From: Phil Osborn (philosborn2001@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon May 13 2002 - 21:42:51 MDT
If you want to go the realtime route, there is
software and hardware out there that allows you to use
realtime video input to a computer card to precisely
detect when motion takes place in any direction or
location.
This was available in 1986 on the Amiga using the
LIVE! board. There were various pieces of software -
all in violation of Myron Krueger's patent on
"Videoplace," but he never took the trouble to enforce
it - including Mandala and Cyberscape, which is
available for free now for the Amiga version - but you
have to dig up a working LIVE! Board, which is like
finding hens teeth. A working LIVE! Board, at last
checking, was selling now for about twice what it cost
in the late '80's, as there has never been a real
replacement for it on the PC or Mac that didn't cost a
fortune. You might get lucky and find a wording Amiga
system somewhere for a few hundred dollars on up to a
couple thousand. If you are real, real lucky, it will
have Mandala on it. Otherwise, CyberScape works just
as well, just doesn't have a GUI to generate the
script language. These are nice systems when they
work, as you can control anything the computer is
capable of doing, including remote control over serial
or parallet ports, MIDI, etc., all from the video
image - you see yourself on the screen and just
directly interact with virtual objects with your
image.
There was a version of CyberScape for the PC that
required the Matrox Meteor board (no longer made, as
well). I believe it needed the Meteor 2. Joe Shen,
of Tensor - a one man company - was no longer selling
PC CyberScape last time I checked, as there were
virtually no customers.
Finally, there was a company - the first one formed
via Kawasaki's Garage.com - which had a system out
there for a bunch of the PC cams, no additional
hardware required. They also offered a free software
authoring package for a while.
Then - I suspect - as I followed this technology
closely as a journalist for over a decade, the big
players moved in and shut them down. Behind the
scenes, everything indicates that patent wars are
going on over videoplace ideas, so, just as we finally
saw CDs about a decade after they were first feasible,
not we may see working videoplace, with all kinds of
proprietary restrictions, three decades after Myron
perfected it on mainframes, and almost two decades
after fully working products first appeared and then
disappeared for various PCs.
Or perhaps MS will simply decide it doesn't fit their
profile for the future they have planned for us and we
will never see it again.
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