Aram Zucker-Scharff

theyear1968:

On December 9, 1968, Doug Englebart and his team from the Augmentation Research Center in Menlo Park, CA, presented what would become known as “The Mother of All Demos” to the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.

Among other highlights, the 90-minute live demo introduced the world to the computer mouse, word processing, hypertext and video conferencing. You can watch the whole presentation in the Doug Engelbart Video collection in the Internet Archive.

explore-blog:

io9 has a neat showcase of famous landmarks in various stages of being built. But they missed the fascinating construction history of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Really cool set of images.

thisistheverge:

It began with ‘Spacewar!’ A history of science fiction in video games
A new exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image.

Image used under Fair Use from EA

By integrating choice and multiple user-controlled view-points into the game, Dead Space 2 provides a refreshing alternative to traditional video game cutscenes.

In the extraordinarily crowded field of video games, many seek attention through cutscenes of increasing complexity or realism. I found it somewhat ironic then that Dead Space’s particular unique treatment of cutscenes was mostly ignored.

Despite increasing complexity, user interactions with cutscenes, excluding quicktime events since there are whole games based around just that mechanic, have been pretty limited. You have two choices with a rare third. Choice 1: Skip. Choice 2: Watch. Then some games, oddly, allow you to fast-forward through them.

As a result, video game players and participants in video media in general tend to present two types of video. You can skip this or you are not allowed to skip this. Video games, television, web videos, heck, video advertising in general all subscribe to this binary choice.

The problem is perspective. For almost all video engagements, only one point of perspective is presented and one line of narrative. Participants are only presented with the whole of the screen and its single focus. Despite our allegiance to single viewpoint video the technology (starting with …