Penny Arcade just started a really neat Automaton story. As before, it’s largely about Carl, an automaton living in 1927 America, with the Issue of racial segregation. It’s got a lot of shout-outs to Caves of Steel, which is a good move, but says a lot more about the ugliness of humanity than Asimov could ever manage to say.
Since Delia Derbyshire’s initial treatment of the title theme, each version has gotten slightly worse. It’s what happens when a creative experiment is successful, I suppose: rather than learning from it to do more creative experiments (which are often unsuccessful, after all), subsequent creators often just kind of polish up the remaining artifact to try to retain what success it had.
There’s music, but watch with the sound off if you must.
This is interesting to me not just for pre-rendered things like movies and TV shows, but for interactive simulation, as shown at 1:47. If we’ve learned anything from the pressures on the digital processor market, it’s that we’re going to start seeing this kind of capability on our desktops — no, in our phones — no, in our glasses* in just a few years.
Consider that, along with the augmented reality technologies being so furiously developed, my friends. Now imagine looking at an object, being able to scan and interpolate its structure (or perhaps look it up in a database of structures), then being able to deform and reconstruct at will. You tag the simulation with the location, and everyone sees what you’ve done to this rock, or this tree, or this skyscraper.
A little more Academic technology from the real world. If you were to put a 1200 dpi reflective/transmissive display on each of those planes, then increase the resolution to the point of imperceptibility, then pack it full of sensors and computation, you’d get their smart Paper.
At Recess two weekends back, I had a chance to play Shock: with Terry Romero, Max Kushner, and Scott and Rym of Geek Nights. They just did a review and man, they totally get the game. Scott ordered it yesterday and I think they’ll have a really good time with it. Also, they seem to have a hard time telling Ben Lehman and me apart. It’s because we look so similar.
You can listen to it right here, but you should also go to their site and figure out if any of the rest of their four shows a week (!) twiddle your fancy.
