Best PC for Families May Be No PC
This is the time of year that parents, ambitious for their children’s futures, ask me what kind of computer would be best to buy for their household.
This year there is a new possibility, Tandy Corp.’s new VIS machine (for Video Information Service). It’s not a computer in the traditional sense, but it does what most people actually have in mind for a computer for the kids. It educates and entertains.
It is the latest of several products--Commodore’s CDTV and Philip’s CD-I, for instance--that marry CD-ROM technology with television. Tandy hopes VIS will thrive where other products have languished because it has better sound and pictures, and also offers more titles covering a broader range of education, information and entertainment. The VIS technology makes it easier and less expensive for software developers to create programs for VIS than for the other systems, Tandy says.
Tandy’s Memorex MD2500 Video Information System, as it is officially known, is a specialized CD-ROM player that connects to a television set and is operated with a simple wireless remote controller. The $700 machine also plays ordinary audio CDs.
Aimed mostly at families with children, the system plays educational, informational and game programs stored on special VIS CD-ROM discs, most of which sell for about $50. Load the VIS disc into the machine’s tray, push the tray closed and the program appears on the screen in a few seconds.
To operate a program, you use the remote control to point a cursor at panels displayed on the TV screen, then press a button to select a program choice. It’s a no-brainer. Any self-respecting 5-year-old will be able to teach a parent how to do it in a few minutes.
VIS discs can store hundreds of megabytes of programming, pictures and sound, so the programs have the potential of mixing hundreds of pages of text with digitized video, TV-quality still photos, animation and CD-quality stereophonic sound. Although VIS discs are the same size as computer CD-ROM discs, they cannot be played in a standard multimedia computer’s CD-ROM drive.
I looked at several dozen VIS discs and found their quality and usefulness spanned the range from excellent to mediocre.
Among the most successful and pleasurable programs were those designed to entertain young children while teaching them to read.
Discis Books’ “Kids Read” series looks like illustrated children’s books on the TV screen, but the programs include a sound track on which the book is read aloud, complete with musical background and sound effects. As the words are read, they are highlighted on the screen so that children can associate the spoken word with the printed word. Despite the inherently slow data transfer rate of CD-ROM discs, Discis achieves nearly continuous speech from beginning to end of a book.
MacMillan New Media’s “Henry and Mudge” picture books are charming, but annoying pauses accompany turns of the page while new data is loaded. There is no text highlighting to help young readers know which words they are hearing.
As children learn to read better, they can turn off the voice track and just read the words, which are quite legible on a typical color TV screen.
Xiphias offers three VIS discs in its “Timetable of History” series. Unfortunately, much of the information is so scanty that TV sound bites seem expansive in comparison. “The Civil War,” for example, is described in just 22 seconds of narration over a map showing the Confederate and Union states. It’s fine for early elementary school levels, but older students will never complete a homework assignment with it.
Compton’s Illustrated Encyclopedia disc, which is included for free with the Tandy machine, illustrates the virtues and vices of the technology. It features fairly thorough articles on topics from A to Z, plus a few interesting video shorts, and numerous photos and voice descriptions. It is entertaining and useful for schoolwork at least through the junior high level. But it begs for a keyboard to enable one to type in the name of the topic being sought rather than having to laboriously spell it out by pointing at letters one by one on the screen.
VIS is a great game platform. With all the data that can be stored on the CD-ROM disc, games can be rich with graphics, voice and sound effects, as in the vividly illustrated VIS version of Sierra On-Line’s popular “King’s Quest” adventure game.
“Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective,” a VIS game published by Icom Simulations, incorporates a series of short video segments in the three mysteries to be solved by players.
VIS presents opportunity to budding multimedia authors. Tandy doesn’t buy VIS programs, but it will sell a specially equipped multimedia PC to qualified VIS developers, which enables them to create, revise and play their work while preparing a VIS CD-ROM master. The person to contact is Dennis Tanner, director of strategic software, at (817) 390-3477.
Who knows, you might have better luck with your VIS script than with your screenplay.
