Abstract
This paper describes a multi-media application, "A City in Transition: New Orleans, 1983-86." The project is being developed on Project Athena Visual Workstations as a curriculum resource for the study of architecture, urban planning, and political science. The project includes 3 hours of movie sequences and stills mastered on optical videodisc, as well as an extensive set of ASCII files containing support material.

The Project Athena Visual Workstation with a Parallax 1280 videographics board and a single 1280 x 1024 display has been configured with six videodisc players running through two 4 x 1 audio-follow-video switchers. The Project Athena network allows us to remotely access the relational database manager, INGRES; we currently attach to INGRES via GDB, a general purpose database handler, developed by Noah Mendelsohn, which allows more efficient processing of complex queries.

Prototype software, developed under X-10, includes a spring loaded mouse control interface to the videodisc player and a professional edit-list management package. Data can be entered and queries constructed using menu bars and postage stamp icons taken from the video footage. Users can also select their own postage stamp icons to represent particular shots during the editing process, or to create multimedia display structures. It is our hope under X-11 to create general tools. which can serve multiple applications wherever possible. For instance, one of the issues which has recently emerged is how icons are used to sequence and edit different media: is the intent with stills and film similar enough to develop program modules, and by what means does a user learn how to customize his/her environment?

X11 Video Extensions Technical Meeting, Bellcore, June 9-10, 1988.
http://mf.media.mit.edu/pubs/conference/SoftConsider.pdf