08/03/2005

A virtual tour in the archaeological site of ancient Olympia won the Grand Prize of the 5th Hellenic Multimedia and Internet Mobius Festival, during an event which took place on 28 February 2005 at the Institut Francais d' Athenes. The DVD ROM/Video "Ancient Olympia - Olympian Paths" was developed by FINATEC in three languages (Greek, English and German) and includes a tour through the history of the Games, from Minoan, through Roman times, to their revival in 1896.

The Culture prize was awarded to the multimedia application "Heraklion, a city through the ages", developed by the Municipality of Heraklion and the Multimedia Laboratory of the University of Crete. The application presents the history of Heraklion, a city more than 4,000 years old, through guides, rare engravings, paintings, old photographs, original texts, music, sounds and videos.

"Filoglossia+, Greek for Beginners, Series 3 cd-roms", one of the educational CD-ROMs of the Institute for Language and Speech Processing aimed at teaching Greek as a foreign language, was given the Education prize. The application is provided with English as a support language and targets beginners with little or no knowledge of Greek. Its aim is to provide the prerequisites for understanding and producing oral and written speech, so that the user is able to communicate in everyday life situations. The software includes advanced tools of language technology, enabling the user to record his/her voice and compare it to that of a native speaker, as well as a bilingual Greek-English electronic dictionary and a cultural section including audiovisual material on the ancient and modern Greek civilisation.

The Fiction prize was awarded to the "Freedom is your ball" proposal, by Evangelos Georgakopoulos, on the pilot development of a website exploring the possibilities of the web's uniquely interactive multimedia tool Shockwave Flash. The proposal concerns the creation of a multi-level alternative narration about man's urban co-existence with the contemporary dog.

The CD-ROM "All Different - All Equal", developed by the New Technologies Laboratory, Department of Communication and Media Studies, University of Athens, was awarded the Mobius Special Prize. The application utilises all five senses to present cultures that originated far away, but exist very close to us. The CD-ROM includes interviews, a glossary of terms, statistics, short segments of traditional music from the migrants' home countries, a sample of the scientific literature on matters of racism and xenophobia, as well as recipes from various countries of the world.

Finally, Special Mention was awarded to the CD-ROM "Fairytales" by Electra Galani. This is a CD-ROM with four passages and a song, digitally dramatised as fairy tales.

It should be noted that the Hellenic Multimedia and Internet Mobius Festival was organised for the fifth consecutive year by the New Technologies Laboratory (Department of Communication and Media Studies, University of Athens) with the support of the Center of Applied Industrial Design (CAID). The winning projects will represent our country in the 13th International Festival which will take place on 22 and 23 March 2005 in France (R?union island). The Festival was established in 1992, through an initiative of the Paris 8 University, and is supported by Unesco.

Source: Mobius Awards 2005