A High-Tech Journey to ‘Vienna’

The Voyager Co.’s “Vienna: The Spirit of a City” is one of the most unusual laser discs yet released. It takes full advantage of the interactive technology to let you virtually tour the city while planning how--or if--you will tour it.

The ambitious project, produced by filmmaker Titus Leber, is accompanied by a 136-page illustrated guidebook with a frame-by-frame index of the 15,000 still pictures and 20 minutes of motion footage. You want to see every picture in Vienna’s museums? Call any one of 8,000 art objects up a frame at a time by name and number.

Unlike tape, you can freeze the picture on your TV screen and leave it there all day if you like and not harm the laser disc. In a sense, you could change the artwork in your home by leaving a different print on the screen for as long as you like.

There are clips of Viennese music, including the Vienna Boys Choir and the Vienna State Opera; a history of the city and its more famous citizens, including Freud and Klimt.

The guidebook includes a time line of Viennese history and the Hapsburg family tree as well as maps of Vienna and Austria. There’s even an excerpt from “The Third Man,” which was shot in Vienna.

The music digital track is supplemented by two analog tracks; you can hear English narration on track one, German on track two.

At $125, it’s an expensive journey, but if you’re thinking of investing in a trip it might well be worth taking a detailed look at the soul of the city that Leber tries to lay bare, to see if that is the cultural life, architecture and history you want to explore.