A very large screen

Written by Adrian Holovaty on February 23, 2003

What are the online-news applications for this thing?

Comments

Posted by Gina on February 23, 2003, at 7:06 p.m.:

Whoa! I just want one.

We could put them in airports and charge admission for surfing/gaming time - or allow people who agree to view #ads use them for free.

Posted by Brock on February 23, 2003, at 10:12 p.m.:

Well, you could do some pretty cool 360-degree VR's with it. Immersive journalism?

Posted by Steve Yelvington on February 24, 2003, at 12:33 a.m.:

Well, that's easy.

Posted by Nathan Ashby-Kuhlman on February 24, 2003, at 1:49 a.m.:

I want one too. Or this one. The best online news application I see would be tremendous: A site's front page would no longer be links to content, but an actual display of (at least the first screenful of) as many as a dozen pieces of content.

Think Mozilla tabs with all of the tabs displayed at once, each on the equivalent space of, say, an 800x600 monitor. Using your eyes to browse would be a much better interface than clicking six-word headline links on an online news "front page."

Posted by Adrian on February 24, 2003, at 7:32 a.m.:

I'm not sure whether I'd want to waste all of that space on text. I like Brock's idea about the huge virtual-reality images. Something in the vein of IMAX movies would take advantage of the screen's size.

Posted by Jay Small on February 25, 2003, at 12:51 a.m.:

Can I take a couple of Advil before I sit down in front of this thing?

Posted by Gina on February 25, 2003, at 2:41 a.m.:

Been laughing all day about Yelvington's post. :-))

Posted by Vin Crosbie on February 25, 2003, at 4:43 a.m.:

A whole hemisphere of coverage! Man, you could unplug it, hold it over your head with its convex side up, and -- voila! -- it will keep inclement weather off you. Alternatively, keep it plugged into the juice, prop it sideways and stand under it, then tell your fellow office workers that you're getting a perm. Here in New England where we're still digging out from the President's Day Blizzard, we could place its convex side onto the snow, climb aboard, and happily slide downhill to the nearest adult beverage establishment.

Alright, I admit that those usages aren't practical. Not at $20,594.95 (thank god it's not $20,595!) per monitor now that the Internet bubble has burst. You gotta love Hammacher Schlemmer for adding ridiculous markups to the gimmicks that it hawks (buy this monitor cheaper from the manufacturer: http://www.elumens.com/products/visionstation.html). Hey, you know what would be delirious on this thing? PowerPoint. First one to tell the difference between all the transitioning bulletpoints and a planetarium wins!

Posted by Ben on February 25, 2003, at 5:20 p.m.:

For some reason I see something possibly interesting with that and NewsQuakes? What about the online news applications for that virtual interface in Johnny Mnemonic?

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