Follow-up info about Waxweb--http://bug.village.virginia.edu
John M. Krafft
jmkrafft at landru.ham.muohio.edu
Sun Apr 2 09:24:58 CDT 1995
From: MX%"jmkrafft at miavx2.ham.muohio.edu" 1-APR-1995 22:55:37.49
To: JMKRAFFT
CC:
Subj: obj-6577.
WAXWEB 2.0
THIS PAGE IS UNDER RECONSTRUCTION
_________________________________________________________________
WHAT IS WAXWEB 2.0?
HOW THE STORY IS TOLD
A DYNAMIC DOCUMENT (USERS ADD TO WAXWEB)
OPTO-PLASMIC VOID: AN IMPLEMENTATION OF DYNAMIC VRML AT WAXWEB
SERVING FINANCIALLY INDEPENDENT, GLOBALLY DISTRIBUTED,
INTERCOMMUNICATIVE, SCALABLE, HYPER-NARRATIVE
CROSS-PLATFORM, NETWORK SYNCHRONIZED PORTABLE MEDIA (CD-ROM)
THE FUTURE OF ELECTRONIC CINEMA
WAXWEB CREDITS
Waxweb is undergoing major changes. We are on the way to Waxweb 2.0,
and will be incrementally updating the site over the next week. Not
everything is currently in place... but will be by early March.
_________________________________________________________________
WHAT IS WAXWEB 2.0?
Think of Waxweb (1.5 gigabytes) as a triple CD shareware version of
the film "WAX..." made available to you across the Internet.
Waxweb is a network-delivered hypermedia project, based on David
Blair's electronic film "WAX or the discovery of television among the
bees" (85:00, 1991), combining the largest hypermedia narrative
document on the Internet with a interface that allows Mosaic or MOO
users to make immediate, publicly visible hypermedia additions to that
document. What we mean by hypermedia: hypertext, pictures, audio,
video, and virtual reality, all mixed up.
Waxweb, online, scalable, and intercommunicative since February 1994,
currently consists of more than 2000 pages of hypertext, available to
both WWW (Mosaic) and MOO users. Mosaic users have access to the
hypermedia portions of the document, which includes the entire film
embedded as 4800 color stills, 560 mpeg video clips, and 2200 AIFF
audio clips, including the soundtrack in English, French, German, and
Japanese. The text of the film's voice-over can be inserted in the
user's language of choice (unlike most Western sites, we do support
Japanese character sets).
_________________________________________________________________
HOW THE STORY IS TOLD:
It's a strange story ["ONE OF THE BOLDEST EXAMPLES OF CINEMA AS
DREAM"Boston Globe]. But it is a story, and we've made a lot of effort
to translate the time-based version into this stop and go medium. You
don't get the clock-based flow, but you get an exponentially larger
amount of association and detail, which are important parts of this
narrative style that you can't get enough of with time-based media
just yet (until controllable multiple streams become real).
Metaphorically, I like to think that the real narrative to all this
exists somewhere in the 4th dimension, from where it casts a variety
of shadows of itself in various media (onto film, on Web, onto CDROM,
onto videotape, etc...).
So, what specifically happens in this bit of cast shadow? In Waxweb,
the narrative has 3 levels of detail:, beginning with SUPERSTORY, a
visually indexed plot condensation available from any page in Waxweb,
meant to orient you whenever you feel lost. Pressing any picture in
SUPERSTORY expands the document, taking you to SHORT FILM, a medium
level visually indexed condensation also available from many pages,
which gives the viewer a greater level of verbal and pictorial
narrative detail, and access to video and audio. Pressing any picture
in SHORT FILM takes you to SHOT BY SHOT, a visually indexed shot by
shot description of the entire film. From this level, several methods
of "associative" navigation have been made available. For instance
pressing any of the 140 keywords highlighted in the SHOT BY SHOT text
will take you to keyword areas; e.g. clicking the word Jacob will take
you to one of the "Jacob" pages, where all the combined
picture/paragraph sets parsed by the word "Jacob" can be found. In
addition, pressing any picture in SHOT BY SHOT or any of the KEYWORD
pages will take you to the VISUAL INDEX, where all the of film's 2000
stills have been sorted in 30 idiosyncratic categories, and 200
sub-categories. Pressing any still here will allow you to reenter SHOT
BY SHOT just where that picture appears in the linear film. You can
also"expand" any visual index page to see the text associated with
every picture. You can also travel from any individual picture back up
to the SUPERSTORY overview.
There several other narrative sections linked into Waxweb. These
include FRAGMENTS, several hundred pages of text fragments from early
versions of the Waxweb script that have been broken apart and
integrated into the main body of the document. FRAGMENTS are
individually available directly from the many of the main document's
pages. There are also OPTO-PLASMIC VEHICLE PORTALS, which are places
in the story where characters come in contact with the OPTO-PLASMIC
VOID, a network distributed virtual reality interface (VRML-based)
which is discussed below. The PORTALS are launching points into the
3-D world.
_________________________________________________________________
A DYNAMIC DOCUMENT:
Waxweb 2.0 is an html-speaking multimedia MOO, and as such is a
dynamic document. It may surprise you to learn that most of the pages
you read here are dynamically generated on the fly by the MOO. What's
a MOO? To get that information in context, you'll want to read a long
paper I (David Blair) wrote about the Waxweb project, available here.
For a more detailed technical overview, there is another paper
available from Tom Meyer, who wrote the software. Essentially, MOO's
are tools for computer supported collaborative work (and play, etc.),
which allow realtime intercommunication... they are text-based virtual
realities. Unfortunately, it is not easy just yet to have the sort of
realtime intercommunication through the Web that you get in text-based
MOO. We -have- implemented Ubique's SESAME server for Sun (and soon,
PC) workstations here, which allows users of the Ubique Web clients to
chat with one another. More practically, we have used the dynamic
processes of the MOO to make it possible for visitors to add
hypermedia to Waxweb. Using a forms-based interface, users have the
ability to make immediately visible links from any word to any other
word, add comments to any page, and also to create their own pages (or
many pages!), thus adding to narrative of the main Waxweb.
We are also using the MOO to dynamically serve VRML (see the next
section). An ftp site will be made available for user 3-D objects (and
other media types.... as up to now we have only stored user text, and
asked that all other media be on an external server).
_________________________________________________________________
THE OPTO-PLASMIC VOID: AN IMPLEMENTATION OF DYNAMIC VRML AT WAXWEB
Waxweb 2.0 implements a new spatialized interface based on the Virtual
Reality Modeling Language, a scheme for distributed VR on the World
Web. The "Wax" film had more than ten minutes which took place in a
simple virtual world. That's the Opto-Plasmic Void, the strange place
where all those Opto-Plasmic vehicles that think they're bees go to
and come from (or, I guess, maybe they're bees, that's not my problem,
that's yours, go watch the film). Using VRML, these 3-D scenes have
become 250 virtual rooms which the user can download and browse
through using a viewer launched by any Web browser. Wait a... minute!
Where are the browsers? They're coming, maybe this month or next...
you've heard that before?... anyway, we're pretty much up and running,
waiting for something to happen. We don't have the browsers, we can't
give you the browsers, please Don't Ask. We'll be here when you really
need us.
Anyway, about these mythical browsers.. they're supposed to offer up
to 20,000 polygons a second on a Pentium based-machine. 3-D objects in
these rooms are hyperlinked... wherever you are in the virtual room,
you are able to touch an object with your mouse pointer, and be taken
to either a new web page, or a new virtual room. There will be a total
of more that 4000 hyperlinks available within VRML. Users will enter
VRML through narrative "Portals", marked places in the story pages
that show where characters encounter the "other world", and will have
the option of passing through a 2-D version of the world, or the VRML
version. Once in the VRML world, users press 3D hyperlinks to travel
through that world, or (we're still waiting to see this) to
automatically change the page on their Web browser... i.e. exit to
another different media type. This is the third interface to Waxweb,
which is meant to be readable, visual, and flyable.
How about the MOO? Well, we're using the MOO to dynamically serve
these hyperlinked 3D objects/scenes. Tom's implementation allows us to
efficiently serve VRML from the MOO, and dynamically auto-assemble
objects/scenes and auto-insert links (URL's) dependent on user
interaction. This allows us lots of flexibility in the use of our
already quite large 3D database, and in addition will let users easily
add to that 3D world. Still no real-time intercommunication, but
that's coming, yes no or maybe?
_________________________________________________________________
A PRACTICAL, GLOBALLY DISTRIBUTED, INTERCOMMUNICATIVE, SCALABLE,
FINANCIALLY INDEPENDENT HYPER-NARRATIVE SERVER
Huh? Well, we're experimenting here. The facts: on Feb. 18th, Digicash
was implemented in the MOO (Waxweb is the first Digicash MOO). On the
same day Waxweb also became a Sesame server, capable of handling
Ubique's Web client for the Sun platform (and soon PC), the first
publicly available system for realtime chat through a Web client.
Media mirroring has also been established with Sunsite at UNC, and
Internationale Stadt in Berlin. Visitors to Waxweb from Germany
receive text and control information from the Waxweb server in
Virginia, but are pointed to Internationale Stadt for pictures, audio,
and video. These three experimental implementations point to a
practical, globally distributed, intercommunicative, scalable
hyper-narrative server, based on an open system, and capable of being
financially self-sufficient. That's the truth, but it ain't here yet.
Buy the CD, please!
_________________________________________________________________
CROSS-PLATFORM, NETWORK SYNCHRONIZED CD-ROM
By mid-April, Waxweb 2.0 will be made available as a Mac/Windows/Unix
(still working on the latter) standalone CDROM, which will also
synchronize with the WWW site. So when you're not using Waxweb in your
car as supplementary database for your Sony navigation system (also
reading it during traffic jams), you can pop it in your web connected
machine, go up to the Waxweb WWW, press the I GOT A CD button and get
all the media locally while using all the online intercommunication
tools, OK, it ain't DOOM, but you can put it on your home LAN and then
the kids can see Waxweb much faster while writing globally-visible
pornographic add-ons to the story, etc.
_________________________________________________________________
THE FUTURE OF ELECTRONIC CINEMA
Last month I went to Imagina (a large graphics conference in Europe),
and heard a lot of people talk about Electronic Cinema. For most of
the cinema world, Electronic Cinema means Francis Ford Coppola sitting
in an Airstream parsing camera feeds with his analog non-linear
editing system, or, at a debased and often repeated level, it just
means high resolution electronic image acquisition, and some level of
digital image processing, before a quick dump out to film. That's not
Electronic Cinema!! That's a subset of it! Remember the fourth
dimension metaphor in the STORY section above? That's more what it is
about... a single narrative "authored" simultaneously for linear and
non-linear media... a narrative that takes place and different form
across a variety of electronic media. A narrative that is in the movie
theater as a feature length film... that is also on the Web or
whatever it becomes the year after next, served from (excuse the sound
bite) a scalable "virtual movie theater", where the 30 hour version of
the film can be browsed or roared through, while people meet at the
same time, maybe remake the movie a bit, or work on their own movie
(ain't no difference at a certain point between production and
distribution, where there is a virtual movie theater there is also a
virtual movie studio). And then there is everything in between, all
the portable media which suddenly small little producer you can make
and distribute, like videotapes and CD's anything else, all of which
might even join in odd hybrid configurations to create, ack, ugly
forms, my god, what kind of world is this? Well, anyway... my point is
that Electronic Cinema is All of the above All at once, not just very
expensive studio productions that could just as well have been shot on
Imax (better tones, smaller grain).
_________________________________________________________________
WAXWEB CREDITS:
The Waxweb document has been authored and designed by myself, David
Blair, initiator and head of the project. The very-creative technical
director of the project is Tom Meyer, who is responsible for all the
permutations to the MOO code, interface design (e.g. the hypertext
writing interface), and lots of incredibly useful automation. Suzanne
Hader assisted Meyer with programming and with various sorts of fancy
html, like the press buttons; she also did the big bee picture on the
home page. Anna Youseffi digitized the stills and much of the video,
and assisted with some of the indexing. Melynda Barnhart helped build
many index links, including the 70 word paths, and did some
spell-checking.
Additional written material in a separate section of Waxweb has been
contributed by invited authors.
Waxweb has been made possible by networked associate fellow status
generously extended to the members of the Waxweb project by IATH, the
Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University
of Virginia, headed by John Unsworth. This is also a project of the
Andries van Dam's Graphics Lab at Brown University, which has provided
resources for a lot of the work on this project. WAXWEB opened to the
Internet on July 24th, 1994, coincident with the opening of THE EDGE
at the ACM SIGGRAPH 1994 convention in Orlando, Florida. Waxweb has
received partial funding from the New York State Council for the Arts,
with both finishing fund and distribution grants, the latter
administered by the Experimental Television Center, Owego, NY.
Total readers of this node:19398
© Copyright Sat Apr 1 22:55:21 1995 EST, all rights reserved.
John M. Krafft, English | Miami University--Hamilton
Voice: 513-863-8833, ext. 342 | 1601 Peck Boulevard
Fax: 513-863-1655 | Hamilton, OH 45011-3399
E-mail: jmkrafft at miavx2.ham.muohio.edu
jmkrafft at miavx1.acs.muohio.edu
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Date: Sat, 01 Apr 1995 22:55:34 EST
From: "John M. Krafft" <jmkrafft at miavx2.ham.muohio.edu>
To: jmkrafft at miavx2.ham.muohio.edu
Message-ID: <0098E40C.29769F00.18576 at miavx2.ham.muohio.edu>
Subject: obj-6577.
John M. Krafft, English | Miami University--Hamilton
Voice: 513-863-8833, ext. 342 | 1601 Peck Boulevard
Fax: 513-863-1655 | Hamilton, OH 45011-3399
E-mail: jmkrafft at miavx2.ham.muohio.edu
jmkrafft at miavx1.acs.muohio.edu
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