QTVR, Macs go on virtual expedition

MacWeek, Jan 19, 1998 by Michael Miley

Exploring Mayan ruins in the rain forests of Central America and Mexico would

seem to demand that you travel light, bringing only the necessities for your

journey. Then how did the MayaQuest expedition manage to bring along a million

people?

MayaQuest, the project of Earthtrecks Inc. of Minneapolis, is an online inter-

active expedition as well as a physical journey. It involves some 35,000

classrooms and an estimated 1 million middle-school students and online

explorers across the United States.

Over the past three years, MayaQuest's goal has been to search for the secrets

of the ancient Mayans in the ruins of their cities. The team, comprising six

explorers, journeys by bicycle through Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and Belize

to plumb the mysteries of the Mayans' decline. For the six weeks that the

expedition is in the field, students and other online explorers can interact

with the team over the Internet.

Expedition leader Dan Buettner, MayaQuest project manager Nick Buettner and

photographer Doug Mason use PowerBooks, QuickTake cameras and an Inmarsat B

Terminal from Rockwell International Corp. of Costa Mesa, Calif., to mail

digital photos, sounds and reports from Mexico and the depths of the Central

American rain forest. The journey is then transmitted via an Inmarsat satel-

lite to the MayaQuest Web site (http://www.mecc.com/mayaquest.html).

The site is hosted by The Learning Co. of Minneapolis. Participating schools

interact with the ground-level team via question-and-answer sessions.

Subscribers to MayaQuest's educational package can vote online to direct the

group to its next destination.

"We're still exploring the mysteries of the ancient Mayans and tying what we

learn with the Mayans alive today," Dan Buettner said. "To that end, we'll be

making another expedition in the spring, and we're encouraging people to sign

up for the online adventure."

Satellite transport

Apple is one of the sponsors of MayaQuest and has donated computer equipment

and money, as have others. Among the tents, bikes, flashlights, solar panel

and other equipment used by the team are the PowerBook 5300, 1400, 520, and

540c; QuickTake 150 and 200 digital still cameras; a Kodak DCS 420 digital

camera from Eastman Kodak Co. of Rochester, N.Y.; a DCR-VX1000 digital video

camera from Sony Electronics Inc. of San Jose, Calif.; a satellite dish from

Rockwell; and an Apple eMate 300 linked to a global positioning system (GPS)

from Trimble Navigation Ltd. of Sunnyvale, Calif., for tracking the GPS coor-

dinates.

"One of the ways we use the QuickTake 150 is on a QuickVT tripod head donated

by Peace River Studios [of Cambridge, Mass.]," said Nick Buettner. "The camera

is outfitted with a Kaidan 28mm wide-angle lens, which we rotate in 15-degree

increments to get a 360-degree view of the site."

The team downloads the images to a PowerBook and stitches them together with

QuickTime VR. They compress the QTVR files with StuffIt Deluxe from Aladdin

Systems Inc. of Watsonville, Calif., and send them back to the Web site via

satellite, along with other digital photos, sounds and text.

Clicking right or left through a QTVR site gives students a vivid sense of

what it means to be in a rain forest or move through a Mayan ruin. One such

QTVR session is of the Tikal ruins in Guatemala. It's a "multinode" file, with

nine 360-degree shots of the ancient Mayan city. Viewers are encouraged to

look for two Mayan masks, as if they're on a treasure hunt.

The QuickTake 200, along with the Kodak DCS 420, were used more when the team

was on the move, although the QuickTake 150 was also used in caves. "The

QuickTake 200 was great for instant gratification and for helping introduce us

to a village," Mason said.

"The Kodak DCS 420 worked well for the times when we couldn't bring our Power-

Books. Its two PC Cards would let us take a couple of hundred higher-res

photos before we'd have to download them," he said. "It also had 25-, 55- and

105mm lenses for close-ups and long-distance shots."

Mason used Adobe Photoshop to massage the photos for light and contrast, and

then saved them as 72-dpi images for publishing on the Web.

On the Web

The MayaQuest Web site, developed and hosted by The Learning Co., is the way

students, teachers and the general public participate with the MayaQuest team

and their consulting experts. More than 12 million hits have been logged at

the site since the project began. Among the 35,000 participating classrooms

are 2,000 subscribers who get increased attention from the team via e-mail

exchanges and voting rights. These are key factors in making the expedition

interactive.

The MayaQuest Web site is a mix of digital photos of the rain forest and the

Mayan ruins. It includes QuickTime and QTVR movies and RealNetworks Inc.

RealAudio sounds, as well as in-depth reports, maps and background material on

the Mayans. It has a search engine, helper applications and related links to

other sites.

A typical area active during the expedition is the News, delivered three times

a week, which includes Team Update, Kid Profile, Julie's Journal, Rainforest