“flash”

Not for the first time I’ve woken thinking that the invention of dirt-cheap, high quality multi-touch wallscreens would prove as epoch making as the printing press, a cure for cancer, or the web. Most people, of course, scoff. They can barely see the point of computer screens bigger than 15”. It is not my intention now to disabuse the heathen. Let’s just assume that we have such wondrous interfaces and see how far we can run with them in one particular direction.

Close your eyes and imagine that you somehow —digital contact lens, projectors, VR goggles, pixie dust— have access to a screen at least as big as a wall—a humongous HD screen that is not only a pleasure to look at but with which you can interact. Mouse and keyboard would suffice for our purposes here, but since we’re dreaming, feel free to indulge in Jeff-Han-style touch interaction.

Despite the mind-boggling immersive multimedia we can expect, text won’t go away. Not only will we still gulp it down, we’ll likely drown in it. Text has advantages all of its own and in a digital word there’s nothing cheaper or more malleable. Reading newspapers, books, magazines, blogs, emails, and tutorials will still be an everyday staple. It’ll just be by and far all digital now.

The question thus is how we’ll read all this text. How do you take advantage of a massive pixel landscape when your goal is reading? You could recreate books in all their physicality, down to the flashy turning of pages, the weight, the fixed dimensions, and the mahogany bookshelf. We would certainly be able to copy it all in breathtaking detail, but limiting ourselves to such molds wouldn’t only be wrong, it would be perverse. Let’s see if we can do better than that.

Second Life^WP, a 3d online community, recently hosted a live concert by Suzanne Vega^WP and of course someone had to make her and her guitar’s avatars. Robbie Dingo did. And he made a video of the making (of the guitar avatar). Breathtaking. Go straight to the Quickitime video or see it embedded as a flash in Second Life’s website.

This may sound silly but I was happy to read such a well-crafted confirmation email. Notice the avoidance of empty superlatives, the non-patronizing, the effort, not to sound hip or flippant or “professional”, but to be useful. The complimentary premium articles were the extra touch that made me want to share this with the world. This is persuasive (marketing) writing at its best.

The McKinsey Quarterly is impressive by itself too, most interesting and with the best graphs I’ve seen since The Economist (and they present them inside sexy, useful Flash “exhibits” that allow you to zoom in/out and pan around).