Posted by andy@assembla.com Fri, 29 Sep 2006 16:19:00 GMT

Four years ago, my friend Doug Smith called me up and told me that I was about to have “an experience. A very important experience.� Then he showed me the prototype of a new browsable video format that he called “Nav�. What Larry Atlas and Doug Smith had done was take the key elements of Web browsing – graphical hyperlinks, the back button, forward button, and history, and apply them in a simple, beautiful way to video. Larry, a writer for stage and screen, had designed the Nav format for a new type of movie script that would encourage a viewer to explore multiple threads of character and plot. With the release of the “Onyx Project� DVD, viewers will finally be able to have this experience of true video browsing. The pre-release Web site is up at http://www.theonyxproject.com/

Onyx contains 5+ hours of hyperlinked video, starring David Strathairn, last year’s Academy award nominee for best actor, on a DVD that can be played in any Windows computer. When you insert the DVD, the Nav browser starts automatically, the video expands into a full-screen player with minimalist, iPod-like black background, and you begin exploring the story.

My role was to architect Nav so that it could grow into a video Web. I designed an XML format to describe scenes and links, so that Nav scenes could be distributed across the Net and played with any compatible browser. I also designed a reference browser, and an editor, or authoring system. The newer, slicker, windows-only browser on the DVD was written by DataArts.

It will be nice to see Doug and Larry release Nav editor, so that users can make their own Nav’s by mashing up original and “found� video scenes, and it would be great to see a streaming Internet browser. Hopefully people will like the Nav format and those things will happen.

Onyx tells a politically charged story about an Army expedition in Afghanistan. Writer/ director Larry Atlas spent years in the US Army, and he doesn’t want to see that great institution used as a political pawn. If you don’t get to see Onyx, remember this: it is our duty to step forward in these contentious times to defend American principles, defend the constitution, and say no to torture.