THE BUILDING OF THE FIRST nuclear bomb is a dramatic tale, one that's been told in many movies and books. Corbis Publishing puts a fresh spin on this critical turning point in history with its interactive CD-ROM Critical Mass: America's Race to Build the Atomic Bomb. To better convey the multiple forces at play, Corbis developed a navigational scheme that explores the topic through the people behind the project as well as through the historical events, political climate, and scientific breakthroughs of the era.
Critical Mass features biographies of the principal scientists, a virtual tour of the laboratory at Los Alamos, a time line of the events that occurred during the bomb's construction, and a photographic collection showing the impact of nuclear technology.
The Corbis Media Archive -- a digital collection of photographs, video clips, and other material -- contributed the core images on the CD-ROM. Critical Mass producer Lisa Anderson acquired additional material by asking the descendants of the key players for photographs of the scientists as kids and for letters written during the building of the bomb.
To make a potentially dry subject more engaging, Corbis created six long-running presentations that incorporate images and sound to help users learn about the personalities involved and tour the once secret Los Alamos testing facility. To bring the CD-ROM into the present, the Beyond Trinity section includes 300 photos accompanied by three user-selectable soundtracks showing the implications of this discovery -- from nuclear power to nuclear medicine.
1. MAIN NAVIGATION. A sepia-tone photograph of the
scientists (from left to right, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Feynman, and
Fermi) serves as the opening screen and appears here on the
title bar as a repeating element that allows users to return to
the main menu. All the items in the main screen -- such as the
scientists, the newspaper, and the crystal ball -- are hot
buttons that link to other material and change to full color
when active. For example, clicking on one of the scientists
takes you to a documentary presentation about that individual.
2. VIDEO CLIP. QuickTime clips are included for many of
the items in the Timeline section and as part of the cinematic
tours. Here, a clip of footage from the attack on Pearl Harbor
plays in the same window the picture occupies. The
240-x-120-pixel video is pixel-doubled to fill the
480-x-240-pixel window. The title runs in 256 colors, but Corbis
created rich custom color palettes to optimize the colors for
each screen.
3. AUDIO CLIP. The audio was down-sampled to 8-bit at 11
kHz to make it play back reliably on all systems and to leave
more disc space for the video clips and photography.
4. DIRECT NAVIGATION. The colored bars on the left allow
users to jump to other areas of the CD-ROM directly, such as the
reference section on chemistry or the 3-D virtual tour of the
Los Alamos facility.
5. TIME-LINE NAVIGATION. This small screen of colored
blocks -- resembling the periodic table of the elements --
represents a miniature version of the main time-line navigation
screen. Each of the colored blocks corresponds to a topic in the
time line: atomic science (red), scientists (blue), political
history (green), popular culture (yellow), and warfare
technology (purple). Each block is a live link. As the mouse
crosses a block, a small photo and caption appear; clicking
takes the user to that item. The small white square indicates
the current selection.
What:
Critical Mass: America's Race to Build the Atomic Bomb
Company:
Corbis Publishing, Bellevue, WA; 800-336-2947 or 206-649-3997.
Tools:
Macromedia Director 4.0 with custom search and display XCMDs; Adobe Photoshop, for image processing; Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects, for video editing and effects; Macromedia SoundEdit 16, for sound processing; AutoDesk's 3D Studio, for 3-D scenery.
