What is Material World?

Termites for breakfast, loaded guns in bedrooms, scheduled blackouts, a mattress for a barricade — the world looks complex, fascinating, and at times scary in Material World: A Global Family Portrait. This CD-ROM adaptation of Peter Alenzel’s coffee-table book (narrated by Charles Kuralt) is a multimedia journey through diverse cultures. It takes you into the homes and lives of 30 statistically average families (selected using demographic data from the United Nations) around the globe.

Users can view statistics about the countries — including population, life span, birth rate, caloric intake, and average income — and can answer the same 64 questions that were asked of each family. Countries represented include Japan, China, Vietnam, India, Western Samoa, Thailand, Ethiopia, South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, Cuba, Haiti, Israel, Iraq, Kuwait, Iceland, Russia, Germany, Great Britain, Bosnia, and the United States.

At start-up, you have four choices: Families, Countries, Lifestydes, and Questionnaire. In the Families section, each family is photographed with all of its possessions arranged outside its house. (A Chinese family appears on a small boat with its house in the background; an Israeli family on a platform held by a crane.) Each family completed a questionnaire about family size, income, interests, religion, and lifestyle. For many families in developing nations, the most valued possession is a TV set.

As you move it over a photo, the cursor sometimes changes to a movie camera or still camera; clicking the mouse at that point brings up either a short QuickTime movie or more photos, respectively. Unfortunately, you have to move your cursor over each photo to find more stuff. In some cases, the movies are abruptly short and of questionable value; the clips of a Mongolian inspecting what looks like an animal carcass and of a Thai child playing a video game are too short and choppy. But the movies of the Malians dancing and the Haitians praying do provide a window into their worlds.

The Countries section shows a world map with each family’s location marked. You can peruse the families’ questionnaire responses and read the photojournalist’s comments. In the Lifestyles section, you can view statistics and photos of houses, food, and transportation in each country^ Clicking on the Leisure button brings up a list of the countries’ national holidays.

The CD ran flawlessly on my Quadra 700. Colors were beautiful in both 8-bit and 24-bit color. Material World requires a 68030 or higher Mac and cannot run other applications in the background.

The Last Word Material World is gorgeously designed, informative, incredibly interesting, and inexpensive. It’s one of the coolest CD-ROMs I’ve seen.

Pearlstein, Joanna. (June 1995). Material World. Macworld. (pg. 83).

Download Material World for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II