Group Manager of Microsoft Next Media Research Group
Curtis Wong is manager of the Microsoft Next Media Research Group, whose focus “spans the linear and interactive media spectrum from television, broadband, and gaming to emerging media forms.” The author of more than 20 patents pending in such areas as interactive television, media browsing, visualization, design, and mobile computing, Wong was previously Director of Intel Productions. At Intel, he was responsible for creating next generation content such as the Virtual Van Gogh Museum Tour; ArtMuseum.net, one of the first Web-based, broadband art exhibition networks (which featured the National Gallery of Art’s Van Gogh’s Van Gogh’s); and the Whitney’s American Century Exhibition. ArtMuseum.net is currently featuring the “Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality” project. (Other Intel content group projects include Wong’s production of The Poetry of Structure, which accompanied Ken Burns’s film Frank Lloyd Wright and was the first enhanced digital television program to be broadcast in the U.S.) Wong was also the General Manager and Executive Producer of Corbis Productions (a division of Corbis Corporation), the digital image company started by Bill Gates, where he created a series of award winning CD-ROM’s on subjects such as A Passion for Art, FDR, Critical Mass (about the making of the Atomic Bomb), and Leonardo Da Vinci. Prior to Corbis he was an interactive-documentary producer for the Criterion Collection, producing some of the first feature films on laserdiscs and multimedia CD-ROMs for the Voyager Company. Wong’s work in interactive media has won many design and industry awards, including New York Film Festival Gold Medals, the ID Magazine Annual Design Award of Excellence, and Communication Arts Interactive award of Excellence. His collaboration with WGBH Interactive on the broadband-enhanced documentary Commanding Heights—The Battle for the World Economy, won a 2002 Academy Award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts and was nominated for the first Interactive TV Emmy. He is currently working with WGBH Frontline on an enhanced broadband documentary for television/web scheduled to air in Summer 2006.
Curtis serves on the board of trustees for the Rhode Island School of Design and the Seattle Art Museum.
Links: Microsoft Next Media Research Group | RISD | Seattle Art Museum | Van Gogh Museum | Commanding Heights
Research Sample: Commanding Heights
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/hi/
(See especially Educators’ Guide and Video Tour of site)
See also: “Codescope,” a tool in the Corbis Leonardo Codex Leicester CD-ROM that allows the user to slide a translation window over the text to translate Leonardo’s writings into English in context.
“Back in the early 90’s when everyone was porting books onto CD-ROM I was questioning the purpose in doing that because the experience to me was substantially inferior to a printed book with the only benefit being it was searchable. I made it one of the questions we always asked ourselves when doing any work which was “what are we doing that is substantially better than can be done in any other form?”
[Download and install interactive page 1 of Leonardo’s Codex Leicester to explore]
