Don Rickert, as Project Lead, was responsible for ALL aspects of this project, including constructing a sound stage, organizing the video production crew, union negotiations, managing a large team of expert contributors, including world-renowned specialists in artificial intelligence, information retrieval, MPEG encoding for streaming video (WAY before YouTube, when you needed a Teradata(tm) supercomputer to stream large video files), cognitive science, design, software engineering, video direction, video production and neuroscience.
The Brain Attack Virtual Conference was the first documented commercially viable website to include embedded streaming digital media (video and audio).
During the first four days of May 1997, a conference on "brain attack" (i.e., stroke) was held at the Camelback Inn in Scottsdale , Arizona . This conference brought together twelve prominent researchers and practitioners in the field of brain attack for the primary purpose of generating content for a "virtual conference" web site. The contents of the Brain Attack web site included text versions of the presentations, audio and video of the presenters, radiological images, instructive illustrations and animations, as well as selected links to other relevant web sites.
Don Rickert served as Project Manager and Brad Wiederholt, the other founding Partner of Don Rickert Research & Design's parent company, Wiederholt & Rickert Partners, LLC as Director/Producer.
Postscript: The website was taken off-line by AT&T reportedly for legal exposure reasons, in the fear that untrained visitors could misinterpret and misuse the key life and death information on brain attack (i.e. strokes) that was disseminated via the website.
Unfortunately, only a few grainy images survive from the Brain Attack Virtual Conference website. They are shown below. Click on any of the thumbnails to see a larger view.
These images are also posted on Facebook.