ROCK / The revenge of the talking head: CD-Rom: one day all records will be made this way. And Peter Gabriel is already off the mark with Xplora 1. John May talks to him

Peter Gabriel is at it again, transmuting himself into another medium, exploring yet another technological frontier. Fifteen years ago he began thinking of himself as an experience designer. Now it's beginning to come into focus. The possible pretentiousness of that title is offset by his work in progress: the theme park ride, the multimedia CD-Rom disc and the Future Park in Barcelona.

We are drinking tea in a peaceful dining room in one of the creamy stone houses that make up his Real World complex in Box, set in the Wiltshire vales. Gabriel has grown a small moustache and beard round his mouth and chin. He wears an oversize patterned shirt and speaks softly. 'My dad came up with the first fibre-optic wired cable TV system in the world, with an Italian. It was for Rediffusion in this country. Had a prototype in Hastings. I grew up listening to him trying to champion home shopping, pay-TV, electronic democracy. This was his battle, for this wondrous means of communication.'

The main topic of our conversation is the new Real World product: one of the first interactive multimedia CD-Rom discs issued by a major musician / artist. (Todd Rundgren is the other front-runner.)

In a year's time that won't need explanation but right now this is what it is and what you get. CD-Rom discs look like compact discs, but they hold a vast amount of data, not just words but also video, stills and animation, all of which are linked together in something that multimedia designers call, delightfully, an 'entity model'. You view them on your computer or on one of the new multiplayers linked to your television, like Philips's CD-I.

The disc divides into four sections: 'US', 'Real World', 'Behind the Scenes' and 'Personal File'. Each is represented by an icon that you can activate. Inside 'US' is all the art work from the album, much of it animated, plus video clips and music. 'Real World' allows you to: examine and listen to the entire Real World catalogue; to investigate and play some of the instruments used; to visit the Real World studios and see work in progress. You can remix one of Gabriel's tracks by moving the levels on an on-screen mixer.

'Behind The Scenes' offers a map of the Womad concert site which you can explore. 'Personal File' is a suitcase full of Gabriel's past, including his family photo album (click on the photos and they come alive as super-8 home movies) and his Eternal Passport (open it by clicking on the cover and you see his animated passport photo endlessly cycle from baby to old man to skull and back). Gabriel is your guide on the side to all this, perched angelically as a little talking icon in the top corner of the screen.

Compared with a number of other multimedia discs, it's fair to say that this one sets a very high standard. What is particularly pleasing are the design and colours. The use of natural textures for the background screen, like the sky and water, is extremely restful on the eye. There are lots of little tricks (a dinosaur wanders unexpectedly across the top of the screen) and care and attention are obvious at every level. Only Apple users will be able to sample its delights at present but PC versions will follow.

The disc, called Xplora 1 (like some Martian space probe) contains, we are told, 100 minutes of video, more than 30 minutes of audio, over 100 full-colour photographic images and the equivalent of a book's worth of text - 600 megabytes of data.

The project, which from conception to birth occupied 40 people for at least a year, originated with Steve Nelson of the appropriately named Brilliant Media, a San Francisco- based multimedia company. Gabriel, one of life's natural multimedia men, took to it instantly.

'I ended up, fortuitously, at an AT & T planning conference (in 1986). I got onto this thing called Global Business Network who advise corporations on their future. They throw in odd people - like they had an anthropologist looking at the design for Nissan cars. They were talking about laying the information highways using fibre optics. My opinion was that, if you put it down, the traffic will come.'

His techno-frontier attitude goes down well in the US: 'People believe it's possible over there. They get excited, they support it, run with it and hope some of the magic will rub off on them. Here we sit back, like a bunch of cynics.'

He recognises that his new project is just scratching the surface of a whole new medium and his Real World multimedia company is now aiming to have a dozen projects up and running within the next year.

'The role of the arist is changing in a sense that there's always been a linear route through a work of art before, and now we are providing an environment which may contain a linear route, but which is also a playground for people to go off and explore for themselves. So you can produce a finished piece of work and also provide collage kits. People may explore your forest or they may take your trees and put them in a dome. In the same way that we have a dictionary in our heads which provides us with the tools for our communication through language, our kids or their kids will grow up with some kind of mutlimedia hieroglyphic capability.'

Interactive multimedia will, Gabriel believes, 'find a huge place in the market in the same way that videos did'. And maybe he should know - he was in the forefront of that development, too.

'What is possible is affected very much by what is believed to be possible,' he says. Peter Gabriel, experience designer, is just warming up for the next Big Show.

Peter Gabriel's 'Xplora 1' goes on sale on 21 December, price pounds 39.95

(Photographs omitted)