Whenever a new medium is created, the first content offered is brought over from other media. But to take best advantage of the capabilities of the electronic medium, content needs to be specially authored with it in mind. So far the vast majority of content on-line has been “dumped” from another source. Magazine or newspaper publishers are taking text already created for paper editions and simply shoving it on-line, often minus the pictures, charts, and graphics. Plain-text bulletin boards and e-mail are interesting but cannot really compete with the richer forms of information in our lives. On-line content should include lots of graphics, photos, and links to related information. As communications get faster and the commercial opportunity becomes clear, more audio and video elements will be included.
The development of CD-ROMs—multi-media versions of audio compact discs—provides some lessons that can be applied to the creation of on-line content. CD-ROM-based multi-media titles can integrate different types of information—text, graphics, photographic images, animation, music, and video—into a single document. Much of these titles’ value today is in the “multi,” not in the “media.” They are the best approximations of what the rich documents of the future will be like.
The music and audio on CD-ROMs are clear, but rarely as good as on a music CD. You could store CD-quality sound on a CD-ROM, but the format it uses is very bulky, so if you stored too much CD-quality sound, you wouldn’t have room for data, graphics, and other material.
Motion video on CD-ROMs still needs improving. If you compare the quality of video a PC can display today with the postage-stamp-size displays of just a few years ago, the progress is amazing. Longtime computer users got very excited when they first encountered video on their computers. On the other hand, the grainy, jerky image is certainly no better than a 1950s television picture. The size and quality of images will improve with faster processors and better compression, and eventually will become far better than today’s television picture.
CD-ROM technology has enabled a new category of applications. Shopping catalogs, museum tours, and textbooks are being republished in this new, appealing form. Every subject is being covered. Competition and technology will bring rapid improvements in the quality of the titles. CD-ROMs will be replaced by a new high-capacity disc that will look like today’s CD but will hold ten times as much data. The additional capacity of these extended CDs will allow for more than two hours of digital video on a single disc, which means they’ll be capable of holding a whole movie. The picture and sound quality will be much higher than those of the best TV signal you can receive on a home set, and new generations of graphics chips will allow multi-media titles to include Hollywood-quality special effects under the interactive control of the user.
Multi-media CD-ROMs are popular today because they offer users interactivity rather than because they have imitated TV. The commercial appeal of interactivity has already been demonstrated by the popularity of CD-ROM games such as Brøderbund’s Myst and Virgin Interactive Entertainment’s Seventh Guest, which are whodunits, a blending of narrative fiction and a series of puzzles that allow a player to investigate a mystery, collecting clues in any order.
The success of these games has encouraged authors to begin to create interactive novels and movies in which they introduce the characters and the general outline of the plot, then the reader/player makes decisions that change the outcome of the story. No one suggests that every book or movie should allow the reader or viewer to influence its outcome. A good story that makes you just want to sit there for a few hours and enjoy it is wonderful entertainment. I don’t want to choose an ending for The Great Gatsby or La Dolce Vita. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Federico Fellini have done that for me. The suspension of disbelief essential to the enjoyment of great fiction is fragile and may not hold up under the heavy-handed use of interactivity. You can’t simultaneously control the plot and surrender your imagination to it. Interactive fiction is as similar to and different from the older forms as poetry is similar to and different from drama.
There will be interactive stories and games available on the network too. Such applications can share content with CD-ROMs, but at least for a while the software will have to be carefully prepared so the CD-ROMs won’t be slow when used on a network. This is because, as discussed earlier, bandwidth, or the speed at which bits are transferred from the CD-ROM to the computer, is far greater than the bandwidth of the existing telephone network. Over time, the networks will meet—then exceed—the speed of the CD-ROM. And when that happens, the content being created for the two forms will be the same. But this will take a number of years, because improvements are also being made in CD-ROM technology. In the meantime the bit rate will differentiate the two forms enough so that they will remain separate technologies.
The technologies underlying the CD-ROM and on-line services have improved dramatically, but very few computer users are creating multi-media documents yet. Too much effort is still required. Millions of people have camcorders and make videos of their kids or their vacations. However, to edit video you have to be a professional with expensive equipment. This will change. Advances in PC word processors and desktop-publishing software have already made professional-quality tools for creating simple paper documents available relatively inexpensively to millions. Desktop-publishing software has progressed to the point that many magazines and newspapers are produced with the same sort of PC and software package you can buy at any local computer store and use to design an invitation to your daughter’s birthday party. PC software for editing film and creating special effects will become as commonplace as desktop-publishing software. Then the difference between professionals and amateurs will be one of talent rather than access to tools.
Georges Méliès created one of the first special effects in movies when, in 1899, he turned a woman into feathers on the screen in The Conjurer, and moviemakers have been playing cinematic tricks ever since. Recently, special-effects technology has improved dramatically through the use of the digital manipulation of images. First a photograph is converted into binary information, which, as we have seen, software applications are able to manipulate easily. Then the digital information is altered and finally returned to photographic form, as a frame in a movie. The alterations are nearly undetectable if well done, and the results can be spectacular. Computer software gave life to the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, the thundering wildebeest herd in The Lion King, and the crazy cartoon effects in The Mask. As Moore’s Law increases hardware speed, and software becomes increasingly sophisticated, there is virtually no limit to what can be achieved. Hollywood will continue to push the state of the art and create amazing new effects.
It will be possible for a software program to fabricate scenes that will look as real as anything created with a camera. Audiences watching Forrest Gump could recognize that the scenes with Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon were fabricated. Everyone knew Tom Hanks hadn’t really been there. It was a lot harder to spot the digital processing that removed Gary Sinise’s two good legs for his role as an amputee. Synthesized figures and digital editing are being used to make movie stunts safer. You’ll soon be able to use a standard PC to make the software to create the effects. The ease with which PCs and photo-editing software already manipulate complex images will make it easy to counterfeit photographic documents or alter photographs undetectably. And as synthesis gets cheaper it will be used more and more; if we can bring Tyrannosaurus rex back to life, can Elvis be far behind?