Waxweb is a hypermedia

Hypermedia

Hypermedia is a computer-based information retrieval system that enables a user to gain or provide access to texts, audio and video recordings, photographs and computer graphics related to a particular subject.Hypermedia is a term created by Ted Nelson....

 version of the film "Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees

Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees

Wax Or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees is the first independent feature film to have been edited on a digital non-linear system. It is also the first film to have been re-formatted as hypertext and posted on the internet...

" by David Blair.

The online version of Waxweb has been hosted since 1994
by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities

Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities

The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities is a research unit of the University of Virginia, USA. Its goal is to explore and develop information technology as a tool for scholarly humanities research. To that end, IATH provide Fellows with consulting, technical support, applications...

 at the University of Virginia

University of Virginia

The University of Virginia is a public research university located in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States, founded by Thomas Jefferson...

. It is an 85 minute movie in 80,000 pieces.

In the story at the centre of Waxweb Jacob Maker is a beekeeper

Beekeeper

A beekeeper is a person who keeps honey bees for the purposes of securing commodities such as honey, beeswax, pollen, royal jelly; pollinating fruits and vegetables; raising queens and bees for sale to other farmers; and/or for purposes satisfying natural scientific curiosity...

 who designs flight simulator

Flight simulator

A flight simulator is a device that artificially re-creates aircraft flight and various aspects of the flight environment. This includes the equations that govern how aircraft fly, how they react to applications of their controls and other aircraft systems, and how they react to the external...

s. "One day, the past arrives out of the future, and Jacob enters". The online version uses Realmedia

RealMedia

RealMedia is a proprietary multimedia container format created by RealNetworks. Its extension is ".rm". It is typically used in conjunction with RealVideo and RealAudio and is used for streaming content over the Internet....

 format and enables users to watch the sequences in the order determined by choices made at every step of the way through the story. There is also a CD Rom version.

The production has received support from the New York State Council for the Arts. Between 1995 and 1997, technical support (and inspiration for this final version) was provided by RACE Laboratory, at the University of Tokyo

University of Tokyo

, abbreviated as , is a major research university located in Tokyo, Japan. The University has 10 faculties with a total of around 30,000 students, 2,100 of whom are foreign. Its five campuses are in Hongō, Komaba, Kashiwa, Shirokane and Nakano. It is considered to be the most prestigious university...

. An early version of Waxweb ran as a MOO

MOO

A MOO is a text-based online virtual reality system to which multiple users are connected at the same time.The term MOO is used in two distinct, but related, senses...

, technically supported by Brown University

Brown University

Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...

 Graphics Lab students (Tom Meyer, Suzanne Hader, David Klaphaak, and others). Additional software for that version was provided by Eastgate Systems with additional assistance from Melynda Barnhardt.

In the movie David Blair plays Jacob Maker, Meg Savlov plays Melissa Maker, Florence Ormezzano plays Allelle Zillah, William Burroughs plays James "Hive" Maker and Dr. Clyde Tombaugh

Clyde Tombaugh

Clyde William Tombaugh was an American astronomer. Although he is best known for discovering the dwarf planet Pluto in 1930, the first object to be discovered in what would later be identified as the Kuiper Belt, Tombaugh also discovered many asteroids; he also called for serious scientific...

 is himself.

The movie was created in co-production with Das Kleine Fernsehspiel, a program of ZDF

ZDF

Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen , ZDF, is a public-service German television broadcaster based in Mainz . It is run as an independent non-profit institution, which was founded by the German federal states . The ZDF is financed by television licence fees called GEZ and advertising revenues...

 Channel 2 of German Public Television.