Liz Quigg

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory • MS226 • Box 500 • Batavia, IL 60510 • 630 840-2631 • edreg@fnal.gov
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Interactive Video

My first multimedia work was in interactive video where we authored a videodisc and wrote software to drive the videodisc and provide activities or context. The authoring tool was HyperCard for the early projects and SuperCard for the later projects. When I developed the later projects, I was able to use a video card that allowed overlaying a video layer on a graphics layer so that the video did not have to be viewed on a separate monitor. The quality of the analog video was much better than the early attempts at digital video. The videodisc-based versions of these projects are ancient history now that we have really good digital video. Much of the content has been converted to newer media.

We also used videodiscs for many of the exhibits at the Lederman Science Center.


Particles and Prairies

Particles and Prairies videodisc and software are a multimedia resource developed in 1992 for middle school students to learn about ecology, history, restoration and research on the restored prairie at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. They were developed for the Particles and Prairies Program at Fermilab. Students and teachers can access the videodisc with Macintosh Hypercard software, a barcode reader or remote control. The program included thirty-seven video clips, seven hundred slides, activities to learn birdcalls and a databases of plants and birds. Particles and Prairies won the NewMedia Invision 1993 Multimedia Award of Excellence and Gold Award for K-12 Education.

The funding for Particles and Prairies was provided in part by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Energy Research, Illinois State Board of Education's Science Literacy Program and Friends of Fermilab. It was a collaboration of the Education Office, Computing Division and Visual Media Services Department at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

The Particles and Prairies Program was profiled in Linda Tway's book Multimedia in Action as an example of multimedia as educator. She interviews Liz and other people involved in the development of the software and videodisc.

Accelerator Kiosk

The Accelerator Kiosk is part of the Quark to Quasars exhibits at the Lederman Science Center. We installed this in 1992. It provided an introduction to the accelerators and experimental areas. It combined animations, video, sound, and graphics.

The original version of this kiosk included a videodisc player, Macintosh IIfx with a Videologic video board to support 14-bit full-motion video from a Pioneer 8000 over an 8-bit graphics layer. We had a Microtouch touchscreen. We used repurposed video from Visual Media Services on the videodisc. We programmed the kiosk with SuperCard and made our animations with early Macromedia products.

 Accelerator Kiosk

External Research

I spent a year consulting for Dr. Barbara Bowen of External Research in the Advanced Technology Group at Apple Computer. During this period I developed two videodiscs and accompanying SuperCard software so she could showcase the partnerships between Apple engineers and university and lab researchers. The videodiscs included projects presented at two open houses she had with researchers.

1989 External Research Open

  • IRIS Intermedia (Norm Meyrowitz/Brown)
  • Dynamic Handbook of Medical Therapeutics (Mark Frisse/Wash U)
  • Medical Knowledge Management System (Robert Greenes/Harvard)
  • NCSA-Scientific Visualization (Tim Krauskopf/U. Ill)
  • Automatic Knowledge Engineering for Intelligent Tutoring Systems (Bev Woolf/ UMass)
  • Scientific Imaging/Medicine (Dave Roseman/ Rush Medical Center)
  • Perseus (Greg Crane/Harvard)
  • Specific Foundations of Graphics (Al Barr/CalTech)
  • HyperMedia Education (Charles Kerns/Stanford)

1990 Accelerating Innovation Open House


  • The Aligner, Kevin Dowling, Mike Blackwell & Hans Moravec, Carnegie Mellon University (Apple liaison: Louis Roehrs)
  • CSILE, Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (Apple liaison: Anne Nicol)
  • ColorSpace- Color and the Human Interface, Bill Cowan & Jim Lai. University of Waterloo  (Apple liaison: Lewis Knapp )
  • Real-Time Audio Processing, Barry Vercoe, MIT (Apple liaison: 
    Dean Blackketter)
  • VOYAGER, Speech Recognition System, Victor Zue, MIT (Apple liaison: George White)
  • Design for Injection Molding, Kos Ishii, Ohio State University - (Apple liaison: Lee Hornberger)
  • The Elastic Charles: A Hypermedia Journal, Glorianna Davenport & Hans Peter Brondmo. MIT (Media Lab)  (Apple liaison: Mike Liebhold)
  • Satellite Data Reception and Display, Bill Emery &  Charles Norris, University of Colorado (Apple liaison: Peter Zukoski)
  • The Network Project: Ansychronous Distributed Computing, Gunther Sawitzki and J. Lindenberg, Universities of Heidelberg and Karlsruhe (Apple liaison: Larry Taylor)

Mills Vision - Interacting with Square One TV

This was my first experience with videodiscs. A group of grad students at Mills College selected video segments from Square One TV, Children's Television Network and pressed a videodisc. A number of us worked on HyperCard activities that went with the videoclips. Mine were on Combinatorics and Piecharts. We spent a lot of time learning about visual interfaces that worked. This project was a prototype to demonstrate the potential of interactive video for math education.

We did our formative evaluation at the Exploratorium in San Francisco and the summative evaluation at the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley.  Our data collection for the summative evaluation included computer tracking of the use of our system, observations, and pre and post-activity interviews and testing.  It was exciting to watch the visitors use our interactive video system, especially when they did the activities cooperatively. Later in the 1989 we demonstrated the project to the producers of Square One TV in New York.

 

Mills Vision

Combinatorics