Trade Show and Demo Hall of Shame

By -
PC World did an article about famous demo disasters which appears on washingtonpost.com. It's called "The Trade Show and Demo Hall of Shame". And guess who is the first inductee:

Can a failed mind-control demo be embarrassing? After all, we're talking about some seriously complicated technology here. During this year's Game Developers' Conference, Emotiv Systemsdemonstrated its Emotiv EPOC neuroheadset, which reads brain impulses and translates what the wearer is thinking about into on-screen game movements. That's what the press release said, anyway.

The demo started off smoothly enough, as the headset wearer made a giant animated head on the screen mimic his real-life facial expressions. But things went awry when the wearer was asked to make an on-screen object disappear, and again when the handlers from Emotiv tried to put EPOC through its paces in an actual game. The device didn't do much of anything.

What's more, Emotiv's wireless game controller, bundled with the headset,   couldn't control the in-game action. Emotiv game developer Zachary Drake described the scene as "demo hell," and Emotiv CEO Nam Do later explained that the 2.4-GHz wireless A/V system at the show interfered with the headset. (According to GDC showgoers,including PC World's Darren Gladstone, the mind-control headset performed nicely at Emotiv's booth.)

Regrettably, no video footage of the doomed demo has appeared anywhere on the Web. Maybe that's just a   stroke of luck for Emotiv Systems--or   maybe the whole company donned EPOC headsets and willed all evidence of the disastrous demo to disappear.

Um....I guess Tim Moynihan of PC World doesn't read Internal Monologue or Joystiq.

My fame goes ever onward...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Snarking The Odyssey (with AD&D)

By -
Image
WARNING: Those of you who are accustomed to pithy political remarks here on Internal Monologue should brace yourselves for a major dose of gaming geekitude. Here's a link to one "Jamie R." who does a very snarky close reading of Homer's The Odyssey (HT: Mad Latinist via email). I've only read book 1, but it's pretty funny so far. An excerpt: Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted; moreover he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life and bring his men safely home; but do what he might he could not save his men… Sooooo, he’s in charge, and everybody dies. Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero and his colossal failure. What? … for they perished through their own sheer folly in eating the cattle of the Sun-god Hyperion; so the god prevented them from ever rea...
Read more

Where is 56th and Wabasha? "Meet Me in the Morning" Dylan Mystery Solved

By -
Image
Short version The lyric is not "Fifty-sixth and Wabasha", it is actually "Fifty-six and Wabasha", referring to the intersection of old Minnesota Highway 56 and Wabasha Street in Saint Paul, Minnesota. If you listen, you can hear Dylan sing "fifty-six", rather than "fifty-sixth", particularly on the take that was released as the B-side to "Duquesne Whistle". Minnesota Highway 56 no longer intersects Wabasha Street, but from 1963 to 1974 it did intersect Wabasha Street, at what is now (in Feb. 2021) the intersection of George Street and Cesar Chavez Street in St. Paul, or possibly South Wabasha & Cesar Chavez.  Long Version "Meet Me in the Morning" is the first song on side two of Bob Dylan's celebrated 1975 album  Blood on the Tracks. In the opening lines of the song, according to the lyrics on Bob Dylan's official site (https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/meet-me-morning/), the narrator invites the listener to a rendez...
Read more

Victim or perpetrator? How about both!

By -
Remember in the movie Adaptation , the main character's brother has this idea for a screenplay called The Three? It's about a detective trying to track down a serial killer before he kills his next victim. Pretty standard, right? The twist is that the detective, serial killer, and victim, are all actually the same person . Whoa, dude. Fight Club 's got nothin' on that one. Well, this isn't quite that weird. But apparently, Utah legal authorities are somewhat perplexed by a situation in which a 13-year-old girl and her 12-year-old boyfriend are both simultaneously the perpetrators and victims of the same crime: having sex with each other (HT: Feministing ): Utah Supreme Court justices acknowledged Tuesday that they were struggling to wrap their minds around the concept that a 13-year-old Ogden girl could be both an offender and a victim for the same act - in this case, having consensual sex with her 12-year-old boyfriend. The girl was put in this odd position be...
Read more