte. In the same historical period the monolithic Christian content of the drama was bathed in a wave of sensory, passionate and archetypal imagery.

It was this coming together of text, body and narrative polyphony that opened the way for Shakespeare, Grand Opera and all the vital permutations of the dramatic impulse that have come down to our day.

THE CONVERGENCE OF CULTURE AND TECHNOLOGY

The idea of virtual reality is the manifestation of a similar kind of convergence between deeper cultural impulses and the “textual” medium of computers. I think that we respond to it so passionately because we sense the magnitude of this transformation at the level of human culture and evolution.

Technology is not exclusively about rationality; content is not exclusively about information. Many of us sense the inadequacy of the paradigm that has led us to our current notions of technology, nature and consciousness. We see relationships between that paradigm and the degradation of our cultures, our habitat and our individual lives.

Terence McKenna has characterized humanity as the species that extrudes technology. What now shall we do with it? VR is a context for exploring how to make ourselves whole within this frame. It is a context in which we encounter technology with passion. The primary concern of VR is not constructing a better illusion of the world; it is learning to think about the world better. As we ponder our collective evolution, we see that passion is the prosody of intelligence.

Brenda Laurel

MULTIMEDIA COMMUNICATIONS ‘93
April 13-16, Banff, Alberta, Canada
International Council for Computer Communication
(403) 487-8102, fax (403) 487-2417

This first international conference will focus on the increasing integration of multimedia markets, technology and policy. It aims to provide a forum to explore issues in multimedia communications among researchers, system suppliers, system users and policy makers.

A two-day program features parallel sessions on multimedia markets, applications and services, communication technologies, policy and regulatory issues. Topics will include education, training, multimedia conferencing, policy environment, workplace engineering, architectures and coding, broadband networks, interactive video services, broadcasting environment, database access and manipulation, evolutionary paths and standards, societal impacts, applications development, wireless environment, business justification and copyright.

Plenary sessions will introduce and conclude the conference. R.H. David of ED TEL in Edmonton, Alberta; Anthony Pilarinos of Media Technology Lab at Hewlett-Packard; Paul Wollaston of Multimedia Market Development at Apple Computer; Alan Baratz of Hawthorne Lab at IBM; Joe Miller of Sega America; Dr. Tengku Mohd Azzman Shariffadeen of Malaysian Institute of Microelectronic Systems; David Ellis of Omnia Communications Inc. in Toronto, Canada; Joy Mountford of Apple; and Robert Pfeffer of Bell-Northern Research in Ottawa, Canada, will be among the hosts.

Tutorials and demonstrations will commence a day before the conference on April 13. Introductory-level tutorials on multimedia will cover topics of systems, applications, platforms, telecommunications, policy and regulatory issues, and standards.

Several key demonstrations are scheduled. Highlights include the use of wideband and narrowband networks to deliver multimedia content and applications; collaborative multimedia working environments that include personal videoconferencing or “telepresence,” shared-screen work space and high-speed file transfer; standalone multimedia applications for entertainment, education, museums, libraries, business, industry and government, and interactive television applications.

Although this is an international event, the influence is decidedly Canadian. Corporations and interests from around the world will be present with Canadian parties best represented. Also, this is a bilingual English-French affair; but only a handful of addresses will be given in French.

INTERCHI ‘93
April 24-29, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
ACM/SIGCHI, IFIP
(415) 738-1200, fax (415) 738-1280

This idea-heavy event covers the topic of computer-human interaction (CHI), and we recommend it more to technical and academic types than to traditional management executives. More than 2,000 designers of software and hardware products from companies such as Apple, IBM, Microsoft, NTT, Philips, Sony and Xerox, researchers, engineers, psychologists, artists and designers will meet to present papers, exchange ideas and perspectives, and learn about advances in the field.

The event program includes pre-conference workshops and tutorials, a research symposium, a technical program, a video program, informal demonstrations, an interactive experience, exhibits and social events.

Workshops, tutorials and a research symposium will begin two days prior to the conference. Workshops provide a forum for small groups to exchange views on issues of common concern. Tutorials will provide participants with an opportunity to gain skill and knowledge through interaction with expert instructors.

A two-day research symposium is geared toward informal discussion among researchers looking to explore developing research issues in greater depth and with more interaction than is allowed in the formal conference.

At the heart of the event is the technical program, which includes papers, panels, perspectives, overviews and demonstrations.

Technical papers and panels include a broad span of topics in the field of CHI from software, design, heuristics, programming and ergonomics, to sign language interfaces, auditory interfaces, interaction in three dimensions, and video-aided workplace collaborations. After presentations, discussions are open to panelists and the audience.

Experts will discuss the evolving consumer market, CHI and music, and manual control and information management in aircraft cockpits. Institutions will discuss their latest CHI projects and activities. Also, formal and informal demonstrations of recent advances or prototype systems will run throughout the three-day conference.

An exhibit center open throughout the conference will feature the latest in CHI-oriented products and services. The Interactive Experience in the exhibit area will encourage hands-on interaction with innovative interface technologies.

Michael Chanowski, founder of Computer Assisted Televideo Benelux, BSO/Origin in Schellinkhout-Holland, will give the closing plenary talk on the use of multimedia in computer-human interaction and teaching computers to better address the characteristics of the user as a human being.

INTERCHI is the first joint conference combining the Association for Computing Machinery’s annual CHI conference held in the U.S. and the International Federation of Information Processors’ triennial INTERACT conference based in Europe.

ELECTRONIC PRIVACY IN THE ‘90S
May 13-14, Washington, DC
Systems Technology Services, Inc.
(201) 579-8147, fax (201) 383-9719

This conference will address the escalating risk of the loss of assets, security and privacy resulting from the increased use of computer networks, technology and data transmissions. An impressive array of speakers — not to mention the historic venue of the Watergate Hotel — make this event hard to pass up.

An assemblage of six experts will give talks on issues relating to electronic privacy.

Stansfield Turner, Rhodes Scholar, Navy admiral, director of the CIA under President Carter, and a professor at the University of Maryland, will speak about the series of events that lead to the New World Order and the responsibilities and role of the U.S. in this new climate.

Oliver North, the retired Marine lieutenant colonel and CEO of Guardian Technologies, best-known (to put it lightly) for his highly controversial role in “Irangate” during the Reagan years, will discuss the value of protecting strategic information as gleaned through service at the National Security Council, and his perspective on privacy and security matters as a result of legal and media scrutiny. Also somewhat amazingly, Col. North’s appearance on the program appears not to be tongue-in-cheek: an autograph session will follow his presentation. (This may tip you off to the political tenor of the conference.)

Jim Ross, president of Ross Engineering, a company that specializes in countersurveillance services, consulting and training seminars, will discuss conversations at risk — cellular phones, wire tapping, remote handsets, eavesdropping, detection, prevention — and toll fraud.

Chris Goggans, a founding member of an underground hacker group known as “The Legion of Doom” and (more irony) security advisor, will discuss the insecurity of the world’s computer networks and phone systems, techniques used to subvert security measures, and methods to avoid security breaches.

Tobey Marzouk, a partner at the Washington, DC, law firm of Marzouk & Parry and an expert on computer law, will discuss protection of proprietary rights in information and technology, employment policies and agreements, software piracy, and The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986.

The last speaker is Donald Delaney, supervisor of computer crime and telecommunications fraud for the New York State Police and author of Criminal and Civil Investigations Handbook. He plans to speak on filing complaints, drafting affidavits, gathering evidence, getting the law enforcement to listen and restitution.

For those looking to check out the latest in paper shredders, recording devices or other security wares, this is not the place. Show sponsors have barred vendors and discourage sales talk. Also, due to the nature surrounding many topics and for the protection of some of the speakers, photography equipment other than still photography methods is prohibited.

Amy Johns
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