Interactive Things Over The Internetz
In the early days of the world wide web, there was a series of projects that I thought were really cool. The internet was slow back then, and my access was through the local library. IBM 386 computers with less than 100meg of hard drive space and 4 gig of ram.
SLOW. It could take 20 minutes just to check if you had emails.
Anyway, there were two projects that I really thought were the bomb back then. The first was Technosphere. This was where you could combine various body parts to create a 3D creature that would live in this environment and then it would send you an email letting you know how long it lived, whether it mated and what it ate, how far it travelled, etc.
Primitive, but it was an early showing of Artificial Intelligence.
Another really cool thing was called the Biosphere and it was basically a camera that could be controlled by people in a chatroom. The camera was pointed over a pot with a whole heap of seeds in it. You could tell the camera to plant seeds, or water certain points within the pot. (Droplets at a time of course).
But those projects ended and I was saddened. The latest thing I've seen is the Red Dwarf twitter thing I mention in the journal entry below this one.
Are there any more I wonder? Do people still have webcams pointed at their Goldfish? I want to know.
SLOW. It could take 20 minutes just to check if you had emails.
Anyway, there were two projects that I really thought were the bomb back then. The first was Technosphere. This was where you could combine various body parts to create a 3D creature that would live in this environment and then it would send you an email letting you know how long it lived, whether it mated and what it ate, how far it travelled, etc.
Primitive, but it was an early showing of Artificial Intelligence.
Another really cool thing was called the Biosphere and it was basically a camera that could be controlled by people in a chatroom. The camera was pointed over a pot with a whole heap of seeds in it. You could tell the camera to plant seeds, or water certain points within the pot. (Droplets at a time of course).
But those projects ended and I was saddened. The latest thing I've seen is the Red Dwarf twitter thing I mention in the journal entry below this one.
Are there any more I wonder? Do people still have webcams pointed at their Goldfish? I want to know.