After 5 years of research and turning prototypes into products, Apple’s think tank closes its doors

In an industry where there is always something newer and better, it is somehow satisfying to hear about a job well done, a project that has served its purpose and come to its natural end. But to bring to an end a project that has influenced the work of so many individuals — and, in fact, helped shape a new medium of communication —can also be bittersweet.

That feeling set the mood at the gathering held August 16 to mark the upcoming closing of Apple Computer’s Multimedia Lab on October 1. More than 100 people attended the private event that signified the end of this West Coast think tank, which for the past five years has been dedicated to the research and development of the multimedia market. The lab leaves behind a rich legacy of technical reports and books, educational videotapes, interactive prototype research, and, of course, real commercial products, including pioneers such as the Visual Almanac, Interactive NOVA, MediaMaker and Life Story, among others.

Perhaps its greatest legacy will come from the people who worked there; many of them are now spread out among the computer, consumer electronics, entertainment and academic communities, implementing interactive media. The lab has been the office/learning institute/hangout for some of the most influential and talented designers in a new genre, including Michael Naimark, Kristee Rosendahl, Sueann Ambron, Fabrice Florin, Steve Gano — and, of course, its founding director, Kristina Hooper Woolsey, who is now an Apple distinguished scientist.

“In my mind the products [we developed at the lab] were seminal,” says former codirector of the lab, Sueann Ambron, now vice president of advanced media for Paramount’s Technology Group. It was, she explained, the first time anyone created “browsable” movies and “repurposed” video on a computer. “The lab was an incredible catalyst.”

Brought to you by HyperCard. Certainly, though, the lab’s beginnings were not so grand. In fact, even today, the lab — spread out among a few rooms at 3220 Sacramento Street in San Francisco — is unassuming, until you notice the full video editing suite amid all the cables, chairs, couches, Macintoshes, reams of paper, and whiteboards.

It officially opened in December 1987 when Apple rented one room on the second floor of the Sacramento Street building. The arrival of HyperCard is credited as the enabling factor that led to the lab’s existence, but its genesis really dates back to the late 1970s when Woolsey “saw the future” while teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, home of the granddaddy of multimedia think tanks, the Media Lab, then the Architecture Machine Group.

MIT was experimenting with the impact that visuals and computing had on the ability to learn. Woolsey decided then that it was her mission to get “this stuff out of the labs and into the world,” she says. “It sounds silly right now, but I was taken with the notion that I had to get this stuff out, and if I wasn’t careful it just wouldn’t happen.”

The nonlinear path. It was by no means a direct route from that moment of enlightenment to the existence of the lab. Upon her return to the West Coast from MIT in 1979, Woolsey left her full-time teaching job at the University of California at Santa Cruz and began working for Atari at the height of the video game industry’s popularity.

“A lot of [the ideas for multimedia] really gained commercial momentum at Atari” says Woolsey. And in fact, it was at Atari, where she met some of the lab’s most influential collaborators, including Ambron, Rosendahl and Naimark. Today, 80 percent of the people Woolsey works with at Apple came from Atari.

“It is interesting to see how all these people have ‘recongealed’,” says Woolsey. “It is even more interesting to note the time it has taken to get this set of ideas most of us knew out of the lab situation into the real world. It took 10 years to bring this stuff into production.

“I could say, ‘Everything we have ever done in the lab, I understood in 1977,’ and for all intents and purposes, I did. Putting movies into computers and having people explore spaces, we did it all at MIT in a few years. But it has taken a huge amount of work to figure out how to make multimedia work on available technology, to understand what the subtleties of the interface are when you ship it to a million people, and to know what are the content areas that can be understood.”

Woolsey left Atari in 1985 and joined Apple to work in the Education Research Group. For her, it was the perfect transition. “What I wanted to do,” she says, “was have motion video and sound [in a computer]. And at the time, Apple was working on building the ultimate education computer. I came here to help do that and to make sure it had sights and sounds.”

The group, which according to Woolsey eventually was responsible for the development of the Macintosh II, experimented a lot with laserdiscs and CD-ROMs for sound and text. “We all anticipated that if we worked hard enough the technology would catch up with our vision.”

While still part of the Education Research Group, Woolsey set up alliances with Lucasfilm Ltd. and the National Geographic Society to create an educational multimedia prototype that would “combine imagery and computers to create a geography program ‘hip’ enough to engage the imaginations of middle school students.” The prototype, produced originally on a Apple IIe, would eventually become GTV: Geography Television. She also began at this time to work with a few people at Apple, including Rosendahl, to set up the human interface group.

It became clear that money and marketing expertise were essential if these types of projects were to continue. Ambron, who had also recently left Atari to come to Apple, took on the marketing challenge, trying to convince executives in Cupertino, who didn’t necessarily understand what the term “fluid media” meant, that it was important to fund research in this field. It was a never-ending quest, according to Woolsey.

“The constant issue has been that we were never mainstream,” she says, “and most of the people who were supporting us never quite knew what we were doing. To their credit they said, ‘Well it looks good. Let’s see where its goes.’ We had some incredibly important sponsors within Apple. People who really thought it was important.”

After GTV, Ambron and Woolsey began to build a slew of multimedia prototypes using early versions of WildCard, which later became HyperCard. They hired a range of contractors including Florin, Gano and Margo Nanny, who was a summer intern at the time. Together, the team developed a series of prototypes that demonstrated the nascent concept of multimedia. In the process they discovered that it was essential to be able to drive external devices such as players for the optical media that could store large amounts of picture and sound data; this painful discovery led to development of the XCMDs built into the released version of HyperCard.

For nearly a year, Woolsey worked with these contractors from their homes; Ambron was still based in Cupertino. But it became too confusing to run around to the different places, and so in December 1987, Apple established the lab in San Francisco. Eventually, a few others became full-time employees, including Gano, Florin and Nanny, but more than 100 people have collaborated on projects developed at the lab over the years.

PHASE ONE: SHOW AND TELL

The lab’s work then began in earnest, and from 1987 to 1990 its mission was to explore opportunities for multimedia computing and to demonstrate the findings within Apple Computer and to potential Mac developers. Its charter was also to educate a community of designers on how to build new media, so they in turn could bring it to the public. It was a time of show and tell.

“Our goal in early days was production and business development,” says Woolsey. “We had constant connections with Apple technology efforts. The good news there was that John Sculley really understood the concept of fluid media, and that made a big difference. John’s a trained architect and so this stuff made sense to him. We kept him informed and gave all sorts of speeches within Apple to show what was possible and tried to drive the technology direction. But as far as the action here at the Lab, it was pretty public what we were doing.”

The research projects developed during this time include the lab’s best-known work, and in fact six of the prototypes completed during this three-year period evolved into products:

• GTV: Geography Television, which began the whole thing in 1986, developed into a product for the Apple IIGS in 1990 and into a version for the Macintosh in 1991 (Lucasfilm and National Geographic).

• Voices of the Thirties, more commonly known as Grapevine, which was created by Bob Campbell, a high school librarian, and Pat Hanlon, an English teacher, to help their students better understand the Depression and the 1930s, is expected to ship this month on CD-ROM (Wings for Learning).

• Interactive NOVA: Animal Pathfinders, based on a film for PBS, which dealt with migration and concepts pertinent to a high school biology curriculum, made its debut in 1987. It became a commercial product for the Macintosh in 1990 (WGBH and Peace River Films).

• Life Story, also based on a TV production (this time for the BBC), captured first place at the Film Festival in New York in 1990 as well as first place and best of show in 1991 at the Cindy Awards, while still a prototype. The Life Story design example uses a video drama as the backbone structure to aid in understanding the complex scientific issues surrounding the discovery of dna (Smithsonian Institution, Lucasfilm and Adrian Malone Productions).

• Disappearing Ducks, which is based on a TV special on wetlands created by the National Audubon Society, was actually scripted by a group of students from the Marin Academy High School. Working with professional designers from Lucasfilm, the students created an entire mystery around a “befuddled character named Paul Parkranger, who left his cabin with an unsolved case of vanishing wetlands on his desk.” The students’ task was to solve the case.

• Visual Almanac, perhaps the most famous of the lab’s projects, consists of a videodisc with 7,000 images and sounds, a CD-ROM with 25 megabytes of software, and a 200-page book titled the Companion. Designed as a classroom aid so students could build reports that included text, sounds, videos and stills in a “presentation” format, it broke ground on a number of multimedia’s most troublesome fronts, including interface design, interaction and navigation, copyright acquisition, and database development. The product was two years in the making; it was the lab’s obsession and its nightmare.

SLIPPING ON THE BLEEDING EDGE

“We did prototypes just to show people what we were talking about,” says Woolsey, “but then we took on the Visual Almanac in particular for the production efforts. Truly no one, including ourselves, knew what we were doing. The difference between doing those quick little prototypes and looking clever and really creating a product is — well, it’s not easy.

“We were trying to build Visual Almanac at the same time we were trying to find out what it takes to build a product and trying to research what was possible in the medium,” adds Woolsey. “It was just crazy. No one should ever do that again. Hopefully no one will ever have to.”

The discoveries and problems surrounding the production of the Visual Almanac are too numerous to detail, but some of the highlights and low points include the following: The interface for the Visual Almanac and what finally became the three parts of the software were rebuilt several times during production. The original Companion went in for a rewrite as the original product began shipments, and a smaller text called Buddy was whipped together so that some sort of printed guide could be shipped with the first version. More than 100 people are credited with helping this product’s development. (There is a Visual Almanac Technical Report, written by the key producers of the product that is more than 200 pages as well as a 33-page report Woolsey scripted detailing the steps from concept to product. Both are available from the lab.)

Even today, the product is still under revision. “The Almanac is so big,” says Woolsey, “that it’s not really a good product. It’s a great resource and it’s a good model for when everything is online. It’s that big.” In an attempt to address this problem, a whole new line of Visual Almanac products will be developed by The Voyager Company, which is scheduled to produce a CD series this year.

During the 1987–1990 phase, the lab also developed the Multimedia Production System in conjunction with Max Whitby of the BBC; the prototype evolved into MacroMind’s MediaMaker. In addition, it created nine other prototypes, including one called Constitution, which Scholastic turned into a product for the Amiga.

PHASE II: THE CLOSED-DOOR POLICY

In 1990, with the shipping of the Visual Almanac, the lab changed. It became part of Apple’s Advanced Technology Group (where it has remained) after three years of skipping from different divisions within Apple, including K-12 Marketing, Special Opportunities and Business Learning. The size of the staff was reduced, and the lab’s research became private.

The most significant event during this phase was the lab’s shift in focus. It turned its direction from multimedia publications, or commercial products, that are produced by a few for the many to what Woolsey calls “casual media.”

Casual media, as the name implies, takes much less time and expertise to create than publications. It includes two forms of communication — graphical correspondence and conversation — over a distributed network. The lab pursued research in four areas that are essential to the concept of casual media, including acquisition, which involves researching how to gather information; architecture, which asks about uniform underlying structures; depiction, which deals with the new human interface environment; and finally, connectivity, which examines the new conversational environment.

“I am not that interested in products right now,” Woolsey says. “I am more interested in every single person being able to make casual media themselves. There is a very different sensibility when you can have images and sounds that you use in communication. Images and sounds have always belonged to the high priest. And those guys and women have given them to us for their own purposes, and we have paid them for them.

“We are now advocating that we always have images and sounds and that everyone can make their own. I don’t want to tell you everything based on the Bible; I want to write my own novel. Or else I want to write my own letter. It’s the same issue. Reading and writing used to be a very small class of people. That ability to write a quick note or letter to your friend took a long time to evolve.”

In other words, the mission of the lab has been to extend the reading and writing metaphor, to show what is possible when people communicate with images and sounds using existing tools. The focus group for this phase of research has been children. They are the perfect participants, because, as Woolsey says, “they just do it.” They have none of the hangups we acquire as we grow older about how well we draw, or tell a story, or how quickly we learn something new.

It is interesting to note that portable devices and available networked services are key elements to the success of casual media, and that Apple is deeply involved in both of these technologies.

Enough research to drown in. Unlike in the lab’s early years, there is no flashy physical evidence to show off its most recent research. There are, however, enough videotapes and technical reports for each of the 19 projects to drown in. For example, the lab’s last project, titled “Kids, Cameras, and Computers,” has a videotape that shows how fifth graders constructed 15–20-second video-based observation records of “discoveries” made during a biology class. These videos were recorded directly into the computer and shown instantaneously on screen. They were also distributed over a network and shown during additional classes.

The premise behind the experiment is that as children focus on the production phases and acquisition stages of creating a casual media product, they focus more intently on the topic area, thereby increasing their understanding of that topic. In addition, student conversations about the topic then become very sophisticated.

The living lab. For the most part, the knowledge and understanding garnered during this second phase of the lab’s existence lives only in the heads of the people who experienced it.

“The closing of the lab is not implying that the work is done,” emphasizes Woolsey, who will continue research into casual media, dividing her time between the Exploratorium and the Ross School System in Marin County. “The point was to launch people of all sorts into all sorts of places, to create technology communities. That’s what really worked. It’s been a goal all along.

“The people that have worked in the lab, it seems to me, are representative of what the information culture is going to be. More than any single company right now, that has been our strength.”

Ultimately, then, the lab was not about technology and titles but about talk. It was a place where people interested in new media — both the commercial and casual aspects of it — could give and gather information with their peers. It was Switzerland in a war zone of competition, where jobs for new media were not and still aren’t plentiful.

Where will that place be now with the closing of the lab? Today, there are no answers to this question, no physical space under consideration. But it is a serious concern for members of the West Coast design community who used the lab as a think tank.

Woolsey is confident that these people will find their haven again. “The thing that I think we have represented here at the lab is a place where a lot of different kinds of people can have thoughtful inquiry,” she says. “We don’t have any religions. The lab was not the Apple culture. It’s was Apple culture plus a lot of other cultures. And so it has lots of other places to go.”

Janice Maloney