PLUGGED IN : NEWS BYTES.

HOME MOVIES: Woodland Hills-based Brilliant Digital Entertainment is pushing the bounds of narrative storytelling with its series of interactive, animated films. Set to be released this autumn, the firm's Multipath Movies allow players to make decisions during the film and alter the tale's course. The software needed to watch the films will be stored on CD-ROMs, and users will get each new 30-minute ``episode'' off the Net. Brilliant's first project, a futuristic pig-meets-man-meets-machine piece called ``Cyberswine,'' will be distributed over the Web and CD-ROMs bundled with Packard Bell NEC machines.

PARENT PATROL: Big Brother's watching, and so is your mom. ParentNet Inc. and Axis Communications Inc. are testing their KinderCam System, which uses a high-tech camera and the Internet to let parents see a stop-motion video of their children at day care. The system is being tested at a Kids ``R'' Kids Daycare Center in Marietta, Georgia. Access to the system will cost parents less than $20 a month, which ParentNet said it will share with centers to help them recoup installation costs.

WEB LINKS

BLASTING OFF: NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is using its Web site to distribute a computer screen saver of the Mars Pathfinder's Sojourner land rover. The download, dubbed ``Mars Exploration Program: A New Trail to the Red Planet'' and available at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/mars, has versions for computers with Windows 95 and Macintosh software. The screen saver features 3-D, computer-generated images of Mars that scientists used to determine where to land the Sojourner micro-rover this summer.

SHALL I COMPARE THEE . . .: National Poetry Month may be almost over, but it's never too late to wax poetic. The Academy of American Poets - http://www.poets.org - has posted works on well-known wordsmiths such as e.e. cummings and Gwendolyn Brooks, RealAudio readings of works by their authors and pointers to on-line chats with other notable poets. The Internet Poetry Archive - http://sunsite.unc.edu/dykki/poetry/home.html - is another hot spot. Netizens will find biographies, bibliographies, poems, audio file readings, and comments from Nobel Prize winners Seamus Heaney and Czeslaw Milosz.

RANDOM ACCESS

CHANGING CHANNELS: The push toward Net-smart TV may be grabbing headlines, but a recent study warns that it will be five years before Internet access really moves into the living room. In a management report released last week, research firm Jupiter Communications found that the public still is buying - albeit at a declining rate - personal computers for the home. This could slow down the pace of home penetration of such TV-centric Internet access machines, despite their cheaper price and ease of use, according to the report.

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Photo: (1--Color) No caption (Mars Pathfinder's Sojourner land rover)