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March 25, 2002

Tokyo MacWorld 2002

Macworld was good fun on Saturday; I'm sure that had there actually been any corporate hospitality areas offering hot and cold running toga'd virgins and as many free iPods as you could carry away, our VIP passes would have got us in without a hitch. As it was, Dave and I had to settle for walking straight in to the main exhibition without paying - which, we both agreed, was preferable to a poke in the eye with a blunt stick. It was a bit like that part in Wayne's World where Wayne and Garth manage to get backstage passes - without the the bouncers, screaming groupies or Alice Cooper, obviously.

Lots of good Mac toys to play with; plenty of oohing and aahing over the PowerBooks and Harmon Kardon speaker sets - and the 10gb iPod was, of course, very strokable. Of particular interest, though, was the dual screen function that seems to be built in to some Mac graphics cards - you can plug an external monitor into the back of your PowerBook, say, and work off two screens at once - or, rather, a single screen displayed across two monitors. I imagine it would be useful for Dreamweaver, Photoshop or other apps that use lots of floating palettes - you could stick all your palettes on the laptop screen and have your main window maximised on the larger monitor, for example.

Also fun was the software on display from cyberextruder.com, as demo'd by their very personable CEO, Larry - it takes a normal digital photo of your face, applies and iterates an algorithm to identify your features and then *plink* - instantly renders you in surprisingly effective 3D. You can then be grafted into other software programs - chat clients, video conferencing apps, Quake-style shoot'em ups, etc. Here's a shot of me auditioning for the NASA space program; compare it to this real-life piccie and marvel at the accuracy. The software was clearly unable to cope with the size of my real-life proboscis, though, squashing it somewhat and giving me the air of a boxer who's walked into one too many fists. When they get the full release working it'll be invaluable for those of us who yearn to pick our noses gratuitously during long videoconferencing sessions. On bad hair days. In our underwear.

Posted by chris at March 25, 2002 11:18 PM | Permalink

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