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 In the case of CD-I, for example, the hardware technology upon which Philips based the CD-I specification was outdated before its development was even completed.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