To Find Digital Horizon, Widen Human Minds

Author: David Cox

Date: 10 Oct 1994

Words: 914

Publication: The Age

Section: Computer Age

Page: 38

TAKE a look at the coin-op arcades these days. They feature amazing 3D-simulation games based on planes, cars, and dancing fighting figures. You will notice that 3D graphical building blocks (called polygons) make up almost every element within each scene.

Sega's Virtua Racer, for example, allows linked multiple drivers to individually change their perspective from inside the car to above the race track. The computer calculates your view of the world as you interact with it in real time.

It is conceivable that eventually such Virtua technology could be used to enable live interactive participation in real world events. Compare e-mail to a fax.

ASCII always retains its digital form up to moment a laser printer fixes the words on to paper. Until that time, ASCII can be infinitely reproduced, saved, uploaded, downloaded and sent as email. It is a universally accepted data standard of written text for use by computers.

By contrast, a fax is merely a scanned picture, to be printed out at the other end of the phone line. The integrity of the digital values making up the original text information is lost in the translation into a picture representation. Fine for human eyes but not much use to processors.

Faxed numbers are destined to be thus frozen on paper, but typed numbers sent over wires as ASCII can be immediately employed for use in calculations and generally made to continue to perform within the digital domain.

In addition, ASCII text requires considerably less bandwidth than a fax, as it is the data to present an electronic representation of the typed symbol which is piped down the tube, not the entirety of information necessary to literally redraw, on paper, a picture of it.

Nicholas Negroponte's regular WIRED magazine column recently described television as a kind of 25 picture per second fax. What if the means were available to provide the coverage of an actual grand final, not merely as live moving picture and sound, but as real time data, able to be represented in a range of ways? Perhaps Virtua Grand Final, where digitised football, players and audience could be viewed on a terminal as polygonal computer generated models? An on-line real-time data feed could be used to construct visualisations, where any point of view could be taken - the ball, the umpire, a non existent ever moving helicopter. The game could even be experienced from underneath the oval. Overall ``knowledge" about the game for the fan would be increased a thousandfold.

Furthermore, the consumer would also become a producer of the experience, tailoring it for his/her particular needs as the basis for virtual participation.

The American game developer, Activision, employs a method using three video cameras to generate 3D polygon models based on the motion of live actors. The cameras capture the motion of reflective tape placed strategically on areas of the actor's limbs and torso. This information is then used to tell 3D computer models (known as ``mesh objects") how to mimic the original motion in the XY and Z axes for game applications.

As we are well aware, information for use by computers is not limited to the visual. Satellites and electron microscopes use a range of methods to divine, then reconstruct what is known about phenomena.

Computers provided the computational grunt to reveal patterns in dynamic systems, where order and disorder were discovered to be mutual partners. Chaos theory emerged, its impact sending shock waves throughout the established academic establishment worldwide for literally shedding new light on reality.

Clouds, traffic, economies and population suddenly were seen to demonstrate patterns. Fractals - computer graphics made up of self similar shapes parallelling those in the natural world (plants, mountains, clouds) - stem from chaos theory and, not surprisingly, have a fundamental role in games, from methods to realistically render the surfaces of the aforementioned polygons, to enabling the efficient compression of moving pictures as data.

Given all this, why is it proponents of a so-called ``information superhighway" for Australia fail to imagine the role of networked digital media beyond tepid recreations of already existing linear forms, like ``video on demand"? A century ago, its inventors intended the telephone to be used as a one-way cable radio service, until the population itself saw its potential for communication. The time required to digitise the video collections of existing libraries is probably not worth the effort.

By the time the fibre is in place, and the ``repurposing" complete, Australia's population will scoff at the arrogance of those who decades before had considered the client server, one-to-many paradigm all it deserved.

``Video on demand" is an expensive, obvious, red herring. We should use our existing limited bandwidth and resources to create genuinely innovative, inherently digital, interactive media, instead of idiotic online shopping malls, pay tv and other insults to the next generation!