As the animated film of The Little Train That Could concluded, with the humanised caboose puffing itself up with pride as it followed the engine down the track, Jean-Paul Jacob, one of IBM Corp’s premier multimedia researchers at its centre in Almaden, California, asked the audience, Was this cartoon made entirely by a computer? Was it made by a person aided by a computer? Or by a computer aided by a person? None of these or other questions I will pose to you tonight can be answered in this presentation. Thus began Jacob’s whirlwind two-hour tour of the state of his favourite art – multimedia – and the social forces and technology that are begetting it. The presentation, hosted by IBM France in the Videotheque de Paris, came less than a week following IBM’s inauguration of a leisure computing company, Fireworks Partners, underlining the hope IBM is putting into the technology. With a showman’s flair, Jacob outlined three societal trends that he believes are contributing to the increased use of multimedia technology. The first he called personalised massification, which could best be described as personalised mass marketing. American Airlines, for example, moves over 80m passengers per year. Nevertheless, it set up a system via the US Prodigy viewdata system whereby each of those passengers can pick their seat from a layout of the plane interior, their meal from a selection of 10 and a film from a library of 13, which is then shown on individual screens in the armrest (in first class). He said services like Federal Express or UPS also demonstrate the trend. Federal Express, which has more flights per day than any airline, can track a package down to its precise location at any time, anywhere in the world. Jacob called his second trend the future is no longer what it used to be. For instance, Jacob said, holding up a digital wristwatch, says, What is this? A wristwatch, you say? Okay, but this device contains 16 programs and a microprocessor, the same as this device, holding up a notebook computer. A watch he said, referring to a slide showing the insides of a classic Swiss specimen, traditionally speaking, had moving parts and mechanics. But this one doesn’t; it’s a computer, it has chips. The future is no longer what it used to be for competition, either, he said.

Less to take a plane

For sending 1.2Gb worth of data from Paris to Toulouse, France Telecom’s biggest competition is Air Inter, for instance. Why? Because it costs less to take a plane to Toulouse to pick up the hard disk than to transmit it electronically on France Telecom’s 64Kbps ISDN channel, which would take about 40 hours, he said. The third trend, he said, are marriages, such as those between computing and telecommunications and between the informatics and entertainment industries. Examples of the latter marriage, he said, include digital photography, computer animation and hypertext. Digital photography, he noted, changes entirely one’s perception of reality because the photos taken and recorded on disks in the camera can be altered by changing their pixel formation. He showed three photos of what appeared to be three models, explaining that only one model had been the subject and the photographer had altered her pixels to change her hair or her facial features. So, which one is the real one?, he teased. Jacob’s latest example of computer animation was Dozo, a female figure created at IBM’s Almaden center using a complex technique to replicate human movement. Researchers first input the co-ordinates of clay models, showing the form of the body, and then superimposed the measured movements of a live person onto the model. The result was an androgynous-looking figure, with what this reporter considered grotesque movements, that the US Olympic Committee used as the torch bearer in its filmed proposal of Atlanta as the 1994 Summer Olympic site. Jacob’s last example of computainment was a hypertext version of Tennyson’s Ulysses, which provided a dictionary of terms, and digitised video of a variety of actors reading the text and of lit

erary experts discussing the poem’s meaning. – Marsha Johnston