 Mike Matheson of Kennel District |
While the potential of Multimedia is very real, the practical application thereof has some hefty work cut out for it. In the canon of modern multimedia, the Internet is perhaps the most developed in terms of maximizing its current potential, but it, too, is a long way from perfect. The question becomes: who will take the first steps in an effort to make multimedia accessible and viable for all? Perhaps thats what were seeing these days embodied in so-called Interactive Music CDs. One small step, as it were. | ||||||
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As we spoke, it became increasingly obvious that the world of multimedia is an often disappointing place. The CD-ROM, watershed that it was at 650 megabytes of storage, is poised to be supplanted by the Digital Versatile Disc (DVD), weighing in at an astonishing 18 GIGAbyte maximum. Hard drives are approaching terabyte proportions, modem bandwidth is rapidly increasing. It is truly a Brave New World. And a lonely one at that, where were going to have so much storage and very little meaningful content with which to fill it. At least, not yet. But I've always been one to give emerging technologies a chance. So I pop in “The Electronic Edge Adventure” to take a multimedia trip through the Toronto Music-Scape (after all, the Headstones rock). I fire it up, my 200-Mhz Pentium MMX with 64 megs of RAM ready to make short work of the Quicktimes, the AVIs, or whatever format the disc contains. I select “Pentium” as my computer type. I get a whimsical spinning globe which gives way to the Edge logo. Cool. Something's about to happen. “This program has performed an illegal operation. It will be shut down. If the problem persists, contact the vendor”. I suppose I could. Then again, maybe not. ++ |
