The Workshop

The Following line should give you some indication of the status of this page - please let me know if it's completely wrong.

This is where I was experimenting with ideas and processes that I thought might apply to the final project. They didn't, but they're left here for interest and because they keep showing up on my visit logs so someone is interested :O)

Language Processing. Here I'm messing with JavaScript just to get some sort of idea of how it might be possible to get visitors to communicate with parts of the site in natural language rather than via menus. I just think it engages the user - and I'll need to find some academic support of that assertion :)
30/7/99: Now deals with any Case and responds rationally to an input it doesn't recognise. Added random responsed for recognised and unrecognised text. Unfortunately it seems not to work on NS 3 - no idea how it does on NS4+.
4/8/99. New search routine no means that it can deal with punctuation, also have a new output routine which writes to the empty frame rather than to a form within it.

Telling the Theseus and the Minotaur story:
Here I'm looking at ways to present the story of Theseus and the Minotaur using different technologies.You will need Realplayer G2 to see these in action. The original sound file (17mb!) was produced and mixed on SoundForge. You shoudl note that I did all this back in the last century, so the technology is very dated. However, I'm a great fan of anything that's simple and works.

Animated Gif + Real Media
The problem here is that the animated gif takes a while to download. This causes problems with synching the pics and sound. I will be trying to add a 'pre-download' script which might mean a wait before it starts. The advantage is that you have a lot of control over the animation. RealProducer (free version!) processed the sound down to 750k which is streamed. The gif was produced on Ulead's Gif Animator 1.5. This one has the clearer sound and, now download speeds are so much faster, it probably works the better of the two.

Real Media Slideshow
This is the new piece of kit from RM and it has a certain amount of promise. Right now the main problem is that it won't play in a frame, it launches the viewer in a separate window. The graphics processing is rather restricting here, and it shows only 'slides', fine for this coz that's all there is, but you couldn't have true animation.

Working on story telling with children?
Do take a look at StoryTeller - it's been a bit of a labor of love as it doesn't really fit in with all that planning and writing children have to do in school, it's actually about children telling stories, but schools who do use it get a lot out of it.

HELP, I'M LOST
Take me back to The Telematics Index, Marshal's Home Page.