my voice is my passport
{ Monthly Archives }
For some reason it took me until today to realize that my new project does exactly the same thing as my last major project at my prior employer.
Different programming language. Talks to different vendors. (For now. An upcoming enhancement might work with one of the same systems as the old project.) Different communication protocol. But it does the same damn thing.
I was in a game from the makers of Halo (I wasn’t playing it, I was IN it), at an arctic base filled with hundreds of people.
My assignment was to disrupt some sort of nuclear energy experiment they were conducting. I had multiple opportunities to do so, by sabotaging the centrifuges where they were refining uranium, or by waylaying the truck that delivered the finished product to the reactor. Unfortunately I missed both chances, and they were able to complete the experiment. The reactor glowed, and the “boss” burst forth from it - a giant, white-furred baboon. The thing went on a rampage, and I was barely able to avoid it as it careened across the snowy landscape, killing residents of the base left and right.
All this was like a mental preview of how far games have yet to go. This scene had the narrative and structure of a video game, and yet it WAS real life in all other respects. Not some low-res, two-dimensional image populated with a couple dozen people and controlled via a joystick, but oh-my-god-dive-outta-the-way-it’s-headed-right-for-us reality.
Too bad I won’t get to experience this during my lifetime. Here’s the technologies that would have to improve to match what I saw:
-Video. Not just higher-than-HDTV resolution, but stereoscopic as well.
-Input. We’d need full-body, real-time motion capture.
-Graphics. The full polygon output of a single game system today might have been able to render a single character in this world, but there were nearly a hundred of them.
-Processing. Each of these characters was fully autonomous and capable of responding to spoken requests. Running all those AIs would bring any modern system to a crawl.
-Physics. There were a whole lot of ragdolls flying around when that baboon let loose. But there’s promise in this area: I bet the Ageia PhysX card coming out this fall could have done it.
My latest project is forcing me to learn all about Web services in a very short period of time.
Good.
I’ve been wanting to work with SOAP for years now, and signs suggest that’s where the IT industry is headed. (No, it’s not there yet, believe it or not.) I could be securing myself a job for the next decade. An interesting one, even.
…you see the Reuters headline “Crack found in space shuttle foam insulation”, and your first thought is that one of the astronauts must have wanted to bring his stash with him.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060703/ts_nm/space_shuttle_crack_dc
