JAPAN

Hitachi, UCLA in Video Disc Venture: The Japanese company and the university signed an agreement last week to jointly research new digital video disc hardware and software applications. The two-year agreement, valued at more than $2 million, will be carried out at UCLA’s Space Simulation and Multimedia Education center by Prof. Maha Ashour-Abdalla, according to a Hitachi Ltd. spokesman. DVD is a new type of compact disc that can hold full-length movies, music and computer data, and may one day replace conventional CD-ROMs and videocassette recorders. The research between Hitachi and UCLA will focus on potential applications of DVD, the spokesman said.