VR DESIGN BECOMES CRAFT AT WORLDESIGN

Worldesign, Inc., the nation’s first information design studio using virtual reality (VR) technology for industrial and commercial applications, has announced its first consulting agreement with Evans & Sutherland, Inc., Simulation Division, and a handful of other design and consulting contracts under discussion.

Worldesign, a spin-off of the Human Interface Laboratory (HIT Lab) at the University of Washington, was founded some seven months ago to pioneer a business in the emerging, yet still sparsely populated field of commercial virtual reality. (For more on HIT Lab, see Vol. 1, No. 6, p. 19.)

Evans & Sutherland, veteran manufacturer of high-end computer graphics engines for simulators, has hired Worldesign to study the application of VR to its industrial and commercial business. The company’s other potential contracts include Osaka Gas in Japan and Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, CA, as well as an unnamed European auto manufacturer and a large financial reporting service.

The Seattle, WA-based company’s information designs include projects such as developing an interface between operators and complex machinery and showing how the next generation of utilities might function in Japan.

Robert Jacobson, founder and president of Worldesign, as well as a cofounder of HIT Lab, knows the company is entering uncharted waters with its concept of information design. “There’s a lot of education involved,” he says. “People have taken for granted the media environments in which they live. How can you rework an environment?”

Worldesign has a nonhierarchical work structure based on a medieval crafts guild model, and is trying to work out a licensing approach that allows all participants to maintain some financial connection to their projects. Worldesign favors a collaborative approach to design and technology and says it will pool the best available resources for projects. Several of the 10 staff members have backgrounds in cultural or anthropological studies, and four are HIT Lab graduates.

SF WANTS TO BE MULTIMEDIA MECCA

Business leaders from many of San Francisco Bay Area’s multimedia companies and leaders in City Hall are pushing a resolution to establish the city as an international multimedia mecca.

The effort, which started more than a year ago, will culminate in a vote by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors on Dec. 8. It is motivated by a desire to foster growth of the new multimedia industry in San Francisco.

The resolution, which takes the form of a statement of intent by the city, calls for zoning laws to allow for high-bandwidth telecommunication lines and other infrastructure improvements. Also, the city would provide support for an interactive multimedia center equipped with a library of interactive titles, hardware and software, and conference areas. In addition, the industry would receive funds from the San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund to sponsor an annual Interactive Media Festival.

“San Francisco can become the Hollywood of this industry,” says San Francisco city supervisor Jim Gonzalez, also a member of the steering committee. He predicts multimedia will be a $200 million business in San Francisco by 1996 (though by whose estimates he doesn’t say).

San Francisco has significant media- and technology-related resources at its disposal. The city is home to more than 38 multimedia companies. Nearly half of San Francisco Bay Area workers are already trained or work in technology- or information-based positions, according to the development group. The city additionally benefits from a growing technology base in Silicon Valley and other regions of the Bay Area.

An ad hoc development group, comprising 18 individuals from Bay Area multimedia companies and related fields, is cultivating the effort. Thus far, “there are as many people in the room as there are agendas,” says one committee member.

The resolution will become more defined over time. However, the group aims to remain open, inclusive and representative of diverse interests and perspectives of San Francisco’s growing multimedia community.

CD-ROM AT TWICE THE SPEED OF CD-ROM

The slow access times for CDs have been an industry annoyance since people started putting anything other than audio on a CD-ROM. The compact disc was designed to handle linear audio tracks, and anything that required seeking a specific spot on the disc took what seemed like forever. Short of changing the size of the indentions on the disc, which would require a laser with a finer beam, the only way to increase the access speed of these drives was to accelerate the speed at which the disc spins.

And now, just as CD-ROM XA discs have started to become adopted as an industry standard, companies are starting to release double-speed CD-ROM drives.

NEC Technologies started shipping its double speed CD-ROM drive for the Macintosh and PC in January. In March, Sony announced it would release a PC competitor in 1992. And, as of last month, Apple has entered the fray with an enhanced Macintosh version of the Sony double-speed drive due out in December.

The double-speed drives, as you might expect, are able to pull data off the CD at 300K per second, compared to the 150K per second of most standard CD-ROM drives. Average access time, or the amount of time it takes for information to be located on a disc, is 280 milliseconds for the NEC drive and 295ms for the Apple drive, compared to today’s norm of 600ms. Depending on the computer such drives are attached to, users can expect to see substantial differences in speed, especially with titles that primarily store textual information.

XA compatibility? Neither drive is XA standard, which requires additional hardware or software to enable the reading of compressed audio. Apple’s double-speed drive is already XA-compatible, while NEC claims it can easily upgrade its new drives to XA when it decides to do so. The Apple drive reads multisession Photo CD discs, as well as CD+G and CD+MIDI discs (although this capability is of rather questionable broad market value).

Both drives can switch speeds between normal and 2× speeds. Apple’s drive also has a 256K buffer, versus NEC’s lesser 64K buffer, which also enhances response time. Of course, spinning the disc at twice the regular speed means anything that is time-dependent, such as video or audio, is not likely to run properly. Chandran Cheriyan, CD-ROM product manager at Apple, said that “maybe, in some cases” there would be compatibility problems.

Apple deals with this problem in software by allowing a manual switch to standard CD-ROM speed. NEC’s drive will only slow for CD audio tracks.

The Apple drive, bundled with up to 10 CD-ROM titles, has a suggested retail price of $599 for the external model, and $499 for the internal model expected to be shipped in January 1993. The drives will also be shipped with the Performa 600, the Vi and the Vx computers. NEC’s bundle of six CD-ROM titles, called Multimedia Gallery, retails for $999. A standalone drive is $749 and an internal drive $649.

CD-ROM CHANGER FROM MICROBOARDS

Microboards, Inc., the Japanese supplier of the first CD-I authoring system for Philips, has introduced a 144disc-capacity CD-ROM minichanger, priced aggressively at $14,950.

The system, called the Libreeze 604X minichanger, accesses 36 discs online and 108 discs “near-line.” The online discs are stored in six Pioneer DRM 604X disc drives for immediate access.

“Near-line” discs are not ready to play, but stack inside the Libreeze case readily accessible for manual loading. When a near-line disc is requested an LED panel in the case sets off a light indicating the location of the disc.

The Libreeze minichanger has a data transfer rate of 612K/second, thanks to Pioneer’s Quadraspin technology, which spins the disc at four times normal speed. It also boasts an average access time of 300 milliseconds, a figure comparable to the market’s fastest drives.

Due to these high speeds and access times, Microboards claims the system can function as a file server in networked situations. The first few systems came off the production line in October.

“We envision these going into the network server area,” says Craig Hanson, U.S. general manager in Microboard’s U.S. office in Carver, MN. “There’s interest among governmental agencies, Photo CD users where they have a lot of images to work with, and anywhere where large databases of text, images and sound are used.”

The system is compatible with DOS, Windows, Macintosh, OS/2, VMS, Sun OS, Solaris, Unix and Silicon Graphics and conforms to many CD-ROM standards. Although Philips’ CD-I was once MBI’s bread and butter — it chose not to make this model CD-I compatible. (For more on Microboards, see Vol. 1, No. 11, p. 14.)

Although useful for existing CD-ROM titles, Microboards did not make the disc changer CD-ROM XA capable — a decision that seems shortsighted in light of heavy interest in the XA format. It has, however, somehow managed to be Photo CD compatible. The company says it’s working on XA compatibility with an unnamed third party and if demand is there, it will upgrade the system.

‘BABY BELL’ ENTERS VIDEO RENTAL BUSINESS

Bell Atlantic Corp. is beating some of the large cable companies at their own game. The Bell operating company recently announced plans to develop a “video-on-demand” system that will enable TV viewers at home to dial up movies or television programs of their choice, at any time, over ordinary telephone lines.

While both the cable and telephone companies have been gearing up to compete in this potentially rich market, many of the contenders have been stymied by the technical limitations of existing telephone wiring, which in the past has been considered incapable of transmitting the huge amounts of digital data required for commercial video-on-demand systems.

Bell Atlantic has found a way around that. Using technology developed by Bellcore, the research arm for the seven regional Bell operating companies, Bell Atlantic will offer viewers at home a single channel of high-quality video that will run over ordinary copper telephone lines. Viewers will be offered a variety of choices from which they can select one at a time. They will not be able to watch live television on the system in its first form.

A test system involving 400 Bell Atlantic employees — providing telephone services in New Jersey as well as other mid-Atlantic states and Washington, DC — is slated to be in place sometime next summer. Commercial introduction of the Bell Atlantic system is expected in 1994.

POLITICS AND FEDERAL INFORMATION ONLINE

Online and open information advocates gave a heavy sigh last year when legislation to increase online access to U.S. government information passed in the House of Representatives, but at the last minute failed to go through in the Senate. The successor to the H.R. 5983 bill, known as “Gateway to Government” in the Senate and “Wide Information Network for Data Online” (WINDO) in the House, promises to be a hot item in Washington in 1993.

The bill would provide a single phone number for online access to public federal information and charge incremental fees. More than 1,400 federal depository libraries would receive the information at no charge. Demographic statistics, federal court cases, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosure statements, and White House and State Department press releases are among the federal databases that would be accessible through the system.

Public government information is available through hundreds of disparate online sources ranging from private companies and value-added online services to government-sponsored bulletin boards.

James Love, director of the Taxpayer Assets Project of the Center for the Study of Responsive Law based in Washington, DC, says the problem with the current distribution system is that it often makes users pay for information twice — once in taxes and again in inflated online fees. In other cases, online information is not available or is difficult to find. “Our argument is if taxpayers pay for the information, and they’re willing to pay for access to the information, it should be made available to them,” he says.

Two drafts of the legislation have been introduced thus far. An original draft, authored by Sen. Albert Gore of Tennessee and the Democratic U.S. vice presidential nominee at the time of this writing, calls for all public government information to be placed online. A subsequent compromise measure offers only those materials published by the government’s Superintendent of Documents office. The bill’s sponsors are Democrats Sen. Albert Gore (TN), Sen. Wendell Ford (KY) and Rep. Charlie Rose (NC).

“If (Gov. Bill) Clinton is in the White House, it’s likely the Gore-sponsored bill will go back to its original form,” says Love. The direction of the bill should be easier to determine after Presidential, House and Senate elections in November.

HDTV TEST RESULTS AVAILABLE

The results of the testing of high-definition television systems at the Advanced Television Test Center (ATTC) in Alexandria, VA, are being published by the ATTC, the Advanced Television Evaluation Laboratory and CableLabs. Each of the five proponent test results will be in separate publications.

The price for CableLabs’ member companies is $1,500 for the entire set, or $350 per copy. Currently available are the results of the NHK Narrow-Muse system and General Instrument’s DigiCipher HDTVTM. Copies may be obtained by contacting Janet Martin, ATTC, 1330 Braddock Place, Alexandria, VA 22314; phone (703) 739-3850, fax (703) 739-8442.