CED VideoDisc and Player Discussion

[ghbrett]

Hi there. Once upon a time (1981ish) I worked for the East Carolina School of Medicine Center for Medical Communications. I was tasked to create a laser disc of histology slides for teaching with. It never got off the ground.

What I do remember was that some one told me, then or later, about a disc that had Magic Lessons on it. You would use the random access to find the spoilers. You would play it backwards to see how the tricks were done. It was amazing in how it took advantage of the power of the hardware to create non-linear, hypermedia.

Does anyone know what that title and which player? I am not going to buy one, but am just really curious. I don't think this is a figment of my imagination.

Are there any other examples of re-purposing laser / video disks for educational use?

Thanks in advance.
-- George
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long time academic computing tech support person.

[Jesse Skeen]

There was a segment with a magician on "The First National Kiddisc" put out on laserdisc in 1981, where he does a trick and tells you to still-frame through it to see how he does it. I have the disc, it's got a bunch of other stuff for kids that take advantage of the CAV format's freeze-frame and frame-advance abilities. There's one part where they show a trip to the San Diego Zoo in super fast-motion and you have to still-frame through it to really see anything.

There were a bunch of laserdiscs put out for use in schools, though the ones I've seen don't do anything really special other than some still-frames with text.
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Videodisc and stereo sound- there's no better value around!