C|NET CENTRAL
TRANSCRIPT
- EPISODE 2 -

Original air date:  4/8/95


HOSTS:  RICHARD HART and GINA ST. JOHN

(MUSIC)

RICHARD:  It's the tape everyone is talking about.  Our re-creation of 
the Simpson-Goldman murders.

(MUSIC)

RICHARD:  Today, we'll go behind the scenes to see how it was made.

VOICEOVER:  So the medical evidence is literally the most important 
to establishing the scenario of the crime.  We believe this to be the 
most detailed reconstruction done to date.

GINA:  And, confused about the Internet?  You won't be after today.

(BACKGROUND NOISE) 

GINA:  Get ready for the ultimate tour of the Net, and see for yourself 
just what it can do for you.

(BACKGROUND NOISE) 

(MUSIC) 

GINA:   Hi, I'm Gina St. John.

RICHARD:  And I'm Richard Hart.  All that, plus the world's tiniest 
radio, next on c|net central.

(COMMERCIAL) 

(MUSIC) 

RICHARD:  Welcome back to c|net central.  Our new home in San 
Francisco--just overflowing with the latest in digital products and 
services.  And it's a place we hope you'll come to often for more 
about life in this computer age.

GINA:   OK, let's get started.  Have you seen it yet?  Our computer re-
creation of the murders in the O.J. Simpson trial?  We aired it last 
week for the very first time, the most scientifically detailed re-
creation yet of how Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman may 
have been killed.  Television programs around the world have now 
aired it as a stunning example of the power of computers to help us 
visualize complex events.

RICHARD:  Today, a follow-up.  An exclusive, behind-the-scenes look 
at how our army of criminal investigators, actors, photographers, 
attorneys, artists and computer technicians created the videotape 
seen around the world.

RICHARD:  The standard of forensic animation was raised to a new 
level last week with the introduction of this startling animation--a 
product of computer graphics and scientific conjecture.  It was 
commissioned by c|net and created by one of the world's foremost 
authorities on disaster re-creations.

VOICEOVER:  As a result of this animation tool, I am able to take you 
back to that street, that condo, that gate, that night, and you can 
watch those people. 

RICHARD:  With painstaking attention to detail, the engineers from 
Failure Analysis reconstructed the murder using scientific 
measurements of the scene, medical examiners' reports, and court 
testimony from investigators and forensic experts.

DR. ROGER McCARTHY:  There is only one scenario that will explain all 
the physical evidence.  Only one--the correct one.  So, the more ways 
that you can constrain your analysis by physical evidence, the more 
likely the final analysis will be close to or identical to what really 
happened.

RICHARD:  The animation of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson 
and Ronald Goldman is dramatic, even disturbing.  But more 
important, say the engineers at Failure Analysis, it is highly accurate.  

DR. McCARTHY:  The geometry of the scene, combined with the 
medical evidence, combined with the position of the bodies 
afterwards, very much constrained, fortunately, the sequence things 
had to be done in.  But the exact sequence also had to make sense in 
terms of reality check.  We know, for instance, that no one got off a 
sound.  These murders only occurred 15 to 20 feet from the 
sidewalk.  No one heard anything.  So, the choreography of the 
characters must be such that at every point in time, the assailant has 
control of the mouth of the victim that he is assaulting. 

RICHARD:  Even the choice of skin color made by Failure's engineers 
was determined by the evidence.

DR. McCARTHY:  The hat is found with--I believe the number is 26--
African American hairs in it.  There doesn't seem to be any contrary 
testimony or even dispute over the hat as belonging to the assailant.  
So, we merely followed the physical evidence of the scene.

RICHARD:  Now, this is a new kind of animation.  You already know 
that it is possible for an artist to sit down in front of a computer and 
use it as a tool to create what is essentially a cartoon.  It's an 
estimation of a dinosaur for a movie or an estimation of what 
happened during a crime.  This is different.  Here, we are actually 
feeding a computer real numbers--evidence, if you will--and having 
the computer calculate an exact portrayal of exactly what happened.  
That's what’s going on here.  A major difference that sets forensic 
animation apart from other types is the amount of data required to 
create it.  The first step for the investigators at Failure Analysis was 
research.  They had to collect every available piece of information 
connected to the criminal investigation of the murders.

DR. ROBERT MALLET:  That involves obtaining transcripts from the 
preliminary hearing, videotape that has been shown by the media, 
and transcripts that are coming from the current trial--and bringing 
all this information together.  We sent a group of people down to Los 
Angeles (actually I led that team down to Los Angeles) and that 
included engineers, photographers and one of our animators, and we 
went on to the site in Los Angeles, and then we were able to obtain a 
lot more information about the site.

VOICEOVER:  What we're going to do is use the photographs taken by 
this camera, which is a metric camera, to go back and reconstruct 
very accurately the three-dimensional geometry of this particular 
building. 

DR. MALLET:  Now, the third stage would be bringing together the 
information from the first and second stages and coming up with a 
plausible scenario, and then we would bring people together and 
brainstorm about what possibly happened on June 12.

VOICEOVER:  The story boards are to help our animators and our 
technical people pull together some ideas and prepare ourselves for 
the shoot we did at BioVision on Saturday and Sunday.

DR. McCARTHY:  I got to inflict a lot of cuts on this guy.

VOICEOVER:  This involved a lot of role-playing with Dr. McCarthy 
playing the assailant, Sally Shepard playing the role of Nicole Brown 
Simpson, and myself as Ron Goldman.

DR. McCARTHY:  I'm going to have to cut his cheek several times as 
I'm torturing him and talking to him. 

RICHARD:  Using the data they collected, the Failure engineers then 
created a chilling script for their scenario of the murders. 

DR. McCARTHY:  It looks like what he did is he had to use the knife to 
pry her head up once and then get a different bite with the back of 
the knife on the back of her head, and literally he picks her up with 
the knife to the back of the head covering her mouth. 

RICHARD:  In order to make their animation characters move more 
life-like, the Failure team relied on the experts at BioVision, who 
have perfected motion capture technology. 

VOICEOVER:  With these markers, each of the segments model and 
the computers are driven by these marker points.  Our machines out 
here will calculate 3D points for each of these markers.  So, I'm 
finding all of her joints in here. 

RICHARD:  Six high-speed cameras follow the movements of each 
actor, while a variety of PCs and workstations record the data.

VOICEOVER:   OK, can you go back to the center?  Half-step back.

DR. McCARTHY:   What BioVision allows you to do is capture the 
movements of organic people and then readily translate those 
movements to the motions of an artificial mathematical character 
who has limbs that can be moved by the computer as long as you 
know how to tell the computer to move them.

DR. McCARTHY:  Step down from my strength.  She is now awake.  
We look over here, bring my hand in front, we have a conversation 
while I nick her throat.

RICHARD:  Mechanical engineer Sally Shepard played Nicole Brown 
Simpson in the reenactment.  She says the taping sessions sometimes 
felt a little eerie.  

SALLY SHEPARD:  It's an unusual situation to be put in, but it's not 
uncommon at Failure for us to sort of play the role of accident 
victims if you happen to be the right size for the incident.  So, it's a 
little bit weird, though.  This is a little out of the ordinary.

RICHARD:  Now, it's up to computer animation engineer, Jerry 
Jackson.  One computer wasn't enough to calculate all the information 
necessary.  Jackson used five Silicon Graphics Unix workstations and 
seven different processors.  Also, he relied on an SGI RealityEngine 
and animation software called Advanced Visualizer to create this 
first-of-its-kind animation.

From photographs to architectural drawings, slowly Nicole Brown 
Simpson's condominium takes shape.  Working from photos of the 
victims, the animators also put real faces on the characters.  The final 
step is movement.  Using the data from BioVision, the characters 
move with human precision.  Through cutting-edge technology and 
diligent investigative work, Failure Analysis can show us what 
probably happened the night of June 12 in Brentwood.

DR. McCARTHY:  We believe this to be the most detailed 
reconstruction done to date.  We hope it remains the standard by 
which all other reconstructions are judged by, even the prosecution's.

RICHARD:  In all, an amazing process.  And if you have a personal 
computer, a modem, and a connection to the Internet, you can get 
your own copy of this animation.  Just go online, and head for 
http://www.cnet.com.  That's our Internet address.  And then you 
can download or transfer the animation from our computers to yours.

GINA:  If any of this is confusing to you...

RICHARD:  And why would any of this be confusing?

GINA:  Oh, it can.  Just stick with c|net central, though.  We're here to 
help you out.

(COMMERCIAL) 

(MUSIC)

GINA:  The Internet.  Everyone's talking about it.  But, what is it?  
Today, a close-up look at the Internet and how it was created.  

(MUSIC) 

GINA:  1969 had Woodstock, and the first Moon walk.  '69 had old 
hippies and a new hero.

(BACKGROUND NOISE) 

GINA:  And '69 had horrors.  The nuclear arms race was at its peak.  
We were still locked in the Cold War.  There was still the very real 
threat that the superpowers could go at it in a global atomic 
showdown.  Factories cranked out missiles on both sides.  Our 
government worried about surviving.  What would happen in a 
nuclear attack to our nation's communication system?  Would the 
Army, Navy and Air Force be cut off from each other?

The Pentagon has an agency that worked on things just like that.  
The Advanced Research Projects Agency or ARPA for short.  It 
funded scientific research that could help the military.  ARPA had 
funded research all through the ‘60s to make computers faster and 
smarter, but by '69, there was still a major problem.  As smart as 
computers were, they couldn't communicate with each other.  

LEN KLEINROCK:  Computers could not talk to each other.  There was 
no format, no protocol.  They didn't even speak the same codes.  

GINA:  So ARPA hired scientists and engineers like Len Kleinrock and 
his staff at UCLA to find a way to do it--to link, or what's called 
network computers--thinking it could be one way to make a 
communication system that could survive anything.  It was a 
challenge because every computer in the world had a different 
language.

JOHN POSTEL:  Imagine if there were ten different kinds of 
computers, and you wanted all of them to communicate.  That might 
mean there was, to communicate with each of the other ones, you'd 
have to have nine different ways to communicate, and would have to 
have nine different languages besides your own.  But we said, OK, 
let's not do that.  Let's come up with one language. 

GINA:  John Postel was a grad student at UCLA back then.  Len 
Kleinrock had a whole team of grad students doing a lot of the work.  
The students and these professors spent months working day and 
night--flicking their computer, adding switches and perfecting a 
standard language.  Then came the first big test.  Could UCLA send a 
message to a computer some 400 miles away at SRI, the Stanford 
Research Institute?  The first word to be sent:  "login."

LEN KLEINROCK:  One of our guys typed the letter "L," and over the 
phone, the guy at the other end said, "I got the L," and then we sent 
the "O," and the guy said, "I got the O," and then we sent the "G," and 
the  system crashed. 

GINA:  For the first time ever, two computers hundreds of miles 
away could talk with each other.  

JOHN POSTEL:  We didn't really think of it as a big historic thing 
because we were building this little research project for ARPA.  We 
weren't building the world's communication system.  

GINA:  So, the ARPAnet was born.  Scientists had a new way to 
communicate on a system that was indestructible.  Indestructible 
because information was stored in computers scattered around the 
country, not in one central place.  Write a file in Los Angeles and 
send it to your friends, and that file is backed up everywhere you 
sent it.  All of ARPAnet could never be destroyed.

GINA:  Remember this concept:  there is no central Internet 
headquarters.  There is no main office building.  Nobody owns the 
Internet.  

GINA:   So, the Net isn't a place.  It's not really even a thing.  It's 
billions of files and ideas floating around everywhere united by a 
common language.  This ARPAnet grew quickly.  By the early ‘80s, 
200 colleges were connected to the ARPAnet.  

VOICEOVER:  3, 2, 1.  Ignition.

GINA:   NASA and other government agencies had networks, too, and 
they wanted their networks to be able to share info with everyone 
on the ARPAnet.  In 1981, they did.  Now, this one network, the 
ARPAnet, was combined with other government networks.  Now, you 
had a network made up of different networks.  For the first time, you 
had the idea of inter-networking, and for the first time, someone 
uttered the immortal word...

VOICEOVER:  "Internet."

GINA:  In the coming weeks, we'll take you on the Internet, and show 
you how to get hooked in, where to go, what's cool, what's for you, 
and what to avoid, and how to successfully navigate this ever-
changing monster network.  We're even launching our own online 
site to help you connect with us 24 hours a day.  Richard...

RICHARD:  True, I've been accused of being an incurable gadget geek, 
and I confess.  So whenever the c|net staff comes up with the latest, 
greatest technology, I'm going to try to share it with you.  For 
instance, the world's smallest FM radio.  This thing weighs less than 4 
ounces, is called the Ultralite 2000, costs less than $30, and it really 
works.  Give a listen.

(MUSIC) 

RICHARD:  Hey, if you want FM stereo, you could use both ears.  
They're going to come up with one half this size in a short while.

RICHARD:  Most of you are familiar with a camcorder called the 
Sharp Viewcam, but when you combine this with a special modem 
base for telephone use, Sharp calls this the Viewcam Teleport 
System, and it's supposed to send video images over the phone.  
Here, I'll take a video image of myself here.  I'm really going to do 
this.  I'm going to smile and snap a freeze frame.  All right, we're 
going to put this into the base, lock it in and just press, "Send."  And 
when you press "Send," whichever last image you took will be 
transmitted over a telephone line--in this case, to the other end of 
c|net here, where Amory Gable, one of our producers, is seated at a 
similar device.   Amory, it's coming through any second now.

AMORY:  Here it comes, Richard!  You're on my desktop, but you're 
upside down. 

RICHARD:  Well, I don't profess to being an artist.  I'm not upside 
down, the camera was upside down.  The base unit costs about $900, 
the camcorder starts at about $1,200--and for that money, you might 
be asking, "What good is it?"   Well, it might be of use to a real estate 
agent who has to transmit an image of a building pretty quickly.  You 
can't do that with film.  And, because it will pick up the phone and 
record even voice messages on the videotape--but pictures too.  
Think of it as the first video answering machine.

(MUSIC)

(COMMERCIAL)

RICHARD:   This might be a good time to point out how c|net central is 
not just a television show.  That's just the tip of the iceberg.  
Actually, what it's more like is a community, and that's where c|net 
online comes in.  It's a place where people are going to be using 
computers to talk to each other, to trade information, to have fun.  In 
short, a real community of people interested in technology.  Now, as 
we've mentioned, much of this is under construction right now.  
Partly because we're waiting to hear from you.  This is your big 
chance.  What would you like to see in an online service?  Now is 
your opportunity to let us, let the people in this room, let Lou here 
know.  Lou, what have we got here?

LOU:  I'm working on the c|net home page, Richard.  

RICHARD:   Home page, that's a good term.  That is the first thing you 
see, kind of the front door, the table of contents, on many computer 
systems, including our own.  Remember the address:  
http://www.cnet.com.  That's where you'll get information on 
becoming a charter member of c|net online, where you can acquire 
for yourself a copy of the O.J. Simpson trial animation that we had 
made.  It's open for business now, but you'll be hearing a lot more 
about it as it grows.  c|net central continues in a moment...

(MUSIC) 

(COMMERCIAL) 

(MUSIC)

RICHARD:   So, how are we doing?  We'd like to know what you think 
of c|net central.

GINA:   And it's very easy to tell us.  Just bang out an email message 
to us.  Send comments, questions--hey, we're looking for your 
suggestions--to Richard and me.  Richard's address is 
richard@cnet.com, and mine is gina@cnet.com.  We'll have some of 
your messages on the program next week.

RICHARD:  With technology, one of the most frustrating things is just 
trying to keep up with all the latest gadgets and gizmos.

GINA:   And Dave Ross has the last word on that.

DAVE ROSS:

I bought a new computer, and I'd swear the thing could think!
It would jockey words and phrases, do my taxes in a wink.
It could print a 3D pie chart, even though I didn't need it.
It never got too tired, and I never had to feed it.

It was everything I wanted--or at least that's what I thought.
Until I saw the new machine my next-door neighbor bought.
It was nothing really special, pretty much like all the others.
Except it had what mine did not:  16 million colors.

So while I did my tax returns in cyan, red and green,
My friend wrote HIS in every shade from mauve to tangerine.
I told myself I didn't care.  I said it once, then twice.
Then went straight out and got my own.  I told them, "Hang the 
price!"

I spent the kids' tuition, I gave notice to the maid,
And bought a new computer with 400 TRILLION shades.
"We don't need this," my wife complained, as if I had betrayed her.
"Oh, yes we do, and I'll explain--but not now, maybe later."

I ran next door to see my friend, to watch his eyes turn green,
The moment I described to him my new high-tech machine.
All he did was nod and yawn as if he didn't care.
And when I looked, I saw HIS old computer wasn't there!

"It didn't do the job," he said.  "The thing was a disaster.
So I bought an even BETTER one--it's 99 times faster.
It recognizes voice commands, controls my heat and lights,
It paints my house, it walks the dog, and tucks us in at night."

So I smiled very warmly, I wished him all the best,
Then my left foot caught the power cord and yanked it off the desk.
"Sorry!"  The lesson here is one that almost everyone ignores:
"Seek not to match your neighbor's level--drag him down to yours."

I'm Dave Ross.  And I get the last word.


RICHARD:  Now all of us with antique PCs can feel a lot better.

GINA:  I know I do.  That's c|net central for now.  We're back next 
week--same place, same time.

RICHARD:  Thanks for tuning in and for logging on.

(MUSIC) 



END OF TAPED MATERIAL
