Living in a digital world

Orange, PMOG, and the evolution of tools

This week sees the launch of the “World’s first internet balloon race” by Orange (arguably an evolution from this idea). Although it may seem like a short-lived gimmick, it could perhaps be more accurately described as the latest attempt at creating a kind of metaweb – a layer of content that sits on top of the internet as we know it.

This is all part of a familiar story: the difficult process in which we collectively work out what to do with the technology we have created. One of the most visible examples of this process is the mobile phone – a well-conceived device to begin with (in terms of global market penetration, going from negligible to 50% in 15 years), it turns out that it can also provide banking infrastructure to third-world countries and has of course become the major focus of device convergence.

A more visceral example of this process can be seen in the field of movie special effects, where it plays out spectacularly in the public eye. For example, Steven Spielberg made use of CGI in Jurassic Park, and as a tool it evolved to a point of fluency when George Lucas came to direct the Star Wars prequels (although even now it still struggles to win over much of the movie-going public).

But the Academy Award for visual effects in 1999 went instead to The Matrix, because ‘bullet time’ demonstrated the first step towards a new tool: the virtual camera. As with CGI, there was a long period in which the new tool was used for its novelty value alone, rather than focussing on how it might be developed further. Almost a decade later, the team that first created the tool (John Gaeta and the Wachowski brothers) have demonstrated its greater potential with the release of Speed Racer. One shot in that effects-heavy film is notably weaker than the rest, and that is the direct homage to the original bullet time-style shot from the end of the original anime series’ opening credits – it feels awkward and contrived, and shows how far the tool has come by contrast with the rest of the film’s fluidity.

Of course, it’s not easy to tell which tools will actually prove useful given further developement. For example, 3D cinema has repeatedly failed to take off (although James Cameroon is convinced that this time it’s different). This difficulty was recently highlighted by Kevin Kelly, who recalls with humility his initial scepticism at the potential of Photoshop, Quicken, and eBay.

While it is hard to see quite how Orange’s balloon race could lead to much greater things, the recently hyped ‘Passively Multiplayer Online Game’, PMOG, while essentially a very similar idea, shows greater promise. As it stands it seems something of an unbalanced, gameable, niche product open to abuse by the likes of myminicity, but it does seem like a significant step towards something far grander than we can quite grasp at this point.

It’s a significant advance on the old web annotation concept, in which users can add notes to any web page they visit that are then viewable to subsequent visitors using the same annotation plug-in. PMOG takes the significant steps of explicitly facilitating links between otherwise separate web pages, and of introducing a half-way practical universal web currency.

Perhaps most significantly it suggests another route towards the anticipated metaverse – a single virtual destination through which eventually all our information and interactions will be filtered. Instead of waiting for a platform such as Facebook or Second Life to reach Google-like domination and thereby gain the power to force all content to fit their own structure and social norms, PMOG is instead a layer that rests lightly atop the web, allowing everything to continue as normal, and simply making things better for those that choose to view things through that layer.

As the Man On A Train says in Waking Life: “Things are just starting.”

June 23, 2008 Posted by mantim | interactive | balloonacy, metaverse, orange, pmog, web annotation | Leave a Comment