In the Louvre, snug at home

00-00-0000
Headline: In the Louvre, snug at homeByline: JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICHEdition; DailySection: FeaturesPage: 10

Wednesday, February 27, 2002 -- Le Louvre: Virtual Visit, three CD-ROMs in English by Montparnasse Multimedia (www.montparnasse.net), for PC- compatible Pentium (minimum 166 Mhz) and Windows 95 and up, or a Power Mac 7800 or better, for teenagers and adults, $49.95.

Rating: *****

The French software company Montparnasse Multimedia doesn't know how to leave things alone. Not only did it produce an excellent CD-ROM on the Louvre Museum in 1999, now it has upgraded it into three outstanding disks on the 800-year-old Parisian complex for the same price as the single best-selling disk.

The decade-old software house again proves itself to be a producer of magnificent products that is unwilling to compromise on quality.

The three disks are divided into Virtual Visit, Collections, and Palace and Antiquities. Each operates independently and has to be installed separately, but fortunately, this is accomplished in seconds.

The Louvre, lovingly described by Jean Cocteau as "Noah's ark of the civilizations," and its rich history can be examined and toured with these disks - as a variety of classical music is sounded in the background.

The actual Louvre on the bank of the Seine accommodates some 10,000 art objects, 144,000 antiques, 6,000 paintings, 190,000 drawings and 2,500 sculptures - so obviously, most of them are not included in the disk, but the most notable ones are.

The disks alphabetically index over 1,000 works, while 400 of them are presented in much detail graphically and with narration. To top this off, one of the disks has the "Louvre On Line" feature that, if you have an Internet connection, lets you download material on 50 of the latest works that have been added to the museum.

If you're interested in architectural history, you can go through the story of the Louvre century by century, from its previous existence as a palace from 1190, through 1793, when it became an art museum, to today - when the 66 diamond-shaped glass panes were added to form the Pei Pyramid in the front.

You don't have to be an art critic or even an amateur art lover to appreciate the beauty and intricacy of the sculptures, paintings, objets d'art, graphic arts, and antiquities going back from the Egyptian era. A magnifying glass icon lets you zoom in to get a closer look, and the running narrative commentary totalling 10 hours (compared to the four hours of the 1999 edition) is compelling.

Textual information is provided by the best art historians in layman's language.

One disk offers virtual visits to 20 rooms in the Louvre. You need only click on a photo icon to see a video film that makes your feel as if you're actually walking through it, accompanied by a personal guide. Users can also prepare a personalized album of their virtual visit with a stored record of their stops; this material can prepare them for a real visit to the Louvre the next time they fly to Paris.

The third disk, on 200 antiquities, focuses on Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan, Roman, and Oriental finds.

Maps are a prominent part of the CD-ROM set, with visual images not only of archeological sites where items were found, but also of the museum's entrance level, ground and first and second floors. You can pinpoint a work or room just by clicking on a photo icon arranged according to style, date, or type of art or add your own notes to the maps.

All the texts, images, and maps in the set can be printed out or saved to your hard disk.

The Louvre's proven format and interface would well be adapted by art and archeological museums around the globe, including this country's own. If, due to the current situation, tourists are staying away for the time being, one or several CD-ROMs presenting the contents of the Israel Museum, Rockefeller Museum, and others could preserve interest among culture lovers abroad until they can get up the "nerve" to visit them in person.

Dino Lomed ABC (Dino Learns the ABCs), a CD-ROM in Hebrew and English, produced by Pecan Productions Ltd., distributed by Hed Artzi Multimedia, requires Windows 95 and up and a Pentium 200 Mhz PC or better, for ages five to eight, NIS 99.

Rating: **

THERE ARE many ways to learn the letters of the English alphabet, but the technique used here - constant repetition and little variety - certainly isn't the best. The format of this disk almost exactly follows previous one in the series, Dino Lomed Otiot, which teaches the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

The ABC disk asks you to key in the child's name and whether you're a girl or a boy; depending on which picture you click, he calls you a "genius" or his "friend" in the proper gender when you answer correctly.

The program teaches the ABCs in groups of four using differently colored cards. Children can either click the cards with their mouse, or small red, yellow, green and blue stickers are provided to attach to the 1, 2, 3, and 4 keys on the keyboard.

Dino asks you to complete the activities as a way of helping him find his parents, whom he has carelessly misplaced. But you may get a bit lost yourself: If you want to get out of an activity while Dino is giving instructions you have no way of escaping.

Sometimes, the only way to self-eject is by pressing the ESC button on your keyboard (which Dino does not explain).

Officially, there are nine activities, but since most are variations of the same matching and clicking, they can hardly be called nine. First users are taught the 26 letters of the alphabet: A is for airplane, B is for baby... A line with all the letters at the bottom of the screen lets you click in any letter and learn a word - just one single word - that begins with the letter. A small animation accompanies each entry.

In another activity, a truck drives across the screen dragging a single letter that you have to click on when it reaches the blank in a three-letter word. The program is more geared to learning the letters than to actual reading.

The games are also hardly varied. Letters drop from the top of the screen along with gold rings that constitute bonus points.

You must manipulate the right and left arrow keys to bump into the letters read out by Dino, who sits in an inflated inner tube; while avoiding the wrong letters you must also try to collide with the rings.

In another game, instead of Dino floating in the water, the dinosaur is in a flying saucer, and you have to hit the letter that begins a given word.

A separate icon leads to the print shop, where you can print out practice sheets with the ABCs shown one at a time along with the picture of a word with which each letter begins.

If you really want your preschooler to learn to read in a systematic way, better to buy the Center for Educational Technology's classic Yesh Li Sod: Ani Koreh Anglit, which is more expensive but is incomparably richer and more imaginative.

Keywords: Computer. Review.