DIGITAL L.A. : LOST IN CYBERSPACE; SOME DVD MOVIES INCLUDE GAMES, SCRIPTS AND MORE.

Byline: David Bloom 

Sales of DVDs are up as more people are buying players to watch good-looking movies with great sound. Plus, the discs contain lots of extras, like director interviews and movie trailers, and can be conveniently stored.

But DVD-ROM games for personal computers have been slower to come to market. That's despite recent projections that as many as 40 million DVD-ROM drives will be sold for computers by 2000.

New Line Cinema hopes to take advantage of that disparity with its Oct. 6 release of what it's calling a ``hybrid'' DVD disc for its movie ``Lost in Space.'' While the disc will contain the usual things for television DVD players (the movie, etc.), computer users will get more.

A menu automatically pops up listing games and other options, including reading the screenplay and jumping to corresponding scenes while listening to the writer/director. For those with Internet connections, the movie's Web site is a click away.

Once at the site, they can use a Sim Earth-like program to create their own planet, tweaking the atmosphere, oceans, land masses, plant and animal life and can get feedback about the planet's chances of thriving.

One area is pitched to teen-age girls, others provide heavy science background, more film information and a 3-D shooter game.

Another intriguing area takes live audio feeds from giant antennae monitoring the universe's transmission of radio waves at various frequencies as part of the search for extraterrestrial life. Those eerie sounds can then be sampled, mixed and combined to create a true Music of the Spheres.

New Line officials said the disk is a model for what they hope to do with some other upcoming titles, including ``Blade'' and ``Rush Hour.''

Marc Randolph, president and CEO of NetFlix.com, which sells and rents DVDs on the Internet, said he's bullish on the future of ``hybrid'' discs such as ``Lost in Space.''

The DVD platform offers so many possibilities for the makers of games and movies that it's just a matter of time before developers begin truly exploiting the possibilities, Randolph said.

And DVD players are considered the future multimedia heart of such entertainment platforms as Microsoft's WebTV and the next generation of Sony's PlayStation.

``If you compare what you get with `Lost in Space' on DVD vs. what you get on a VHS tape, there's so much more,'' Randolph said. ``It's one of those things that's tremendously impressive compared to what came before it but absolutely is only a first step toward what will come in the future.''

Let 'em hear you

Whether it's a pothole down the street or the presidential peccadillo of the week, there's finally a place designed to help you exercise your right to petition the government, or at least your (least) favorite politician.

E-The People, a Web site atwww.e-thepeople.com/, will help you e-mail letters to any of an estimated 140,000 public officials with 7,000 city, county, state and federal governments. If the official doesn't have e-mail, the site will fax your letter instead.

``I think a lot of people want to get involved,'' said the site's founder, Alex Sheshunoff Jr., a 24-year-old Yale history grad. ``But they don't want to spend three hours waiting in a public meeting to speak for three minutes.''

The site's best feature is that it helps figure out who you should write to for a specific problem, such as that pothole that just swallowed your car's front end, a common complaint, Sheshunoff has found.

You can choose from 28 general issues (including ``other''), decide whether you want to send it to a national, state or local politician, and give your ZIP code. The site comes back with a list of who should be written to, and then shepherds you through the rest of the process of sending the e-mail.

``In a very large historical perspective,'' Sheshunoff said, ``it's plausible we can use technology to come back to participatory democracy. When I first came up with this, I heard a lot of people talking about the Internet and democracy, but not too many people writing code (to do anything with it).''

E-The People users also can create or sign petitions on a variety of issues and determine who should get copies and who should receive the final product. The site definitely is still in beta mode, which means bugs have to be eliminated before it works smoothly. For instance, though I was using Version 4.04 of Netscape Navigator, the site wouldn't display the checkboxes you need to click to choose who will receive your e-mail or petition.

Sheshunoff said the bugs should be stomped out of the site by early October. Once done, this site has real potential to increase the flow of information between the governed and the governing, so we the people can make ourselves heard.

Ad-ing less, not more

Much as the benefits of technology are enjoyable, one of its most frustrating aspects is how much easier it is for advertising and marketing to seep into every corner of its existence.

The latest sign of the end of civilization is word that pkWare, a Wisconsin software company, will include advertising content in some versions of its best-known product, the compression program pkZip for Windows.

The content will only be included in the shareware version of the program, and even then, the company will distribute a nonadvertising-supported version. And registered users - those who have paid the fee - get spared the ads also.

To some extent, this approach makes sense as a way for shareware authors to actually generate enough money to keep creating cool, cheap software. In that situation, it's not much different from magazine or newspaper publishers using advertising revenues to reduce or eliminate subscription charges.

But the possibility of avoiding more ads would be incentive enough to pay for an ad-less version of software. Hmm, maybe this isn't such a bad idea after all.

The march of technology

Now come two welcome bits of news from the world of technology. First, Intel has announced price cuts of as much as a third on its computer chips. That'll mean cheaper, more powerful computers in the near future at a time when prices are already dropping on everything else.

Some off-brand, non-Intel-based computer systems are already being advertised for as little as about $600. At this rate, it could get ridiculous, but who's complaining?

And the smart folks over at Lucent Technologies (which used to be known as Bell Labs back when it was part of AT&T) have figured out a way to make cell-phone batteries last a month between rechargings. So you'll have one less useful excuse for hanging up.

Game theories

The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences is sponsoring a series of seminars on video-game design at its Los Angeles headquarters over the next couple of months.

The first session is at 7 p.m. Oct. 8 and features George Collins of Pandemic Studios talking about how to apply the lessons of 1970s games to modern CD-ROM design. Collins designed Activision's Battle Zone most recently.

Other sessions will be held Oct. 22, Nov. 5 and 19, and Dec. 10. The academy's offices are at 10635 Santa Monica Blvd., Suite 180, Century City. Call [phone] for further information, or check www.interactive.org on the Web.

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2 Photos

Photo: (1) The enhanced DVD for ``Lost in Space'' includes the full movie, an interactive screenplay, interviews with the director, Web links and more.

(2) no caption (E-The People)