http://www.hotwired.com/wired/scans.html (HotWired Trade Show Demo, 11/1995)
If that sounds odd, it's only because some people see restaurants exclusively as places to eat and drink. Food is served in the three clubs up and running so far (in New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Cambridge, Massachusetts) but these are just the most visible part of a content-driven media empire.
House of Blues Entertainment Inc. co-produces a weekly TBS television show and runs a syndicated radio program hosted by company investor Dan Akroyd. The House of Blues Music Company has signed five artists and is also releasing blues compilation albums.
E-mail addresses flash on monitors because House of Blues New Media Vice President Marc Schiller is using edge technologies to bring multimedia created at the company's clubs to a wider audience. He plans to provide live programming on the company's advertising-supported Web site, and he's also toying with launching a House of Blues CD-ROM magazine, to be sold in House of Blues retail stores.
"The corporation is creating an incredible amount of content," Schiller says. "You can license out some of that content and take a passive role, which really doesn't create good products, or you can take an active role in designing those products."
Schiller says this over lunch at the Los Angeles club, one of the few buildings boasting both a corrugated tin façade and multiple ISDN lines.
Former movie producer and entertainment consultant Schiller was working as a technology consultant when, last year, he was hired by House of Blues founder and CEO Isaac Tigrett for the new media division.
Tigrett "understands brand identification like I've never seen before," Schiller says. Tigrett got the know-how by launching the Hard Rock Cafe in London at the age of 19, then taking it worldwide. At 46, he's now building the House of Blues brand name, and seems genuinely excited about bringing it into cyberspace. "To me, new media is the most important thing happening today," Tigrett says.
The House of Blues's new media ventures will work synergistically with its other divisions. An interview with John Lee Hooker, conducted for the House of Blues radio program, could be reprinted on the Web site. And club goers could use the site to collect info about their favorite bands.
Still, the House of Blues is more interested in live "Netcasting" than using the Web to promote its other products.
"Live programming is going to be key for us," Schiller says. "What the Web allows you to do is communicate with the artist, participate in the creation of the art, interact with the programming as it happens. The real capability of the Web is to take a kid in London and hook him up with a kid in Spain and have them create something together or jam with a musician. And who's going to do that? We are."
House of Blues: +1 (213) 650 0476. Web: http: //www.houseblues.com.
- Rob Levine
Haight-Ashbury in the '60s is the first CD-ROM effort from Rockument Inc., a multimedia firm in Gualala, California, whose mission, according to president Tony Bove, is "to warp technology into a rock-and-roll machine."
Haight, to Bove and crew's credit, is no dewy-eyed whitewash of the time when a San Francisco street corner was the center of the anti-establishment world. "We're not censoring anything. We can't go putting fig leaves on people's bodies," says Bove, who also directed and co-produced the CD-ROM. "A lot of the material here could be considered radical. We're talking about a movement that involved freedom of speech."
Bove and Haight associate director and co-producer Cheryl Rhodes have the computer and counterculture cred for the venture. The founders of Publish magazine, as well as the authors of several books on multimedia, they grew up in the era they're chronicling. "I came out of the '60s clearly a counterculture person," say Bove.
"It's the old home-brew computer club mentality," notes Rhodes. "I'm also a music lover and a music fan. It was exciting to me to be able to research this area in more depth."
After years in the field of journalism, Rhodes says the idea of moving from writing about technology to making it had been at the back of both of their minds for several years. When the CD-ROM industry started to explode in the early '90s, "we just couldn't sit back and do nothing," she adds.
An unflinching, nonjudgmental chronicle, Haight is divided into three parts: Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out. Of course. With Tune In, you can search through snippets of the CD-ROM and assemble them in a "roll-your-own" format. Turn On is "The Rise and Fall of the Haight-Ashbury," written and narrated by former San Francisco Oracle editor Allen Cohen. The section includes excerpts from the notorious underground paper in all its glory, as well as archival footage featuring the luminaries of the scene, set to the music of the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company. After boning up on history, you'll be ready to Drop Out with a game that takes you to the Haight on a quest for enlightenment.
Though some will wonder at the relevance of yet another look at this decade, Rockument's leader recognizes the importance of cultural context. "We're not stuck in the '60s, but it makes sense to start at the beginning," says Bove. "I see a progress from the media experiments in the '60s to the experiments in television, video, and film in the '90s. There's a direct lineage from hippies to hackers." And where they meet is the most famous intersection of all time. Rockument: +1 (707) 884 4413, http://www.rockument.com.
- Mary Elizabeth Williams
Arie Kaufman, a computer scientist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, likes to say that whenever he steps into his lab, the experience is akin to "discovering a new continent."
It's less a continent and more another dimension; Kaufman is a pioneer in volume visualization (VolVis), a technology that takes 2-D data from CAT scans, MRIs, PETs, and X-rays and renders them as 3-D images. VolVis's users can then, on screen, peel the outer layers of the brain, search for tumors, change the angle of view, or magnify areas of concern, all without touching a scalpel.
The implications of the technology are staggering, from medical applications to environmental science to national defense to entertainment. Already, VolVis is enabling researchers to see inside the brain in greater detail than ever before, to delve into the cells and synapses that make thought and memory possible, to concoct more realistic flight-simulation programs, to measure ground-water flows, and to search for oil reserves.
And all this is just the tip of the arithmetic. VolVis relies on a series of algorithms to simulate "ray tracing": how particles in a volume emit, absorb, or refract light. The process works by taking an object, already traditionally represented in triangles (these then form 2-D images), and translating it into volume elements called "voxels." When individual rays pass through each voxel, the data are accumulated and displayed on screen. With VolVis, you can get the inside scoop on just about everything.
Since Kaufman's university does not budget for research, he's had to turn to other sources. The National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy each awarded him US$100,000 for volume visualization research.
On the Stony Brook campus' Howard Hughes Medical Institute (no affiliation to Hughes Aircraft), volume visualization is used to analyze the circuits within brain cells. Says Paul Adams, a Hughes researcher, "We're gearing up to look at one of the central questions in neurobiology: Where is memory stored? This is a 3-D question. You need a technique that allows you to look for small changes in many parts of the brain simultaneously. VolVis is playing a key role in this. For us, it's vital that this tool has come along."
But the MIPS-greedy VolVis will have to be souped up if it's to out-maneuver 2-D surface-based visualization systems. At Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston (an affiliate of Harvard University Medical School), both techniques are used to detail patients' anatomies before, during, and after surgery.
"Whether or not volume-based systems are better isn't clear," says Bill Lorensen, a graphics engineer with GE who has been working with doctors at Brigham for seven years. "As for surface-based systems, you can always see one surface, but you can't see through it, so it's not clear what surface is in front of another. Similarly, with an X-ray, it's hard to see one surface behind another. The volume techniques can't produce images as quickly, so Brigham and Women's, for now, is using both, although surface-based systems win out because they're faster." But Kaufman expects VolVis to improve over time. "Even now we can see that this technology will revolutionize the field of computer graphics."
VolVis software, instructions, manuals, and conversion utilities are available to researchers free of charge over the Internet (volvis@cs.sunysb.edu).
- Adam Penenberg
It's no secret that expatriate Chinese students used fax machines to funnel information in and out of China during the 1989 democracy movement. Less well known is the fact that China's turmoil gave birth to what is now one of the most vigorous communities on the Internet. Mailing lists, newsgroups, and ftp archives proved to be superb methods for distributing information to the many far-flung pockets of "overseas" Chinese.
The most enduring cyberlegacy of the Tiananmen Square incident is the China News Digest, a web server (http://www.cnd.org) and mailing list that routinely figures in the top 10 most popular listserv lists (see "Top 10," Wired 2.11, page 46). The Digest was started by a group of Canadian and American expatriate Chinese students to spread news about the Tiananmen demonstrations. Six years later, tens of thousands of subscribers receive a daily synopsis of news stories about China published in newspapers and magazines from all over the world.
One of the volunteers from the group that produced the Digest, James Ding, soon recognized that the Internet could be turned to different, more profitable uses. Along with other expatriate Chinese, Ding founded AsiaInfo Services Inc., in 1993, a joint venture with China's largest information retrieval company, Wanfang Data Corporation. AsiaInfo's original mission was to transmit - via the Internet - business-oriented information about China. But over the last six months, the company has become increasingly involved in getting China online.
"China has got Internet fever," says Edward Tian, AsiaInfo's president, in an e-mail message from Beijing, where he and Ding "are working like crazy to have many Chinese institutions linked to the Net."
AsiaInfo is also a "major" subcontractor for Sprint, which is setting up three leased 64-Kbps lines to the Internet in China. And with a content provider in the United States and a technology provider in China, AsiaInfo hopes to become a full-fledged online service provider.
These days, there's no shortage of companies with similar plans in Asia. Hong Kong alone has 10 Internet providers - six months ago, there were three.
But the real irony of the AsiaInfo case is that the same people who smuggled information out of China when the government was doing its utmost to stop them are now helping set up that same government with the most potent information-dispersal technology around. So far, they're being discreet, capitalizing on the observation that either Chinese leaders don't know enough about the Internet to fear it, or that they're so blinded by the economic need to upgrade telecommunications, they're ready to write blank checks.
- Andrew Leonard
Antiques dealer Scott Wilson spends a lot of time fishing through thrift stores and junk sales around Boston and comes across a lot of really awful art. A couple of years ago, Wilson found a gem of a bad piece and brought it over to his friend Jerry Reilly's house in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. The huge oil painting was titled Lucy in the Field with Flowers. It was "a beautiful painting of an old lady with blue hair, standing - almost hovering - in a field of daisies," recalls Wilson.
"There was something about it that was just hideous," says Reilly, a computer programmer, "but in a really striking way. It's breathtakingly bad. You could tell that the person who painted it was technically proficient, but something had gone horribly wrong."
Reilly, who spends every summer in Cape Cod living in a tent full of computers with his screenwriter wife, asked Wilson if he could hang Lucy in his home. Wilson gladly accepted. "I started giving him more and more bad paintings," he says. Nine months later, Reilly had so many horrible paintings in his house, he and Wilson decided to share their collection with the public. "I turned my basement into a museum," Reilly explains. "We painted the walls white, added track lighting, framed the paintings, wrote little blurbs for them, and called it the Museum of Bad Art (MOBA). Then we invited a pile of people over. That was the start of it all."
It didn't end there, of course. Reilly and Wilson had more shows, each with new pieces Wilson had rescued from yard sales, thrift stores, flea markets, attics, and trash cans. As MOBA's curator, Wilson is very particular about what gets hung on the walls. You won't see velvet Elvis paintings or intentionally primitive "folk" art. "We don't go for kitsch," he explains. "The paintings are all inspired, genuine attempts at something. There's a lot of passion in them, but something ran amok. As a result, they need to be seen." Thus, MOBA's motto: "Art too bad to be ignored."
Reilly's suburban home quickly became the hip local hangout of West Roxbury, attracting mobs of people on show nights. Strangers began donating paintings they'd found. MOBA's last show in January, "Bright Colors/Dark Emotions," was a complete zoo. "It's a small house, and there were hundreds of people," Reilly says. "We'd put paintings on the whole outside of our house, and it was so crowded you couldn't get in. We hit the limit."
At that point, it was no longer practical to keep the museum in Reilly's basement. A meeting was called with the Friends of MOBA (a loose connection of 80 or so of the museum's hard-core fans) to figure out what to do. They came up with two plans. First, they decided to set up temporary MOBAs in larger galleries and museums around town. They also started making a CD-ROM. The friends of MOBA began pitching in. One member put them in contact with a photographer's studio in Boston. Another who owns a small software business agreed to help distribute the CD-ROM through her company. Somebody else is a film producer, so she brought in costumes and props. The CD-ROM is full of chatty, outrageous characters (played by the Friends of MOBA). You can visit the lobby, café, restroom, and gift shop, or sneak past the "No Admittance" signs to explore the offices, shipping dock, and restoration rooms. "Other art CD-ROMs we've seen are sterile - a bunch of empty rooms with paintings," says Reilly. "Half the fun of going to a real museum is eavesdropping on people."
What is it about bad art that has made MOBA a success? Reilly has a theory: "Because it's the Museum of Bad Art, people aren't afraid to give their opinion. In fact, they talk passionately about the art. You never see that in a regular museum." MOBA: +1 (617) 325 8224. On the Web: http://mirror.wwa.com/mirror/orgs/moba/moba.htm.
- Mark Frauenfelder
They used to say the problem with ham radio is that the only people you can reach are other hams. That adage came to mind when I first tried Internet Phone (or "IPhone" as it's known among aficionados), a new program from VocalTec that does pretty much what the name suggests: it allows you to talk in real time with other people on the Internet. The system won't replace AT&T any time soon, but exploring the booming IPhone community provides an intriguing preview of where the Net is headed.
IPhones, along with a growing number of competing programs, work like this: you speak into a microphone connected to your computer, and the software then compresses your voice, shipping it across the Internet to the receiving computer where it's played. Voice quality ranges from the slightly muffled sounds of a speakerphone to the near-gibberish of a New York subway announcement. But hey, you get what you pay for - in this case, a cheap, local phone call to your Internet provider.
That makes the program a godsend for anyone in a long-distance relationship. But while a few people use IPhone as a cheaper way to reach out, right now, its main use is as a telephone chat line - a place for people to hang out and talk with strangers.
My inaugural IPhone call was fairly typical. The program first connects to a central directory of people who are hooked up and willing to talk. I scrolled through the list, clicked on a name at random, and, suddenly mike-shy, stammered my hello. After a short pause, the voice of Tom from St. Louis emerged from my computer. It was exciting at first, a faint echo of how Alexander Graham Bell must have felt when he called Watson. But after Tom and I exchanged weather information, and talked about how cool IPhone was, our conversation petered out.
It was a far cry from the playful and often surprisingly personal conversations I've had on IRC and MUDs - an impression other IPhone users echo. "IRC allows you to get a little more substance," agrees Alice, a longtime IPhone user. "Voice is more personal; people kinda freeze." The old joke that no one knows you're a dog on the Internet doesn't hold true anymore.
Of course, not everyone misses the intricate wordplay and flights of imagination found in the ASCII world. Tom, for one, believes IPhone's growing popularity stems from the fact that "you don't have to be a literary genius like you do on IRC" to communicate effectively. And some people find voice flat-out superior. Jimmy, an aerospace engineer in California, brags he's dated two girls he met through IPhone thanks to his "silver tongue." And Alice, who has the use of only one hand, says IPhone can make the Net a whole lot more accessible to the disabled.
Perhaps the sea change IPhone reflects is that the Net is no longer just for shy hackers who prefer typing over communicating face-to-face. Indeed, IPhone users speak excitedly of how this is just a teaser for what's to come: real-time video. They're undoubtedly right. But, as embarrassingly retro as it sounds, I wonder whether more bandwidth will allow us to communicate better. VocalTec Inc.: http://www.vocaltec.com or +1 (201) 768 9400.
- Steve G. Steinberg
Earth-moving equipment manufacturer Caterpillar Inc. is testing new machine designs by operating them in cyberspace. Using WorldToolKit software developed by Sense8, operators sit on a platform situated within a large cube. Stereo images are displayed on the cube's walls, allowing the operator to assess the view from the cab and test the maneuverability of the virtual vehicle. Sense8: +1 (415) 331 6318, fax +1 (415) 331 9148. E-mail: info@sense8.com.
- Mark Frauenfelder
A Japanese optician chain is offering custom-made eyeglasses based on the shape of the customer's face. A system consisting of color scanners, image software, and an eyeglass production unit is integrated within a local area network in each Miki Cycglass boutique.
A digitized image of a customer's face is analyzed by artificial intelligence software developed by Siemens Nixdorf in Germany. The system then displays the customer "wearing" a suggested pair of glasses. Once a pair is selected, it's made on the spot. The system has been installed in Japan, Australia, France, and Germany, with an additional 500 systems to be installed in Japan. Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG: + 49 (89) 636 41325.
- Mark Frauenfelder
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