THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, July 21, 1995 TAG: 9507210517
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE MAYFIELD, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 130 lines
Conked on his unprotected head by a wrench, burned in the face by sparks, his foot run over and broken by a tow cart, the workman was having an unbelievably bad day.
All because just a few seconds earlier his blue-collar tailor hadn't outfitted him properly for the job.
It all happens in ``Personal Protective Equipment,'' an award-winning CD-ROM that has garnered worldwide attention for Virginia Beach-based Coastal Video Communications Corp. in a rapidly growing field known as interactive multimedia.
The CD-ROM is one of 10 titles produced by Coastal's 2 1/2-year-old Clarity Multimedia division. Topics range from forklift safety to sexual harassment.
The CD-ROMs, which sell for $995 apiece, are chock-full of film clips, graphics and test questions aimed at improving workers' knowledge about on-the-job risks or conflicts. Each climaxes with a real-life re-enactment, like the one involving the unfortunate workman.
For ``Personal Protective Equipment,'' a stuntman ``injured'' himself in 30 scenes. The CD-ROM covers all the hazards he'd be exposed to if not properly attired by his computer test takers in things like goggles, hard hats and steel-toed boots.
Clarity's productions incorporate audio, dramatic video shots, text and graphic images into a slick little disk that can be popped into a computer. With it, Clarity division has broken ground in the workplace training field and opened a plethora of business opportunities for itself.
In April ``Personal Protective Equipment'' won NewMedia magazine's 1995 Gold Award for the nation's best multimedia training program. Writeups in several other national magazines, including Forbes, shortly followed. Then came the calls.
Christopher Bryant, Clarity's director, said three British companies want to distribute the CD-ROMs in other English-speaking countries. The International Monetary Fund even suggested that Clarity make a CD-ROM on macroeconomics.
In keeping with the company's history, Bryant and his boss - Coastal owner Paul Michels - are treading carefully.
Bryant said Clarity will add 20 titles by the end of next year. But for now, it is sticking mainly to its parent company's knitting: workplace safety and health, job skills and topics of interest to human resources and health care professionals.
Over its 11-year history, Coastal has built a national following and a $10-million-a-year business by publishing videos and print materials that focus on those subject areas. CD-ROMs were a logical technological progression for the company and an improvement over traditional training materials, Bryant said.
``This is where everything is heading in the training field,'' he said. ``Multimedia engages people. You can't sleep through it.
``What I'm finding is that people are even having fun with this. And if you can make something as boring as industrial health and safety interesting, you're on to something.''
Among Clarity's fans is Jim Gijantino, assistant general manager for New Jersey Transit Authority's bus operation. Since his operation's 4,000 employees began taking individual CD-ROM training programs, he said, their safety test scores have improved by 20 percent to 25 percent.
``They have to manipulate the computer and they have to answer questions correctly before they move onto the next block of information,'' he explained.
Gijantino said the improvements will enable his operation to whittle its staff of 43 trainers and make work for the remaining trainers more enjoyable.
``They'll be able to get out of the ticket-punch kind of training that everybody dreads,'' he said. ``Trainers want to teach people new skills, not go over the same material for the thirtieth time because some law says you've got to do it.''
Clarity's 12 artists and programmers are among about 125 Coastal employees. All work out of a circle of low-slung, brick Colonial-style suites that Coastal has practically taken over just off Kings Grant Road.
The Clarity specialists, who call themselves ``title engineers,'' are young, earnest types who come to work in khakis or shorts. Like Bryant, an Old Dominion University business-school graduate who had worked for Sentara Health System before joining Clarity in early 1993, they are mostly home-grown computer nuts getting a chance to stretch.
The work is complicated. It can take months to turn the 300 to 400 pages of storyboard documents, created by training-program designers, into a typical CD-ROM.
The atmosphere on a recent weekday morning is quiet and casual in the cool, low-lit room where much of the work goes on. But Bryant said the early days, when just a handful of employees toiled to get the first CD-ROM to market in October 1993, were quite the opposite.
``Eighty hours a week. It was ungodly, it was `sweatshopish,' it was all the things you don't want a workplace to be,'' he said. ``But it was a race to the market.''
Clarity beat its training-field competitors into CD-ROM and it has continued to stay out front, Bryant said. It was the first to use a video and audio platform known as MPEG that has quickly become the standard for compressing video images and sound into bits of data for storage on compact disks. MPEG, which stands for Motion Pictures Experts Group, produces a much higher quality image or sound than earlier formats for CD-ROM.
Earlier this month, Compaq Computer Corp. said it will incorporate MPEG chips into its line of Presario personal computers. Because Compaq's move is likely to be followed by other PC makers, analysts predict demand for CD-ROM titles will further explode.
Last year alone, CD-ROM title shipments totaled 54 million, according to Dataquest Inc. of San Jose, Calif. That was up from 16.5 million titles shipped in 1993, the research company said.
Clarity's volume is just a drop in that bucket. It has shipped only about 1,000 titles so far. But it's not competing against Microsoft, Grolier and Electronic Arts, a few of the big names in multimedia that aim for consumers and typically retail their CD-ROM titles for under $75.
Clarity's customers are mainly Fortune 500 outfits like Georgia-Pacific Corp. and Land O' Lakes Inc. These companies shell out thousands of dollars for multiple copies of worker-safety titles like ``Confined Space Entry'' or ``Bloodborne Pathogens'' in hopes of avoiding accidents that could cost them millions.
If Bryant's goals are met, Clarity will sell about $1 million worth of CD-ROMS this year, putting the division in the black.
Someday, he predicted, the multimedia division will generate most of Coastal's revenues and profits.
Within five years, Clarity may ``rent'' its multimedia programs via the Internet, the global web of computer networks, Bryant said. To that end, it and its parent company already have a ``home page'' on the Internet to spread word of their products.
CD-ROMs in languages other than English may also be in Clarity's future. Already, it has sold some of its titles in Taiwan, Bryant said.
``This business,'' he said, ``has tremendous possibilities.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
Christopher Bryant
Color photos of program screens
by CNB