A CONVERSATION WITH JON ALPER
by Doug DeRusha
 How did you get started with WGBH, Jon?
 I grew up on WGBH in a family that supported public broadcasting. The member magazine was a fixture on the coffee table and we watched NOVA and Masterpiece Theatre together. As a "Cah Pahking Bostonian" I have a great deal of pride and connection to WGBH. I never imagined I'd get to work here. Then I got lucky, about three and half years ago my former boss, Annie Valva, was doing some work with Apple and ended up on a plane headed eastward from Cupertino with my friend Jim Vestal. He suggested Annie call me and the rest is, as they say, history.
What do you see as the objectives of the WGBH Interactive group, particularly in context with the mission of WGBH itself?
You can read the WGBH Educational Foundation's Mission Statement at http://main.wgbh.org/wgbh/about/mission.html so I won't repeat it here but the mission really drives our work, and we hope the viewers' experience with our content. WGBH Interactive does most but not all of the interactive work for The WGBH Educational Foundation. WGBH Interactive, under various names, has been around since 1987. That's a remarkably long time for the new media industry. We started with interactive Video Discs, CD-ROM projects and content for the old Prodigy online service. There are also other groups working at WGBH in similar spaces. For example, there is another group dedicated to producing the site at www.wgbh.org that focuses on the regional TV and radio audience and delivering services to WGBH members. In Interactive, our approach to our work in the context of the Foundation's mission is to understand the content for the projects we build, and extend and deepen that content for the users. It's very definitely not about being a brochure for a TV show.
The media are catching up with the mission... Our job is trying to push that forward. If we engage and entertain the user with the content while make the navigation understandable, they'll enjoy exploring and learning.
We have other more specific goals as well, as we want our content to be as accessible to people with disabilities as possible. WGBH is home to the CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM, www.ncam.org) and we work closely with them on issues of media access.
We also want our content to be useful to classroom teachers and we try to deliver lesson plans and teacher materials for as many of our sites as we can.
You have 70 people in the Interactive group working on many projects at one time. How is the group structured to accommodate multiple projects, and what kind of creative cross-pollination happens as a result?
The fact that our primary goals are not to sell products but rather to educate, inform and inspire allows us to attract high quality people who are committed to the mission and that makes it really fun to work here.
The bulk of our work involves collaborating with units like Educational Programming and the groups that produce the various programs that WGBH makes for air on PBS like NOVA, American Experience, Arthur and others to bring that content to new media. Currently, the majority of that work is for the Web and recently DVD. We still do occasional CD-ROM projects and we are doing research and pilot projects for new technologies including Interactive Digital Television.
In Interactive, our teams are based on a core of three people: Producer, Designer, Developer. The people in these roles collaborate to define and deliver the final project. We're really lucky because we have incredible people to put on these teams. Our Producers live the content, they write, they plan, they budget, they fundraise and they hold the project together. We have award winning designers who really understand information design and interactivity. They're highly experienced designers who focus on Interactivity rather than folks with a primarily print background. We have developers who bring more than coding to the job. Our developers are musicians, meteorologists, premeds, math teachers and science historians who discovered interactive media and now sling great code. The work we do is the result of the collaboration and collision of producer, designer and developer. We see this tri-disciplinary collaboration as critical to our success because choices in any one of these disciplines have profound implications on the user's experience. For larger projects, we may add additional people to the legs of the triangle but the basic structure is always those three people.
We try to produce in parallel with the TV team for several reasons from rights clearance to economies of scale, to having access to the people in the TV production unit while they're still on the project and immersed in the content.
Where possible, we start larger projects with 'school' where the team members spend a few days or weeks doing reading and research in the content area, watch the footage being gathered by the film team and generally immerse themselves in the content. This is often followed by a brainstorm with the team in interactive and the folks from the TV team from which the best ideas are culled and then explored with storyboards and some nuts and bolts, so how would we actually do this?... research.
Working with the Producer of the television show, we arrive at a shared vision for the interactive component and then we build a site map, wireframe navigation and, for larger projects, an alpha version to do user testing. After the testing, we define the final content elements, tools and technologies needed to deliver them and create a production plan.
This general approach applies to all our projects but, obviously, depending on the scope of the project the size of the team will vary. From a managerial standpoint, people report to managers within their discipline for two reasons. First, developers will often work on several projects over the course of a year and each of these projects may include different designers and producers. For example Carla Waggett, developer for the "This Old House" VR tours on their Web site, also works with me on the QTV project. Secondly, because the folks within each discipline are a sort of meta-team, they meet as a group periodically to share experience, give project updates and post mortems so we can re-purpose successful code and methods from one project to the next while trying to avoid repeating mistakes.
How did Apple's QuickTime VR come to play such a prominent role in the Web content designed and delivered by WGBH Interactive?
We use QuickTime VR when we think the user can benefit from QTVR's unique ability to convey a sense of space and context for scenes from the real world. While linear film of the Pyramids in Egypt or from the summit of Everest is a very powerful experience, it is inherently narrative. The viewer can play forward or backward but the experience is really about seeing the images over a period of time as framed by the videographer/cinematographer, editor and director. With VR, the experience is about space. The control the user has over what they see gives them the power to explore, to get a sense of being in a place or handling an object. We use QTVR when we can teach more or make the content more engaging by offering a spatial experience instead of, or in addition to, a narrative experience. Showing the hieroglyphics on the walls of an ancient Egyptian temple can be done with a still photograph but showing how they fit in the context of the room, or on the wall is best done when the user can freely manipulate their view of the whole room.
One important point that is often misunderstood in VR photography is that, despite being a 360 degree panorama, composition is very important to creating a successful experience for the user. This is well demonstrated on the VR's Aaron Strong, Annie Valva and Peter Tyson shot in Egypt. If you go look at those VR's they are the result of careful thought about composition in support of the content. For example, some panos are shot from the corner of a room to allow the user to see some of the hieroglyphics close up while still being able to get an impression of the room as a whole. Also, the object VR on the Giza Plateau demonstrates the relative positioning of each of the Pyramids on the plateau. Composition is critical to successful use of VR.
QTVR is a particularly powerful tool for the This Old House project tours. Certainly the feel of the spaces in a house can be shown with stills or by walking through with a video camera but with VR the user can explore more freely. They can put the elements in the room in a spatial context, understand the room in the context of the house in conjunction with an interactive floorplan or map. A great way to appreciate the power of a QTVR experience is to see QTVR's of a place you've never been and then go there. Your ability to orient yourself in this new space is much greater than if you'd been shown stills or video.
What software and hardware tools do you use to produce the content for such luminaries as Nova and This Old House?
We choose tools from a variety of companies and we often use them together on a single project. Our choices are about suitability and affordability for a particular project at a particular time and should not be read as any kind of endorsement.
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