itvt

By Patrick Donoghue

Homecoming: The Tale of Two Virtual Cities

In many ways, writing this ITV Legends column is a lot like returning to the little town I grew up in: seeing old friends, sharing stories, and visiting places I’d long since forgotten. It was great to hear from so many people about the city interfaces they built for ITV and, with a little coercion, I got some great stories. It turns out that even virtual cities have a bad part of town where you keep you eyes open and your hands on your wallet.

In retrospect, the city I built for Viacom was pretty barren, but Beethoven 2 was always playing at the movies and there was an all-night ITV pinochle game going at the big blue games arcade! One problem with these virtual spaces is where to break out of the metaphor and get down to business with things like movie pricing, rental period, parental controls, etc. At some point, we had to leap out of our three-dimensional worlds and "go flat."

The Magic Music Store

Dave Johnson took a stab at this in the early work he did for Time Warner Cable’s Full Service Network. Dave has been working in the games and ITV space for years, and has great stories about designing the graphics for old Colecovision games on graph paper.

The Full Service Network was a digital video trial conducted by Time Warner in Orlando, Florida, which launched on December 14th, 1994 and lasted for 18 months. During that time, 4,000 customers had free access to an interactive digital system, which included video-on-demand, shopping, games, a program guide, and US Postal Service functions.

Dave was brought in to design the graphics for an interactive music mall that would allow consumers to buy CD’s and related items on their TV’s.

The Full Service Network’s set-top box was based on a Silicon Graphics engine, so the operative buzz-phrase was "real-time 3D graphics." Early concept meetings had Time Warner executives describing how they wanted to use a virtual glove to fly down the corridors of the virtual mall, entering stores, selecting and sampling CD’s, and interacting with other customers while being guided by virtual salespeople.

"Since I was developing the graphics with a primitive, text-based, ray-tracing program, I was relieved when the client insisted, ‘The interface will be 2D,’ "Dave recalled in an email.

So, what you see in the image above is a nod to the client’s wishes–with the outside of the cleverly named "Magic Music Store" rendered in 3D. The mall was designed as a rotunda. Pressing the left and right arrow keys on the remote moved you in a circle so that you would face a new storefront with each key press. Once you "entered" the store, the interface flattened out into a 2D list-like display.

"In retrospect, this screen looks pretty chaotic but it’s surprising how much of the basic layout and functionality is in use today," Dave wrote.

The Wrong Side of the Tracks in a Virtual City

In 1996 Bob Holmes and Sudden Industries took on a project called "The Professionals," which always made them laugh because they were half-convinced that the guys funding it had a shady mob background–too much money and no one knew where it was coming from. "The Professionals" themselves, of course, didn’t get the joke.

The application was designed to provide access to professional services on a subscription- and ad-supported basis–sort of like an animated, virtual-world Yellow Pages. Click on a virtual hospital, go inside, and choose from among different professionals, represented by symbolic avatars. Click on a movie theater to get tickets, or click on an airplane to get flight promotions. The ultimate goal was to move this off of disc/browser and onto interactive TV. The investors were talking Qube/FSN/Columbus/Orlando–big talk, unrealistic talk.

Bob wrote in an email: "My last memory of the project (and this is no lie) is standing in a parking lot in the East Village. [The investors] had an envelope with cash in one hand and we had a bag with all the discs and code in our hands. We counted the cash, performed a hand-off with the discs, and the rest was history."

That was the first major project that Sudden Industries did as a company. Since then, Bob and Sudden have done all kinds of great work in interactive TV and in interactivity in general. As far as Bob knows, "The Professionals" are still at large.

Send in your examples

Calling all legends and battle-scarred veterans. Don’t let your stories go untold. We are collecting some great tales from the unsung heroes of ITV.

Many thanks to Bob Holmes at Sudden Industries and Dave Johnson at http://davej.com

Patrick J. Donoghue is an ITV veteran with the scars to prove it. Since 1992 he has received four Emmys and an [itvt] Award for Leadership in Interactive Television for his work in the field. To submit materials for his column, email donoghue@itvt.com. To read the previous Legends of ITV column, click here.

Click http://www.itvt.com to subscribe to our free email newsletter, which contains all the news stories you see on this Web site, and additional breaking news and scoops, in-depth features, interviews, screenshots, videos, and other exclusive content you will not find anywhere else.