2008 - 7th Floor Media launches new Web site
The creative and technical team at 7th Floor Media launches new Web site, bringing the site inline with Simon Fraser University's new logo and brand and clarifying 7th Floor Media's close relationship with the University. The site is easy to navigate and highlights the team's current work, while allowing partners and clients to see the range and depth of 7th Floor Media's achievements since its beginnings in 1987.
2008 - "Asahi: Canadian Baseball Legends" VM web site
Designed and developed for The National Nikkei Museum and Heritage Centre, this web site tells the story of the Vancouver Asahi baseball team. This talented group of Japanese Canadian baseball players triumphed over inequality, adversity and prejudice to successfully compete in the Vancouver senior city leagues between 1914 and 1941. Although the Asahis have been the subject of several recent books, films and traveling exhibitions, this is the first time their story has been brought to an online audience.
Throughout the four main chapters, the site features engaging historic photographs as well as video and audio clips. In addition to being of interest to sports enthusiasts, historians and baseball fans, the site contains lesson plans, printable baseball cards, a timeline and a map section of special interest to teachers and students. The site is available in English, French and Japanese.
2007 - Encounters With Canada
Encounters with Canada is Canada's largest youth forum. Its objective is to bring young Canadians from different backgrounds and regions together in order to give them an opportunity to learn from one another.
2007 - FYI Canada
Social networking with meaning! FYI Canada is a place where Canadian teens can express themselves, learning about each other and their communities while sharing images, ideas and opinions. An exercise in "radical trust," FYI Canada is designed to be a true teen community, allowing its users to determine the content and topics that will appear on the site.
2007 - Vancouver Art Gallery "Emily Carr" web site
Representing the largest online collection of her work ever produced, the Emily Carr site offers a wealth of detail for everyone from students to the serious art collector. 7th Floor Media worked with the Vancouver Art Gallery and the University of British Columbia to bring together a variety of tools to view and appreciate this Canadian icon's powerful body of work. The site offers both a detailed index of her work and the story of her life, an inspiring struggle to become a respected artist in Canada. It includes many historical photos showing her life at the turn of the last century in Western Canada and many of the locations that she painted. Teachers' guides have been prepared for Elementary, High School and ESL classes. The project was developed for the Virtual Museum of Canada program, incorporating strict accessibility guidelines and two languages while taking advantage of the capabilities of Flash and CSS to create an intuitive, visually interesting interface.
2006 - Access.ca teachers' gateway
Access.ca allows teachers across Canada to access authoritative Canadian resources, evaluated, tagged and organized for easy retrieval according to their curricular needs. Access.ca demonstrates how a deep understanding of users' thought processes, combined with appropriate metadata standards and an effective metadata exchange system, can expose online resources from many sources in a manner that makes them truly accessible and useful. It also shows how implicit community behaviour can improve the results provided by the system.
2006 - "English 2 Go" mobile prototype
7FM worked with Mobile MUSE and LinguaComm to prototype "English 2 Go" — a system that allows learners of ESL learners to practice their English language conversational skills using their cell phones.
2005 - Re:call mobile prototype
As part of our ongoing exploration of the design of mobile applications, we created a prototype "cultural tourism" application that ran on HP IPAQs. Not only were users alerted to multimedia vignettes about nearby features of historical and cultural interest, they were able to take photos, send postcards, rate shows and restaurants, and create a time—stamped multimedia journal of their experiences. Re:call allowed us to understand user—preferences, and the technical and design issues involved in creating cultural experiences using rich multimedia content on location—aware mobile devices.
2005 - "Documentary Lens" web site for NFB
In 2006, 7th Floor Media, in collaboration with the National Film Board of Canada, created Documentary Lens, an innovative educational web space devoted to documentary filmmaking. The site features an online library of 86 selected films in both English and French dating from the 1940s to the 1990s, as well as supporting materials, such as original promotional posters. The site includes 50 English and 50 French film excerpts and access to the complete films online. Designed to help students hone their critical thinking skills while learning the basics of documentary cinema, it also offers detailed teachers' guides. Interactive tools encourage students to explore the art of storytelling and documentary making and to think critically about the vision of Canada represented in the films. Interviews with NFB filmmakers allow students a look into the process of creating documentary films and the skills required to bring ideas to the screen. The original Flash version of Documentary Lens won selection to the Webby Awards in 2006. A revised html version of the site was launched in 2007, along with a companion site, Aboriginal Voices, also developed by 7FM.
2004 - Marine Discovery Centre installations
In a competition involving a host of competitive bidders, Parks Canada chose 7th Floor Media to complete twenty touchscreen interactivities, ten video loops, and seven audio features for the new Canada Marine Discovery Centre in Hamilton, Ontario. Combining unusual architecture, a beautiful setting and stimulating displays, the Centre is designed for young Canadians and their families to learn about Canada's natural and cultural inheritance and to understand the importance of our marine environments. Working in close collaboration with designers and architects, 7th Floor Media designed and created installations that take advantage of the creative, communicative and collaborative possibilities of new technologies.
2004 - New "Historica" web site
As the histori.ca site continued to grow in content and complexity, and as the structure of the organization went through a significant change, the need for a re—design became evident. 7th Floor Media worked with the staff at Historica to develop a dynamic site that accurately reflects the structure and mandate of the Foundation. 7th Floor Media created a true portal site for the Foundation that links to the many content and resource sites that are part of the Historica umbrella. 7FM also developed program mini—sites with a common look—and—feel that reflects the new branding of the Foundation. All of the individual sites within the portal are integrated through a central administrative system.
2004 - "Journeys & Transformation" Virtual Museum web site
Designed & developed for the Royal BC Museum, the Journeys & Transformations site features large inviting photographs, a Gallery of pictures, and incorporates a specially designed Flash picture viewer, which allows users to click through the many engaging photographs. As with all the sites developed for the Virtual Museum of Canada program, the site is bilingual and meets strict accessibility guidelines.
2003 - Canada in Space Virtual Museum web site
We created the Canada in Space Virtual Museum site for the H.R. Macmillan Space Centre. This bilingual site is designed to encourage youth to explore the International Space Station, space science and Canada's contribution to space exploration. A custom CMS was created to allow space centre staff to easily add and update content.
2003 - Pacific Salmon Summit
7FM designed & implemented this powerful authentic education experience. Grade 5—7 students from Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska engaged in an inquiry—based collaborative project to explore the issues — environmental, biological, economic, and political — surrounding the Pacific salmon fishery.
2002 - A Scholar's Garden VM web site
"A Scholar's Garden" was our first experience creating a site using a non—Roman character set (Chinese). 7th Floor Media worked with the staff of the Dr. Sun Yat—Sen Classical Chinese Garden to create a site in English, French and Chinese that used the rich, multi—sensory experience of the Garden as an entree to Chinese culture, art, history, and traditions.
2002 - Open Hearts/Closed Doors Virtual Museum web site
One of numerous Virtual Museum sites created by 7FM, "Open Hearts/Closed Doors" set a standard for rich, engaging Virtual Museum exhibits using artifacts & personal stories to reach the audience in a way that a simple recounting of history could not.
2001 - YouthLinks
YouthLinks/InterJeunes was a collaborative online learning program that linked high school students in Canada with their peers around the world to discuss both historical and social issues. 7th Floor Media designed, developed, and maintained the bilingual web site for the Historica Foundation of Canada. Through this 5 year project, we furthered our understanding of how to engage teens in online learning communities.
2001 - "Historica" history portal
7th Floor Media developed and designed the Historica Foundation's Web site devoted to Canadian history and culture. The site provides access to Historica's educational programs, original resources, as well as links to Canadian content on the Web. The search function is fully integrated with The Canadian Encyclopedia. 7th Floor Media also designed a content management system that allows for distributed authorship and maintenance of the site content.
2001 - "Seeing Things" with NFB
The "Seeing Things" site was commissioned by the National Film Board of Canada to extend the concepts of "creative seeing" from their Seeing Things video series. On the site, users solved puzzles, joined contests, explored close—up photography, manipulated pictures, and even made their own productions, called PicFlicks, combining images and sound. "Seeing Things" enhanced our ability to design "hands—on" new media learning tools.
2000 - CLE web site for BC Continuing Legal Education
By late 1999, it was clear that CLE, as the principal provider of continuing professional legal education in the Province of British Columbia, had outgrown its web presence. Redefining the CLE web site to serve as more than an online brochure, enhancing the content and services the site provided to the legal community, and beginning to realize the site's potential as a highly effective means of generating direct sales and delivering content, was necessary to allow CLE to serve legal professionals with greater efficiency and simultaneously create the key groundwork necessary for future expansion. To support the on—going creation of this new expanded content, CLE needed a system that would support easy and non—intimidating content authoring by volunteers from the professional legal community. 7th Floor Media proposed a solution for "CLE.web" that reflected our long—standing belief in flexible, modular web design, and suggested a CMS—based system that resulted in a site that was extremely easy to update, maintain, and expand. The success of the design is reflected by the volume of content and number of contributors to the site, the reliance of the BC legal community on the site as a key resource, the introduction of new content and services such as online courses and conferences, and in the fact that the site served the CLE's needs with minimal changes to the design or infrastructure for seven years.
1999 - Canada Place Interactivities for Banff National Park
Our first experience working closely with exhibit designers, we were able to marry our understanding of visitor expectations and behaviours with effective new media design to create an engaging multimedia experience. These interactive touchscreen interactivities and video installations are still popular attractions at "Canada Place" in Banff National Park.
1999 - Launch "Virtual Heritage Fairs"
Heritage Fairs were a popular program of the CRB (Bronfman) Foundation. Like Science Fairs, they encouraged students to create projects related to Canadian Heritage and present their projects at regional Heritage Fairs. A small number of students from each Regional Fair would get the opportunity to participate in activities at a National Fair, learn about each other, and present their projects to participants from across the country. But what about those students who didn't get to go to the National Fair or who lived in communities that had no Regional Fair? The CRB Foundation commissioned 7th Floor Media to create a Virtual Heritage Fair, which would provide a showcase where all Canadian students could share their Heritage projects with the entire country. The Virtual Heritage Fairs Web site contained content, humourous animations, and games developed by 7th Floor Media, and provided online content publication tools for users of the site.
1998 - Review of online course delivery platform
In the early days of Web—based on—line learning sytems, 7FM was asked by a huge Canadian corporation to identify, evaluate, and compare distance learning platforms that met some or all of a set of defined functional requirements. The resulting report not only enabled the client to select an appropriate platform for its in—house use, but led it to make a significant investment in what was to become the leading academic LCMS.
1998 - Launch "Newzone" w/CBC
User generated content and youth engagement have been key focuses of 7th Floor Media's work since its inception. Newzone showcased CBC's news resources and made them available to students to help them write their own news stories through an interactive Web site. In so doing, Newzone built on what we saw as the two most powerful and popular uses of the Internet: information sharing and community building.
1997 - BeatFreak ITV prototype
In the mid '90s, the cable industry was contemplating investing in "set top boxes" to enable "interactive TV" (ITV). On behalf of the Canadian Cable Labs Fund, 7FM researched user requirements and set top box functionality. 7FM then created an interactive television prototype called "Beat Freak" targeted to the teen to early twenties generation. An exploration of the factors that will make interactive content work on TV, "Beat Freak" was designed to demonstrate the relationship between television viewing behaviour and attitudes, interactive content, and TV broadcast programming.
1997 - Prime Minister of Canada CD—ROM
The best—selling Canadian educational CD—ROM ever, The Lives & Times of the Prime Ministers of Canada was a stunning original multimedia presentation of Canada's leaders from the time of Confederation. 7FM interviewed all the living Prime Ministers, as well as politicians, historians, journalists, commentators & comedians, and combined a wealth of original graphics, written and audio/visual material with archival resources for this CD—ROM. The original content has now been repurposed as a rich Web resource.
1996 - "Submit" Java—base document exchange
"Submit" was an early "learner & content management" tool allowing university instructors to set up learning spaces where students could submit and discuss their work. The tool integrated with the university's student authentication system. "Submit" also allowed us to begin our exploration of the Java development environment.
1996 - Spin—off Ncompass Labs Inc.
7FMs NCompass technology was spun—off into a start—up company — NCompass Labs Inc. Five years later, NCompass Labs Inc. was acquired by Microsoft, and its flagship product, Resolution, became Microsoft's Content Management Server.
1995 - Science, eh?
This pioneering informal learning environment, combined rich media with user—created content & distributed authorship.
1995 - Ncompass Web browser
In 1995, 7FM became the first group to combine Microsoft's object linking and embedding technology (now called ActiveX) with Internet HTML standards to allow the creation of fully—interactive component—based applications which can run within World Wide Web pages.
1994 - Prototype tourism site for BC Ministry of Tourism
As hard as it is to believe now, there was a time when people did not understand the potential of the Web for tourism. This prototype site included many things that we now take for granted, from interactive maps to previews of tourist attractions, helping the client to envision and clarify possible future directions.
1994 - "Safari Splash" — 1st major web initiative
Within less than a year of the release of the Mosaic Web browser, we were planning our first major educational Web project. In conjunction with the Royal BC Museum's Safari Project, the "Safari Splash" Web newsletter included student articles (produced by students equipped with early Mac laptops & Quicktake 100 digital cameras), articles created by 7FM, scientists & researchers, professional undersea video footage, a Q&A section, and an interactive 3D "touchtank." All of this was produced in real time to complement a live satellite broadcast from the Banfield Marine Station on the west coast of Vancouver Island.
1993 - Online custom publishing environment for McGraw—Hill
Digital media enables user choice. In this early project we worked with McGraw—Hill to design a customized multimedia college textbook generator. Instructors could browse readings by criteria such as genre, theme and author, select readings and associated resources such as question sets, images, and video and order publications customized to match their curricula and teaching styles. The application was subsequently commercialized under the name Primus.
1993 - 1st web server in Canada
As part of its ongoing exploration of the potential of new and emerging technologies for education and culture, 7FM set up a Web server as soon as the technology became available. This server — the first in Canada and one of the first in the world — allowed us to immediately begin investigations of this new medium.
1992 - Heritage Minutes
Early in 1989, the CRB (Bronfman) Foundation of Montreal commissioned 7FM to develop a pilot set of multimedia educational materials for schools to accompany the Canadian Heritage Minutes Project, a series of one—minute dramatic television segments intended to spark the curiosity of young people about Canada's history. The prototype multimedia classroom kit 7FM developed for this project, including a magazine, video, audio cassette, novel, HyperCard stacks and teacher guide, was well—received and found the support of the Executive Director of the CRB Foundation as well as the Chair of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), and in 1990 7FM was asked to create all the Heritage Minutes educational materials in French and English to be used in schools across Canada.
1991 - Is this a dagger ...
How do you engage teens with "Macbeth"? Let them watch different interpretations, from Orson Wells' version to Verdi's operat. Then, create a virtual dagger and use a real—time video feed to put them in the scene to perform Macbeth's famous "Is this a dagger..." speech.
1991 - Early investigation into VR
In 1991, people were just beginning to talk about the concept of "virtual reality." We cobbled together a VR environment using Nintendo "power glove" and 3D goggles, to explore the potential of VR for education.
1990 - Vienna Project for IBM
As an IBM research centre, we were asked to use a computer controlled laser disc entitled the "Vienna Project" to show how university students, instructors, and researchers might make use of multimedia. One of the results was a series of multimedia authoring tools including audio and video clipmakers, the Electronic Magic Marker™, and presentation templates, that were packaged with IBM's "Advanced Academic System," and marketed by IBM to universities and colleges throughout the United States.
1990 - Pioneering multimedia prototypes
By 1990, 7FM had established itself as a leader in the field of interactive multimedia technologies, researching and developing software applications including
-diskette-based software programs
-the first "talking books" on CD-ROM
-software integrating videodisc—based content
-authoring tools such as audio and video clipmakers and the electronic "magic marker"
In 1990, 7FM developed a number of "multimedia templates" for schools, including a number of language arts and second language learning prototypes which used HyperCard to control French and English "books on compact discs" sound recordings. These "books" were audio CDs placed in CD players attached by a SCSI cable to a computer.
Using this early technology, 7FM was able to demonstrate multimedia concepts that we now take for granted - for example, showing animations, graphics, and text synchronized with an audio track, or playing a portion of an audio track when the user clicked on a particular graphic or piece of text on the computer screen.
1989 - Peter Rabbit CD—ROM
We provided consulting and testing for this very first interactive multimedia CD—ROM series presenting favourite children's stories.
1989 - Hyper—Postcards
Think user—generated content and online communities is something new? Think again. Sponsored in 1989 by Apple Computer and NHK Television in Japan, the "Hyper—postcards" project linked a class of Grade 7 students in Toyama with another Grade 7 class in Letchworth, England using "highspeed" modems. The students exchanged photographs, drawings, voice files and text, both in real—time and asynchronously in an attempt to question each other about their respective school lives and cultures.
1988 - Apple Centre for Innovation
Apple was one of our first supporters, as we explored the potential of "multimedia" for teaching and learning.
1988 - National Gallery of Art — Interactive
One early multimedia project for Apple computers involved building software applications in HyperCard, which was a software application permitting the design and development of interactive multimedia applications for use on Apple computers. The resulting applications were called HyperCard or hypermedia "stacks". "Hypermedia" — the notion of linking text, graphics, sound, video and other types of content, allowing non—linear navigation between digital "documents" — is the basic concept underlying the World Wide Web and all interactive multimedia today. 7FM was a pioneer of this technology, and developed numerous Hypercard products and applications between 1988 and 1995. One of the first Hypercard applications developed by 7FM was a hypermedia stack for an interactive tour of 1,645 works contained in the National Gallery of Art.
1987 - Excite is established
In 1987, ExCITE (the Exemplary Centre for Interactive Technologies in Education) was established as Canada's first multimedia R&D centre. In 1999, we changed our name to 7th Floor Media. From the beginning, our focus has been on the meaningful, engaging, effective, and appropriate applications of new media for education and culture.
1987 - 1st international online conference
Long before the advent of today's Web, we were using the Internet to connect learning communities.
Click on timeline items to explore highlights from over 20 years of prototyping, developing, researching, consulting and advising on new media for clients large and small.
