FROM FISH TO DOORKNOBS…
It’s a digital world, all right

The following gem was peeled off the Internet and sent to us. The author — Danny Hillis, founder of Thinking Machines in Cambridge, MA — agreed to let us reprint it.

I went to my first computer conference at the New York Hilton about 20 years ago. When somebody there predicted the market for microprocessors would eventually be in the millions, someone else said, “Where are they all going to go? It’s not like you need a computer in every doorknob!”

Years later, I went back to the same hotel. I noticed the room keys had been replaced by electronic cards you slide into slots in the doors.

There was a computer in every doorknob.

AND NOW THEY’RE BAR CODING THE FISH
This story originated on the Newsbytes news service.

The Washington State Department of Fisheries and Intermec have figured out a clever way to bar code fish in hatcheries so their origin can be traced. By identifying the fish, researchers hope to be able to get better information on pollution, habitat damage and survival rates.

The method doesn’t involve any handling of the fish, but is done in the hatchery during the embryo state of salmon. A calcified element in the ear of fish, called an otolith, shows daily growth rings. By slightly lowering and raising the incubation water temperature for brief periods over 14 days, Intermec has been able to produce in the otolith rings in an Interleaved 2 of 5 bar code, representing the digit “6,” on two million salmon raised in the Cowlitz Hatchery in Washington State.

The Interleaved 2 of 5 code was chosen because it’s more easily visible to the human eye.

One digit isn’t enough, however, and tests are currently being done with 10 different incubation environments being used to encode 10 different digits. Intermec says the technique could be refined so it could be used to uniquely identify fish from every hatchery, and even subunits of hatcheries.

Intermec, a division of Litton Industrial Automation, says it has bar coded other animals, including bees and moths. The company says its business is data collection hardware, software, systems, services and supplies.

Presto!

GENERAL MAGIC TALKS TECHNOLOGY

Last week, just as Digital Media went to press, General Magic — the Apple Computer spinoff for personal communications devices and software — revealed its strategy and talked about the technology it is developing to revolutionize personal communications. Look for an in-depth report in the next issue.

COMPACTVIDEO GOES TO 3DO; WILL NINTENDO AND SEGA FOLLOW?

Although you didn’t hear much public acknowledgment of it at 3DO Co.’s big announcement at the Consumer Electronics Show last month, 3DO’s addition of video compression to its Interactive Multiplayer technology is courtesy of SuperMac Technology. 3DO has announced an agreement to license SuperMac’s CompacTVideo software compression for use in its machines. (The 3DO announcement is discussed in detail in “3DO: At last, the Wait is Over,” Vol. 2 No. 8, p. 13.)

The San Mateo, CA-based 3DO, which signed a nonexclusive licensing agreement with SuperMac, is following the example of Apple Computer, which licensed CompacTVideo for use in QuickTime 1.5, and Creative Labs, which licensed the software-only encoder-decoder for use in its digital video products. (Creative Labs now has the exclusive distribution rights to SuperMac’s VideoSpigot for Windows and is codeveloping multimedia hardware with SuperMac for the PC market.)

CompacTVideo’s growing appeal as a de facto software-only compression standard is primarily based on its ability to provide fast playback from a CD-ROM device. According to SuperMac, the compression codec makes it possible to fit as much as two hours of high image-quality video on a CD-ROM disc, and it allows full-screen, full-motion playback of digital video without the use of dedicated hardware. (CompacTVideo is an asymmetrical compression format, meaning the time required to compress and decompress an image is not the same. It can take up to 2 minutes to compress a single frame of video using the technology but it can decompress the same image in a fraction of a second.)

“The 3DO machine is perfect for running CompacTVideo,” says Peter Barrett, SuperMac’s director of software technology. “It has the right amount of CD-ROM bandwidth and the right amount of processing power. In fact, [the multiplayer] runs Compact–Video faster than a Quadra 700.”

The news of the licensing agreement should gladden the hearts of video game developers, who are expected to flock to the new 3DO platform. The software-only codec is available now, works with QuickTime- and Windows-based authoring tools and raises the level of interactivity in the consumer game-play experience through faster playback speeds. The licensing agreement means the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer could potentially handle game titles with more sophisticated video and graphics than existing Sega and Nintendo machines.

Surprisingly enough, the announced licensing deal may also warm the hearts of these two giants that basically own the multibillion dollar game market. Why? Because the licensing agreement between 3DO and SuperMac is to date nonexclusive. That means SuperMac could license its proprietary CompacTVideo technology to both Nintendo and Sega — potentially before the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer hits the retail channel next October.

3D HOLOGRAPHS WITHOUT GLASSES

A new visual transducer, made public this week at a technical conference in San Jose, CA, will purportedly be able to produce true 3D holographic images in real time under computer control, without the need for viewers to wear any sort of glasses.

The inventor, Jeffrey Kulick from the University of Alabama Computer Graphics Department, spent several years at the MIT Media Lab working on medical holographic imaging.

Experts say it’s the only really new visual transducer invented since active LCD s some 10 years ago, and may be an example of a rare “fundamental patent.” They say the way it operates is unlike any display device on the market today — even, perhaps, unlike anything in laboratories anywhere in the world, including Japan. Kulick and his colleagues have fabricated and shown a prototype that demonstrates this principle of operation but does not display an image.

The new device should have a wide variety of uses in virtual reality, computer graphics, teleconferencing, mobile computing, multimedia and medicine (the market for which it was originally developed).

VIDéOWAY PRESIDENT WARNS OF POSSIBLE PATENT INFRINGEMENT

The most visible interactive television company at the Western Cable Television show was Vidéoway (Les Enterprises Vidéoway, Itée), a Montreal-based subsidiary of Groupe Vidéotron, the largest cable operator in Quebec. The company has spent more than 100 million Canadian dollars over a period of 10 years developing interactive baseball, lottery and video games now offered to more than 200,000 subscribers who pay $18.95 (Canadian) per month for the service.

In 1993, Vidéoway plans to add home shopping and banking, coupon delivery and energy management options to the system. In addition, it licensed the interleaving technology originally used in the Hasbro Isis program (now used by Digital Pictures in its Sega CD video games, see Vol. 2, No. 7, p. 12) from its developer, John Perkins, and can provide real-time switching between four or more programs over a single TV channel. They use a multi-function box encompassing the pay and interactive TV features, data services and an electronic catalog at a price estimated to be $300.

It is now poised to move into the U.S. market and will be using satellite transmission in 1993 to provide programming for the U.S. service.

Michel Dufresne, president of Vidéoway and chief of development for the parent company, says his company is further along in development than other interactive TV projects, most of which are just beginning and do not have market experience or the patented technology available to Vidéoway.

Dufresne also claimed that his parent company, Groupe Vidéotron, is well protected legally against incursions into the interactive arena. His staff has been checking out a number of the prototype interactive systems — many of which he felt were using techniques and technologies that Groupe Vidéotron has previously developed, protected, licensed and implemented.

Dufresne specifically named the Cable Network Data Transmission System and ACTV, Perkins and FastTrack licensees, and hinted that owners of these systems will likely be told they cannot use certain techniques without paying a license fee. If this indeed is true, it will be interesting to see what impact this has on the burgeoning interactive TV market.

CABLE CHANGING FACE IN WESTERN EUROPE

A recent market research report published by Frost & Sullivan, Inc. of New York says that the European market for cable television is growing, though it will be quite some time before it reaches the 90 percent penetration of U.S. television households. However, the lack of penetration could work in favor of forward-thinking cable equipment vendors if they move quickly.

By the end of 1991, according to the report, more than 40 million of Western Europe’s TV homes had been passed by cable, with more than 25 million of those homes connected — representing a tiny 18.4 percent of the continent’s 139.3 million available TV homes.

Frost & Sullivan projects the subscriber market will grow at 10.5 percent annually until 46.5 million TV homes are connected in 1997. That’s a 30.9 percent penetration. Germany is the largest cable market in Western Europe, followed by the Netherlands and Belgium. By 1997, France is expected to take over third place from Belgium.

What’s most interesting about the report is not so much its analysis of why the cable industry is so much slower to grow in Western European countries than in the Benelux countries or in the U.S., but what it says about what will happen from now on.

European cable is leapfrogging all the regulatory struggles and scrambling for markets that has typified the U.S. cable industry on its way to 90 percent saturation. Fear of stiff competition by other networks such as the telephone companies and direct broadcast satellite delivery catapulted the U.S. cable industry into the world of digital transmission and information services.

Perhaps for the same reasons, the European cable business is about to change its identity from an entertainment medium to one that delivers a wide variety of services to businesses and homes.

But with a comparatively tiny infrastructure already in place, it seems that forward-thinking cable operators who are intent upon selling fiber-optic cable systems could think of Europe as even more ripe than the U.S. for a broadband cable network. If they succeed, Western Europe’s cable systems could be ready for interactivity at about the same time as U.S. systems.

PASSPORT TO SUPPORT KALEIDA SCRIPTX TECHNOLOGY

Passport Designs, a pioneer in digital audio and MIDI technology, recently announced its support for Kaleida Labs’ ScriptX description language designed to allow cross-platform development and playback of multimedia titles. To date, it is the third company, including Macromedia and Canter Technology, both of San Francisco, to publicly support this emerging technology from the Apple-IBM joint development venture.

According to David Kusek, president and CEO of Passport Designs, the company plans to build support for ScriptX into Passport Interactive, an interactive authoring program that can control external devices such as VCRs and laserdiscs and that will compete with Macromedia’s popular authoring program, Director.

Though still in development at Passport in Half Moon Bay, CA, Passport Interactive will be based on technology introduced in Passport Producer, the company’s first foray into the multimedia presentation market. Passport Interactive is expected to be available in the fall of 1993.

In theory, at least, supporting ScriptX means toolmakers such as Passport don’t have to create a software player for every computer platform. It is the mission of the Mountain View, CA-based Kaleida to create various levels of software that provide this cross-platform delivery system. “In essence, Kaleida wants to be the layer between the title and hardware,” says Kusek. “I write the title once and it runs everywhere that ScriptX lives.”

Passport Producer is one of the only products in its category and price range ($495) to support SMPTE time code for synchronous playback of mixed media. Kusek says the company’s strength in synchronizing media attracted Kaleida.

COMPTON’S TO RENT CD-ROM SOFTWARE

Compton’s NewMedia plans to be the first publisher to rent computer software in video rental stores. The Carlsbad, CA-based company has recently cut a deal with Major Video Concepts, the second-largest distributor of prerecorded videocassettes in the United States, to distribute more than 20 CD-ROM-based multimedia software titles to select video stores.

For the same price as a movie rental (about $3), customers in approved video retail stores will be able to rent both entertainment and educational CD-ROM titles for one to two nights, depending on individual store policy. Sleeping Beauty, USA Wars: Operation Desert Storm, Jazz: A Multimedia History, New Basics Electronic Cookbook, Stories of Murder, Mystery, Terror, Magic & More and the KGB/CIA World Factbook are among the 22 titles that Compton’s has agreed to distribute through Major Video.

To lure customers away from the movies, Compton’s is installing multimedia kiosks where customers can preview any of the available titles at no cost to the retailer.

The agreement between Compton’s and Major Video sets a new precedent for software distribution. It is the first time content developers have agreed to the rental of their software. (Major Video actually purchased the software titles from Compton’s, which owns exclusive distribution rights to more than 80 titles from 18 different software development companies. Major Video plans to then sell the titles to selected video stores.)

Compton’s says it does not believe consumers will “pirate” the contents of the CDs since most of the individuals who rent the titles are unlikely to have the data storage devices required to copy the contents of an entire disc (660 megabytes) or the writable CD-ROM drives necessary to duplicate the disc itself.

Both companies expect the discs and the point-of-purchase kiosks to be in place in select video rental stores before April 1. According to the companies, they are targeting affluent communities that are likely to have a large installed base of home computers. Neither company expects that the video stores will rent the hardware necessary to use the titles.

THE MOST AMAZING NEWS OF 1993 (SO FAR)

In a recent Saturday New York Times story about convicted junk bond peddler Michael Milken, friend and former aide Lorraine Spurge said that Milken is interested in doing his 1,800 hours per year (for three years) of community service by creating an interactive educational cable television network.

Some of Milken’s old junk bond clients included Viacom Inc., TCI and what’s now Time Warner. The community service plan is subject to the approval of New York Federal District Judge Kimba Wood, who cut Milken’s original 10-year sentence after he agreed to cooperate with investigators.