I just wanted to let you know that an interactive QuickTime movie has
just won the second place in the fourth annual "Science and
Engineering Visualization Challenge" sponsored by /Science/ magazine,
the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the American Association
for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
The interactive movie won the second place in the "Interactive
Multimedia" category...
This interactive movie allows anyone to visualize the sounds archived
in the Macaulay Library's digital collection of natural sounds and
bird videos (over 160,000 audio/video files). This application
provides spectrograms and waveforms in real time as the user listens
to sound or video clips from the collection. Its uses embedded Flash
for its main interface (yes Flash....), XML to communicate with the
server and requires additional 3rd party QuickTime components for the
audio visualization part of things. The interactive QuickTime movie
is launched from the online application, allowing you to browse the
entire archive, which sits on top of a massive Oracle database (each
audio/video) asset can have more than 700 attributes.
For the viewers who do not wish to use the interactive movie (or
install the 3rd party components), we also offer streaming MP4 videos
and streaming RealAudio (until we have converted everything to MP4).
I would also like to add that the current player deployed is a
'older' version, I have a better/improved one but it isn't ready
quick yet for deployment.
Last, providing the worldwide community easy access to browsing the
hundreds of thousands of assets in the Macaulay Library of animal
behavior is a project Cornell plans to maintain indefinitely, thus it
is important that QuickTime stays backward compatible.
