Easy to use, useful and entertaining
Article in the December 17, 2001 issue of the China Youth Daily (translation)
Article of the China Youth Daily on the hosting of the Olympic Games in Beijing (translation)
Exclusive interview
On December 13, the organizing committee for the 29th Olympic Games was officially established.
At 5 p.m. on the same day, Mr. Wang Wei, the deputy head of the organizing committee, held a press conference with Mr. Akifumi Onaka, the committee’s longtime friend, at Novotel Beijing Xin Qiao. Mr. Onaka developed the presentation tool that Beijing’s delegation used in its Olympic bid and serves as the president of a Japanese company, Aoyama Planning Arts, Inc.
During the press conference, Mr. Wang Wei expressed his heartfelt gratitude for the remarkable effect that the company’s product had on Beijing’s campaign to host the Olympic Games. Mr. Onaka responded by saying it was a tremendous honor for all the staff of his company to have been able to contribute to China’s successful bid.
New multimedia revolution
Do you still remember the night when Beijing was selected to host the Olympics and the people of the city were excited at the news?
The innovative promotion style adopted by the Beijing delegation stunned the members of the IOC, and the multi-functional presentation featuring a variety of contents and beautiful videos profoundly impressed the people. Do you know which company developed this presentation tool?
It is a Japanese company called Aoyama Planning Arts, Inc. that specializes in designing and producing TV programs and commercials, creating entertainment contents and developing multimedia. The tool developed by APA is known as CYBER VISION, a software product aimed at improving efficiency that is receiving high acclaim from users. Of course, the Chinese Olympic Games Bid Committee is one of these users. The other day, President Onaka of APA gave us an exclusive interview.
Mr. Akifumi Onaka, the founder of the company, is an artist and a developer. He is also a business person. Mr. Onaka says, “A good interface should be easy to use like a home appliance and simple enough for even older people to use it readily. And that is best.” The products developed in line with his principles of being easy to use, useful and entertaining are creating a new multimedia revolution boom.
Simple and beautiful
An analogy of the CYBER VISION interface would be the Sphinx sitting in front of a pyramid in Egypt. The face of the Sphinx is the main screen of CYBER VISION, with the left ear corresponding to the array of channels and the right ear to the sub screen. The pedestal of the Sphinx is the control panel.
If you select a channel with the mouse (a different screen and a different set of preset buttons are displayed for a different channel), a video is played back on the main screen with the sub screen showing a second part of the main screen video or a related video at the same time (the content to be played back can be changed in the preceding design stage). The contents of the main and sub screens can be switched as well. These operations can all be done just with a single click. The control panel has buttons for the cueing, play, stop and fast-forward operations, as well as the volume control and full-screen display functions, like VCRs and DVD players.
These are the basic operation functions of CYBER VISION. In addition, this software also comes with a set of editing functions. It allows you to download the data or other content necessary for your purpose, including videos, still images, music, text, HTML pages and websites, from the network and display the downloaded content. By using such data, you can create a promotion or presentation tool through a one-click operation. This can be used for a broad range of purposes from business talks to new product promotion and public relations activities.
These features are the reason that the Beijing Olympic Games Bid Committee adopted CYBER VISION. Mr. Onaka happily told us how all this happened at the time. “It happened that, at the beginning of this year, a friend of mine showed CYBER VISION to a member of the Beijing Olympic Games Bid Committee. Later, the committee contacted us, saying they would like to use it as a presentation tool.”
Afterward, as is well known, Beijing’s presentations at Lausanne and Moscow were done very smoothly with no language barrier. Easy to operate for anyone in the world, these presentations featured beautiful video and sound of quality comparable to that of music CDs in combination with related photos, numeric data, Internet content, etc. They helped Beijing earn high ratings in the final selection process for Olympic host cities.
Entertaining and useful
CYBER VISION is one of the series products of APA. The core product of this series is CYBER PRO developed in the Java language. It is a next-generation network tool that allows video-based news, market information, marketing analyses, PR promotion materials, product databases and the like to be configured as an information network to solve issues facing the top management of corporations. The tool is highly versatile and can be introduced quickly.
CYBER VISION is a video browser that enables content to be edited with simple operations, and it may be possible that anyone can be a professional multimedia editor by using this browser. As noted by Mr. Onaka, who says CYBER VISION is the best tool for young people wishing to produce an original collection of videos, this editing tool is not difficult to handle.
First, prepare materials. 1. Video captured with a video camera (MPEG-1), 2. Photos and images (JPG), 3. URL of the related website, 4. Favorite music, 5. Tables, graphs and others showing related information
Next, edit the prepared materials with CYBER VISION. 1. Decide on the content of each channel.
Organize the prepared materials (e.g., a collection of videos telling the story of how a person spends a day from the moment he or she wakes up through the hours at work until he or she goes home from work).
2. Establish a hyperlink between a preset button and related information on a channel-by-channel basis. 3. Include hyperlinked text in each video explaining what is going on. 4. Incorporate background music.
Since all these editing operations can be done through the drag-and-drop operation, even an unskilled PC user can create a multimedia photo album. You can save the created content in your PC for your own viewing pleasure or burn it on CD-ROMs to share it with friends and family members. If your dream is to be a professional singer or actor, you may be able to make it come true by creating an original CD-ROM and sending it to a record firm or production company.
CYBER VISION is also useful to record memorable events such as wedding receptions and birthday parties. If you notice someone munching on the meal in the video and want to find out who it is, just click on the screen, and you will see the screen display that person’s name, the amount of his or her gift money and even the data on the personal relationship with him or her. Or, suppose you are watching the video of a trip you made several years ago and click a related preset button. A block of text may appear describing how you felt after you got ripped off during the trip, potentially turning the bitter memory into a funny story.
You can create content by yourself and watch it for your own pleasure. This is a gift that CYBER VISION gives us to lead a fun life.
* The China Youth Daily has a daily circulation of over one million in Beijing and is much more popular than the People’s Daily, the most powerful newspaper in China.
go back