Berners-Lee on the read/write web

In August 1991, Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the first website. Fourteen years on, he tells BBC Newsnight's Mark Lawson how blogging is closer to his original idea about a read/write web.

From BBCNews

One Man Star Wars

Ok. I'm sick of it too; maybe it's just the SWgeek in me but this looks friggin halarious! A one man stage play of Star Wars, staring Charles Ross.
Check out the video Clip
OneManStarWars: the site

Sadly it looks like the closest we'll get to it here in LALA land is seeing him perform his one man LOTR @ the One Ring Celebration in Pasedena on January 20th.

"Finding Interactive Nemo"

A mentor/colleague of mine is now spearheading a whole new breed of interactive entertainment for Walt Disney Theme Parks. The recent successes with "Stitch's Photo Phone" @ Innoventions and "Turtle Talk with Crush" @ Disney's Living Seas Pavilion has given his projects new momentum. Both projects break new ground in Imagineering's "Living Creature" initiative and rate high in guest satisfaction. Without sacrificing intimate guest interaction, the throughput issues with "Stitche's Photo Phone" were solved in the more recent EPCOT attraction.

100-150 guests enter a small theater with a virtual fish tank showcased in an 8' x 16' screen. The 153-year old surfer dude turtle from "Finding Nemo" greets the visitors and makes conversation with specific audience members. This is done through a voice-activated real-time animation system developed by Imagineering. The 30-frame per second rendered image is breathtakingly real and seamlessly responsive. They are already working on a second generation of "Living Creatures" for other parks/venues.

Anyone interested in a field trip? Go to Epcot for more information.

Happy Anniversary!

Moore's Law on chips marks 40th

Moore's Law, the guiding principle that has driven the computer chip industry, celebrates its 40th birthday this week.

The "law" was adopted after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore wrote in a 1965 article that the number of transistors on a chip would double every 24 months.

Dr Moore said that the next 40 years could be "mind-boggling" and that he wished he could be around to see it.

"I re-read my 1965 article a year or so ago, and I frankly was surprised to see in it that I had predicted home computers as one of these uses for low-cost electronics, but had no idea what it would look like," he told the BBC News website.

He had forgotten about it until a young engineer came to him with the idea to build a home computer, while he was chief at Intel.

I frankly didn't expect it to be at all precise. But in fact it turned out to be much more precise than it had any good reason for being, and a colleagues dubbed it 'Moore's Law'

"I said 'gee that's fine but what would you use it for?'.

"The only application he could think of for it was the housewife putting her recipes on it, and I didn't think that was going to be a powerful enough application."

Read the BBC News article.

The Invention of Morel

The Invention of Morel, long unavailable (in English, anyway) is back in print!

Written by Adolfo Bioy Casares (most famous for his collaborations with J L Borges), it's without doubt the best novel from 1940 (or any other year, probably) about a totally (and I mean totally) immersive environment.

Borges wrote in his introduction that "to classify it as perfect is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole."

He's not exaggerating.

Highly recommended, and very relevant.

Lev Manovich: Bio

Lev Manovich: New Media Theorist

Lev Manovich is an associate professor at the Visual Arts Department, University of California, San Diego where he teaches new media art and theory. Manovich has been working with computer media as an artist, computer animator, designer, and programmer since 1984. His art projects include little movies, the first digital film project designed for the web, Freud-Lissitzky Navigator, a conceptual software for navigating twentieth century history, and "Anna and Andy," a streaming novel. He is the author of "The Language of New Media," a book that has received more than 40 reviews and is being translated into Italian, Korean, and Chinese. Reviewers say the book offers "the first rigorous and far-reaching theorization of the subject."

Manovich's awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship 2002-2003, Mellon Fellowship from Cal Arts, 2002 Digital Cultures Fellowship from UC Santa Barbara and 2002 Fellowship from The Zentrum fur Literaturforschung, Berlin. Manovich was born in Moscow where he studied fine arts, architecture, and computer science. He moved to New York in 1981, where he received an MA in cognitive science from NYU in 1988, and his Ph.D. in visual and cultural studies from the University of Rochester in 1993. His dissertation "The Engineering of Vision from Constructivism to Computers," traces the origins of computer media, relating it to the avant-garde of the 1920s. Manovich has been teaching new media art since 1992. He has also been a visiting professor at California Institute of the Arts, UCLA, University of Amsterdam, Stockholm University, and University of Art and Design, Helsinki.

Currently Manovich is working on a new book, "Info-aesthetics." His most recent art project is "Soft Cinema," which was commissioned by ZKM for its "2002-2003 Future Cinema" exhibition.

Related Links / Sources:

Lev Manovich's website
Soft Cinema
MIT Press - The Language of New Media

Ivan Sutherland: Bio

Ivan Sutherland: Head Mounted Display

If Morton Heilig's Sensorama was the first step towards the creation of engaging Virtual Reality spaces, then Ivan Sutherland's work on what he called the Ultimate Display provided the link between Sensorama's primarily mechanical structure, and the technologically sophisticated, computer powered VR standard that is prevalent today. Like Heilig, Sutherland believed in the power of expressive and expansive virtual worlds, writing that, "a display connected to a digital computer gives us a chance to gain familiarty with concepts not realizable in the physical world.Ê It is a looking glass into a mathematical wonderland." As a researcher, Sutherland was primarily interested in the idea of harnessing the power of computer science and mathematics in order to fully realize his conception of these immersive virtual spaces. With his 1970 invention of the head mounted display - the culmination of the paper "The Ultimate Display, published in 1965 - Sutherland made the first step towards making computationally powered Virtual Reality technologically possible.

In addition to his pioneering role in the history of VR, Sutherland is also responsible for a number of important technological milestones. His Phd thesis from MIT, Sketchpad, was the first implementation of the Graphical User Interface, and proved to dramatically affect Computer Graphics research. After academic stints at the University of Utah and CalTech, Sutherland co-founded Evans and Sutherland, an important virtual simulation company, and now presides as the Vice President of Sun Microsystem Labratories in Moutain View, California.

Morton Heilig: Bio

Morton Heilig: Sensorama

In 1962, Morton Heilig - a Hollywood based cinematographer was clearly ahead of his time. His conception of the first virtual reality machine - an experience he patented as Sensorama - was the amalgam of a number of mechanized processes all serving the user's immersion within the limited space of the arcade box. Using motion, 3D stereoscopic imaging, sounds, artificial breezes, smells of jasmine and hibiscus, and tactile-feedback handlebars, Heilig was able to offer the user an experience that was unparalleled by any other form of entertainment during the era - breaking down the "4th wall" that neither film nor tradtional theater were able to circumvent. As is typical of such revolutionary innovations, Sensorama was unprofitable- ignored by a public that wasn't ready to engage with such a machine. But despite its commercial failure, Heilig's pioneering experiments with Virtual Reality have proved an important step in the evolution of sensory based immersion, providing contemporary designers with an early example of how powerful such experiences can be even without the technology available today.

Related Links / Sources:

Retrofuture
Sensorama at Artmuseum.net

Perry Hoberman: Bio

Perry Hoberman: Installation Art

From the artist's website:

Perry Hoberman is an installation artist whose work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and worldwide. He works with a variety of technologies, ranging from utterly obsolete to seasonably state-of-the-art. Last year, his installation "Timetable" was awarded the Grand Prix at the ICC Biennale '99 in Tokyo, and "Systems Maintenance" won a 1999 Prix Ars Electronica "Award of Distinction"."Unexpected Obstacles", a retrospective survey of his work, was exhibited during summer 1998 at the ZKM Mediamuseum in Karlsruhe, Germany, and before that at Gallery Otso in Espoo, Finland. Other recent works include "ZOMBIAC", exhibited at the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki, and "Workaholic", shown at the exhibition "Vision Ruhr" in Dortmund, Germany. He is represented by Postmasters Gallery in New York and currently teaches at the School of Visual Arts (NY).

Related Links / Sources:

Hoberman.com (Artist Website)

Alan Kay: Bio

Alan Kay: The Curriculum of the User Interface

Alan Kay, while working as a researcher at Xerox PARC in 1970, said that "the best way to predict the future is to invent...this is the century in which almost any clear vision can be made." Kay made a career out of turning such rhetoric into some of the most groundbreaking inventions of the century, indeed shaping the future with his ideas.

Kay is responsible for a long list of technological and theoretical innovations, including the Dynabook- the first real personal computing system, and Smalltalk- the first object oriented programming language. However, perhaps Kay has been most important to theories of user interface design. He writes that with the advent of personal computing, "millions of potential users meant that the user interface would have to become a learning environment." Kay first developed these ideas with the Smalltalk language at Xerox PARC, building an interface of layered windows that would become the predecessor to the modern MacOS and Windows desktop schemes. Kay's truly radical idea, however, and the concept that has fueled his research with projects such as the Learning Research Group (LRG) in 1970 to Squeak today, is the idea that computer interfaces should be designed in such a way that the user gains a type of authoring literacy by engaging the interface rather than being prone to it. The logical next step then, was to use these machines as educational tools for children- the creation of an "environment in which users learn by doing: a curriculum of the user interface."

Kay's contribution to the world of interactive media is therefore more than the mere sum of his myraid creative and technical innovations. The idea that interactive media is ideally structured as an educational platform is an important concept that provides a possible blueprint for the development of interactive content and again proves Kay's notion that the future is best seen through invention and innovation.

Related Links / Sources:

Squeak
Croquet

Bob Stein: Interview

Bob Stein came and gave a talk at CTIN 511 seminar on January 30, 2003. Obviously, Bob has been a key figure in the development of the interactive form as a viable artistic and commercial enterprise, and we were lucky to have him share some of his thoughts concerning the future:

Q: as you conceive it, what does the term *interactive media* represent?

Bob Stein: Interactive media comprises a wide continuum. the defining element is that the user/viewer/reader controls the pace, sequence and direction of her experience with the content. this applies to something as simple as a book and as complex as a multi-player role playing game.

Q: in your opinion, is the general public ready to embrace new media?

Stein: sure; if it's compelling.

Q: in what ways do you think content publishing has been altered by new media technologies?

Stein: Lets' scratch the qualifier "content" since all publishing is about content. the changes so far have been minor in the "old categories" of books, newspapers, and magazines. to the extent that pubolishers in these fields have embraced new media it has usually been ancillarly to their traditional publications -- ie. CDs in the back of textbooks, or internet versions of the NY Times have not displaced the traditional forms in any significant way. The blogging phenomenon is the first really signifcant new form to emerge on the internet in terms of text-based publishing. On the other hand, we have entirely new genres and forms, for example games, which now occupy a significant place in the culutural landscape. And of course peer-to-peer sharing of audio now (and video later) is wreaking havoc with the music business.

Q: Why interactivity? Why not traditional forms of media? What does new / interactive media allow for that is not possible with other forms of media?

Stein: Books are already "interactive" in the sense that the reader interacts actively with the author's presentation -- determining pace and sequence of access, but also being able to pause at any point to reflect. with electronic books readers can become even more active --using the computer's ability to search text strings to navigate easily in a complex data space; linking out to the net as appropriate, engaging the author and fellow readers in discussion.

Q: what could a program like the interactive media division at USC bring to the current media landscape?

Stein: Here's one example.

over time, filmmaking is likely to bifurcate into two quite different strands -- one which makes big spectacle movies intended to be seen in a theater by a large audience and one which makes small personal films intended to be "watched" by one person with the expectation that the material is so dense and complex (like a novel) that the viewer will want to pause and look at various scenes more than once -- to really understand it -- much the way they read a book today. these new films will increasingly have gaming elements and/or simulations. the filmmaker/novelists of tomorrow could certainly come from the interactive media division of USC.

Bob Stein: Bio

Bob Stein: Multimedia Visionary

In 1985, Bob Stein founded Voyager, one of the earliest encarnations of an exclusively multimedia based company. Starting with the release of laser disc versions of such films as King Kong and Citizen Kane under the Criterion Collection label, Voyager was from the start focused on the educational possiblities of media. In 1989, Voyager released an interactive guide to Beethhoven's Ninth Symphony, a work that is generally considered the first consumer CD-ROM title. The company subsequently released a profoundly diverse catalog of multimedia projects, expanding the user's experience by adding text, sound, and image to titles ranging from the history disc Who Built America to the performance pieces of New York artist Laurie Anderson.

Despite the ostensibly disparate nature of Voyager's titles, Stein ensured that his products were all unified by their reliance upon text to handle the bulk of the presented material- a concept that, like a book, ensures that users will be able to notice the depth of the material and medium alike. As Stein notes, What's great about books is that the power is in the hand of the user. Books are random access - you can read a sentence twice or go back and look up a reference. Books are a user-driven medium versus a producer-driven medium like film. What we do [at Voyager] is to transform a producer-driven medium into a user-driven one. The meta medium is that they're all random access."

Stein's driving interest in the update of the fundamentally engaging qualities of books to new electronic mediums has carried over to his current position as CEO of the web publishing venture Nightkitchen. By creating the authoring environment tk3 Stein has with Nightkitchen, created software that he proposes will "enable people- even those with no technical experience- to assemble text, images, audio, and video files into sophisticated electronic documents." Stein's forward-thinking actions in the realm of multimedia have consistently placed emphasis on the importance of the user in content authorship, and have given allowed interactive works to become visable within the commercial world.

Related Links / Sources:

Nightkitchen
The Teachings of Bob Stein in Wired Magazine