New CD-ROM format brings real-time video. (Ideas & Trends) (column)

NEW CD-ROM FORMAT BRINGS REAL-TIME VIDEO

Someday, this magazine may be "printed" on a CD-ROM (compact disk-read-only memory) rather than on paper. If that happens, reading will never be the same.

Imagine. You pop a five-inch optical disk into a player connected to (or built into) your PC, and a page of text and pictures appears on-screen--a fairly high resolution, color graphics screen.

The text looks typeset--black type on a white ground, just as in the magazine. But the pictures are different: They can move. With the touch of a key, three-dimensional animations and full-motion videos with soundtracks replace still-frame photographs and drawings.

And although you could read the magazine page by page as you do now, you would have a second option: moving through the magazine (or training manual or dictionary or textbook or travel brochure) in an Alice-through-the-looking-glass, helter-skelter sort of way.

As applications for CD-ROM technology begin to emerge, one thing is becoming clear: Information retrieval need not be a linear process. By clicking a mouse on highlighted text, portions of drawings, or icons, you can call for more detail or information on a related topic, following your train of thought through all 560 megabytes of this interactive mixture of media.

"Explorability becomes the issue, not sequence," says Ted Nelson, the San Antonio-based software designer and consultant credited with inventing the concept of hypertext (nonsequential writing), which is the basis of many CD-ROM applications. In this "hyper" world, you control the sequence of information.

Sound far into the future? It could happen next year. In fact, PC-based CD-ROM applications that use bits and pieces of the total concept are already available.

These, along with many prototypes of what's being called hypermedia (an extension of the hypertext concept into hypergraphics, hypermovies, hypersound, and so on), were demonstrated at Microsoft's Second International …