A couple of months ago I called a meeting of the OMNI Internet staff. "It's trashing time," I said. We'd been publishing on the web for almost a year, and it was time to scrutinize our product, to assess what we'd accomplished and what we could improve.

For our creative team, the synergy of that meeting was powerful. We articulated our ideas about the medium, and looked at our labors with fresh eyes.

You can see one result now: The redesign of OMNI's home page and inner sections marks, once and for all, the transformation of OMNI Magazine to OMNI Internet. We vowed to banish any vestige of print's look and feel from our "pages," and to create a clean, dynamic interface geared specifically to the web. Our java-driven home page, designed by gifted art director and head programmer Robert Killheffer, is truly a work of web art. Just "mouse" your way over the sections, and, without as much as a click, our current content comes into view.

While we're proud of our new home page, this is just the beginning. Throughout the summer we will continue our sweep, section by section and bit by bit. Look for a new, more dynamic Antimatter; a truly interactive Arcade; and a revamped fiction arena, among other changes.

This month, we are especially proud of our Art Gallery, a 3-D virtual trip to the Isle of Purbeck, created from the multimedia CD-ROM exhibit of artist Jeremy Gardiner. Using not just audio and video, but also Apple's QuickTime VR player, we are able to take OMNI sojourners through Gardiner's moving vision of "Childhood's End." Special kudos to digital art intern Vanessa Liou for the programming and artistic prowess needed to pull this off.

We are also planning a bold new look for our Live Science section, this month devoted to the complex field of computational neuroscience --the effort by scientists worldwide to understand the workings of the brain through computer modeling. Instead of simple written reports from our outpost, James Bower's Cal Tech lab in Pasadena , coverage will be multi-dimensional. We'll bring you audio and video, and even place you in the Bower lab, through CU-SeeMe technology, 24-hours a day. You'll be privy to posts from Babel, the computational neuroscience mailing list, as well as up-to-the minute news from Genesis, the international effort to build a computer model of the brain. Posts from our writer-on-the-scene, Linda Marsa, as well as the participation of the scientists, will render the Live Science website a nerve center in more ways than one.

The experiment continues. We hope our loyal users will stay tuned this summer as we continue our evolution and our journey toward a more perfect journalism for the web.

Pam Weintraub
Editor-in-Chief
OMNI Internet
July, 1998

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