Future Schlock

By Bob Ostertag, AlterNet. Posted June 4, 2004.

Wired magazine's NextFest 2004 filled San Francisco's Fort Mason exhibition center over the weekend with thousands of eager earthlings looking to be dazzled by the latest in gee-whiz tech.

I wait through the long line of those of us who had not bought advance tix and dive right in. I find myself confronted with a nice young man demonstrating the Gummi from Sony, a "bendable, credit-card sized computer interface." The idea is that instead of typing, or pressing buttons, or moving a joystick, you bend this little credit card thingy. Not obvious to you what the advantage of bending a credit card might be? Me neither. Unfortunately, I remain unenlightened on this matter, because the Gummi had broken. "It worked really well this morning," the nice young man pointed out helpfully.

Next door was the Reality Helmet. Supposedly, this helmet takes the sounds and images that surround you in the real world and translate them into different sounds and images you experience inside the Reality Helmet. But when I strap in, all I get was a very static purple image with pink in the middle, and a recurring loop of not very interesting electronic sound. I try waving my hands in front of it, clapping loudly in front of it, and swinging my head from side to side, but nothing I can do interrupted the monotonous loop inside the helmet. The problem, the man from Reality Helmet explains, is that we were just in the wrong environment. Not a good one for the helmet. Right helmet, wrong reality.

No worries, there are fascinating things everywhere. Nearby, You're the Conductor - A Digital Conducting Experience for the Public invited me to "Find your inner musician." A video of a symphony orchestra is projected on a screen. I am instructed to stand in front of the screen, and wave around odd microphone-size thing. The faster I wave the thing, the faster the video plays. And the farther I move it from side to side, the louder the music gets.

Wow. A volume control.

Hooray. A speed control.

I am told that this project was supposed to give me "a visceral sense of what it feels like to conduct a real orchestra." Are you listening, Michael Tilson-Thomas? That's what you orchestra conductors do, right? Control the speed and volume?

It's occurring to me that orchestra conductors get paid an awful lot for controlling an orchestra's speed and volume. Actually, it's occurring to me that the people who made this exhibit must know nothing about music. Incredibly, the contraption is the result of the combined efforts of Immersion Music, Stanford University, and ETH Zurich. Even more incredibly, it is booked two years out in museums around the country.

"Find your inner musician."

Actually kids, you'd be much better off with a beat-up guitar. Volume and speed? Bah. You can learn about dynamics and tempo. And also melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre, tunings, the feel of a string vibrating under your finger, and how differences between your skin and fingernails change the sound.

Even a pair of rocks would be an improvement. In addition to your basic speed and volume, you can explore rhythm, phrasing, swing, and timbre. And you'll have way more fun knocking them together than you will waving this black plastic cigar-thingy around.

Say, I should contact some of these museums and offer them a couple of rocks. I could cut them a sweet deal.

Anyone else noticing that the marketing of this hi-tech junk is even more vacuous than your average corporate drivel?

Next to the canned orchestra is the Intel pavilion, festively adorned with banners proclaiming that "In the future, you will not have to learn about technology. Technology will learn about you."

"Technology will learn about me?" I ask the Intel rep.

"Yes," he beams.

"Sounds like a nightmare," I answer. There is one of those awkward moments.

"Yes, there is an element of that," he answers, smile still frozen in place.

Next stop: the KBOT by Human Emulation Robotics. KBOTs are somewhat lifelike looking heads covered with a stretchy, skin-like material and filled with little motors and chips. They are capable of making human-like expressions. Think the next-generation of Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean. The display placard informs us that the applications of this technology include "Advertising and Marketing" and "High End Toys."

In fact, many of the informational placards the exhibits sport announce the technologies' usefulness for "Advertising and Marketing" and "High End Toys." (Of course, if the You're the Conductor placard had been accurate, the "Applications" field would have read "None.") The other common applications are "Military" and "Security." War and play, marketing and security, it is getting hard to keep things straight these days.

Still pondering the subtle divide between war and fun, I head to the "Future of Security" section of the festival. Interesting place, this -- except there is nothing here that will make anyone more secure. Quite the contrary, in fact.

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