bitsifter
friday, july 12
[sift this] A favorite past time of the brother-in-law and I is to spend the first half-hour after seeing a special effects extravaganza deciding "how they did that". I believe the past time began with the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park primarily because we fear the day that we're unable to decide what is a real model or a 3-D computer graphic. We had our first disagreement on Gary Sinese's amputed legs in Forrest Gump (He's a cripple in real life. No he's not. Yes he is.) It was at that point I knew we were doomed.
A
similar conversation arose in my cube when we arrived at Graham
Technology Solutions . The page features interactive network tv, an
audio jukebox, live radio, tele-robotics, and (take a breath, there's more) video
projection. The co-worker and I spent the better part of thirty minutes
exploring the HTML code to trying to figure out what was going down (Ok,
the audio is done with Java, but what about the video? Where's the
applet?), but, at a certain point, you just sit back and admire.
In the tele-robotic portion of the page, a remote camera overlooks a room which could be corporate headquarters of GTS or maybe someone's living room. Probably both. The user can pick-up a remote control and explore the room in real-time. I recommend around 3-4Pm PST as it is usually populated with people who's primary concern hinges on when the camera is pointed at them -- it's tres Orwellian.
Technology like this has been around for some time, but GTS shows it off in full-color, real-time, web-page embedded glory. Look for GTS to be snatched up by one of the web-heavyweights before you can finish saying "tremendously sexy technology".
[sift this] It was BBSes that introduced me to schizophrenia in the early 80's. Picture this: a twelve year old who won't cut his hair above the bottom of his years because of the size of his ears. Ache was three years off, but BBSes were there to show me I could be anyone. That was year the Mom started serving me dinner in my room.
The concept has gone virutal in the guise of avatars.
They're
3D images of the self with customization limited only by your imagination.
No more ALLCAPS to show your displeasure, you just select ANGRY or
YELLING and your avatar tells the world where you're at.
It's appealing because you can hide, change your gender, and convince the world that you fit in, but no one has got it quite right...
You're biased now, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't continue. The Palace (from Time Warner) is definitely worth a jaunt, it sports a smart UI under Windows and the number of features available to the slackers who haven't paid their membership fees ($25) is tantilizing.
Unfortunately, the Palace isn't 3D, the designers believing that 3D represents more confusion than utility which I'd normally agree with. Unfortunately, I've been spoiled by WorldsChat which allows me to get in your face and ComicChat which makes sure you know I'm laughing at you. 3D is a requirement and not that far off.
In
keeping with last week's column which slapped Suck and Slate
for there improper use of white space, we're now breaking the digest into
an easy to read two column format. This will only appear if you're using
Netscape
3.0 BETA 5.
The other change is we've upped the font size of the digest from a FONTSIZE=-1 to 0. Several readers complained that the Digest was a wall of tiny words on the 800x600 monitors. Sorry about that, on the ole 21inch monitor, it looked purdy good.
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