Television’s future aired on BBC1 in the UK tonight. The follow up to the BBC’s groundbreaking CG fest Walking With Dinosaurs, Walking With Beasts had its first showing. What made this already fantasticly high production value show all the more remarkable was that it was the first BBC documentary to be fully interactive for Digital Satellite owners. Interactive viewers were treated to two different narration tracks to choose from. Constantly updating pop-up facts were accesible through your remote. As were two entirely seperate video tracks one showing a picture in picture “Making Of” the series, while the other showed more documentary evidence to back up the main points the show was making. I’ve watched the show 3 times now with a totally different experience each time.. Walking With Beasts is backed up by a suitably interactive Web Site at BBC.co.uk.
Microsoft began their campaign for gaming domination today with the launch of XBox in New York. Only time will tell if they will be able to survive in the cut throat world of video games. Going off the launch titles it looks like they are going to have some trouble, Halo and DOA3 looking like the only grade A titles. I suppose they’ll pick up a good number of casual/first time gamers with their biggest is best advertising strategy, (I think the fact that they roped in “The Rock” at their launch event says a lot about their target market). Personally my money’s down on a Nintendo Gamecube which is released in the US this weekend.
Apple have released a new 14mb update to OsX. The new release is available through the Software Update in System Preferences on OsX machines. Apple say the download adds improvements to USB and FireWire devices, including support for additional digital cameras, and overall improvements to CD and DVD Burning. It also includes updates to AFP, SMB and WebDAV networking, updates to the Finder and Mail applications, as well as improved support for printing.
This is the best thing I’ve seen in ages. Star Wars: A New Hope animated in ASCII. Just telnet to telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl to view this incredible ASCII animation. Newbie OsX Tip: just cut and paste the bold telnet command into an open Terminal window.
Alias / Wavefront are runing a quiz on their site to see if you can spot the difference between photographic and CG images. Its actually a bit more like can you spot the cheese smothered stock photo, but it’s interesting non the less.. Damn, only 7 out of 10, and I work in photography and digital imaging :(
A conspiracy in the making?
Be good to your partner, or else.
It snowed today, dunno why but I always feel warmer the colder it gets.
The Gameboy Camera Colour Photography project bears striking parallels with the first ever post on this site. The results are kind of impressive in their understated lo-fi-ness. Meanwhile Santa’s getting his gnomes to wrap me up one of these.
There’s something innately wrong with Topps new range of trading cards. With their Enduring Freedom Picture Cards “Topps has chosen to focus on America’s strengths -its elected leaders, the security of its military, its worldwide support