< Waxweb MosaicMOO >
The Waxweb Mosaic Moo 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). It combines one of the largest hypermedia narrative databases on the current free Internet with a unique authoring interface that allows Mosaic or MOO users to make immediate, publicly visible hypermedia links to the main document.
Waxweb consists of more than 900 pages of hypertext, available to both WWW (Mosaic) and MOO users. English, French and Japanese text versions of the film's monologue will automatically be inserted into the hypertext, according to the wishes of the visitor. Mosaic users will have access to the hypermedia portions of the document, which includes the entire film embedded as 1600 color stills, 560 mpeg video clips, and 560 AIFF audio clips, including the soundtrack in English, French, German, and Japanese. This document has been created by David Blair, with invited contributions by a number of authors, and generous assistance provided by Melynda Barnhart and Anna Youssefi.
Visitors 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. By turning a MOO (text-based virtual reality) into a dynamic HTML document, Mosaic users will have the ability to use a forms-based interface to transparently write publicly visible hypertext (and hypermedia) additions to the main document. This breakthrough in Mosaic functionality has been written by Tom Meyer, with assistance from Suzanne Hader, and some coding help from Chiba.
In 1993, "Wax" was the "First Film on the Internet" (Markoff, New York Times, Business section, 5.24.93), sent out as a relatively high bandwidth multicast over the experimental multimedia backbone (MBONE). WAXWEB is an attempt to re- multicast "Wax" in a form more appropriate for the current Internet. As a narrative server available to both text interface and visual interface users, WAXWEB uses hybridized off-the-shelf freeware/shareware tools to demonstrate that the 5,000,000 channels are here now.
Users of WWW readers (Lynx, Mosaic) can reach Waxweb MosaicMOO at this URL: http://bug.village.virginia.edu:7777
[Mac users note: for now, you must go to your options menu and set for HTTP 0.9]
MOO people can reach the Waxweb MosaicMOO at: bug.village.virginia.edu 7777
FEATURES OF WAXWEB MOSAIC-MOO ----------------------------- The entire film "WAX or the discovery of television among the bees" as:
560 mpeg video clips (the entire film)
1600 gif color stills (available in 3 sizes dependent upon the bandwidth of your connection. Dynamic preferences allow change of size at any time. Total of 4800 stills)
560 AIFF audio clips: the entire film available with English, French, German, and Japanese soundtracks, with language change available at any time. Total of 2240 audio clips)
900 pages of hypertext (over 5000 links to date, including index links). Text material includes the script of the film in English, French, and Japanese, as chosen by visitor; 2600 paragraphs (English only) describing each shot in the film; more than 100 pages of contradictory fragments from early versions of the script; and hypertexts by 10 invited writers (Jane Douglas, Stuart Moulthrop, and others)... all meant to encourage your writing on this site!
* Immediate, publicly visible hypertext links in Mosaic through a forms-based interface. In-line links and hypertext authoring interface in MOO-space. Read-only available through Lynx, and so available to many without telnet.
*The ability to immediately add new pages in both Mosaic and MOO.
* Personal bookmarks saved from session to session.
Upcoming support for VRML, the distributed virtual reality markup language extension to HTML, which will allow spatialized access to Waxweb.
CREDITS ------- This project 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. 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. Thanks to Jackie Morie, director of THE EDGE, two terminals and a shared T1 connection were made available, for public-site exhibition of the network- based document. Waxweb has received partial funding from the New York State Council for the Arts -Electronic Arts finishing fund-, administered by the Experimental Television Center, Owego, NY. Software and technical assistance provide by Eastgate Systems, maker of Storyspace hypertext software. Mpeg compression hardware and software provided by Xing Technologies. SLIP access generously provided by Echonyc.com.
NOTES ----- Since we have the ability to change pointers to media files on the fly, we intend to mirror the media at sites around the World, to keep the load down on the MOO at IATH. Hotlinks will be published on the visitor's page pointing to the nearest media mirror. If you have some extra space on your system, and would like to help us out with our research, please consider becoming a mirror site.
This is an unfunded project (except for $500 from NYSCA).... please be patient with us as we bring everything up to full quality. We will be selling a signed, #'d CD of the dataset, playable on most every machine, in the fall, to help offset expenses. We hope to be able to setup the MOO to point to the individual user's CD for the media when that happens, but we are still in the vapor stage with that.
If you can speak German, and wish to volunteer your help to the project, we could really use your help... we need to transcribe the German voiceover off the videocassette.
BUGS ---- Feel free to point out problems... there are forms-based mailers available at the site (though these are still a bit buggy, sic).
You will notice some missing pictures, and when audio comes up, occasional clipped words, especially in the French/German/Japanese audio. Please be patient as we clean up the database.
Note that no PD mpeg player outside of the Xing player for Windows supports a timebase. Since this is a particular problem with the Mac, we will provide partial Quicktime support, about 100 clips or so. This should come up this week.
Note that we are going up just as MacMosaic 2.0 is in beta... there are sure to be some incompatibilities... please be patient! Don't forget to set options to HTTP 0.9 !!
Unfortunately, as far as we know, only X-users have a version of Mosaic able to publish kanji text (the multi-localization enhancement for 2.4 is available from http://www.ntt.jp/Mosaic- l10n/README.html). MOO users won't have this trouble. And of course, there is the audio.
