02 mai 2008

Hyperland - 1990

I BBC-produksjonen "Hyperland" tar forfatterene Douglas Adams (han med The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy ) oss med på en reise inn i en fremtid av interaktivt fjernsyn. Dokumentaren gir en svært elegang og ikke minst interessant fremstilling av hypermedienes fortid, nåtid og fremtid (slik man trodde det ville bli for snart 20 år siden).

Etter drøyt 7 minutter møter vi nordmannen Hans Peter Brøndmo ved The Media Lab. Han snakker om micons (moving icons), en metode for å representere videosekvenser.

Slik ble dokumentaren beskrevet:
In this one-hour documentary produced by the BBC in 1990, Douglas falls asleep in front of a television and dreams about future time when he may be allowed to play a more active role in the information he chooses to digest. A software agent, Tom (played by Tom Baker), guides Douglas around a multimedia information landscape, examining (then) cuttting-edge research by the SF Multimedia Lab and NASA Ames research center, and encountering hypermedia visionaries such as Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson. Looking back now, it's interesting to see how much he got right and how much he didn't: these days, no one's heard of the SF Multimedia Lab, and his super-high-tech portrayal of VR in 2005 could be outdone by a modern PC with a 3D card. However, these are just minor niggles when you consider how much more popular the technologies in question have become than anyone could have predicted - for while Douglas was creating Hyperland, a student at CERN in Switzerland was working on a little hypertext project he called the World Wide Web.