Electronic rights-, power source or static?Poor cousins of the Phillips CD-I player are game systems made
by companies like Atari, Nintendo, and Sega. Products for these are
kid- and game-oriented. Think sports and Sonic the Hedgehog.
You may have noticed that our discussion of these "new media"
has wandered pretty far from fiction. I will come back to that point,
but before I do let us gaze into the electronic far future.
Full-motion CDs, virtual reality, the data superhighway, and beyond. The
problem with CD-ROM is that film-quality moving images are not
possible, never mind TV-quality stuff. In fact, the moving pictures on
CD-ROM are not even as good as animated cartoons.
The reason for this is that moving images eat up vast amounts of
disk space, even with todays data compression. But tomorrow...!
Get ready.
And, in fact, tomorrow may not be very far away. New break-
throughs in full-motion CD are rapidly heading our way. Two rival
alliances were formed to develop this new technology, and for a
while it seemed that a new Beta/VHS-type format war was in the
wind. Luckily, the rivals have agreed to common standards, and that
means we will soon have movies on CD.
Interactive movies, no less! Actors are already part of PC games
(catch "Baywatch" beauty Yasmine Bleeth in Maximum Surge), and
interactive movies for theatrical release have already been tested.
But movies on CD is something new. It means not only a new and
better way of playing feature-length movies, but a whole new cate-
gory of interactive entertainment.
Imagine having a drink at Rick's in Casablanca and chatting with
Humphrey Bogart, or trading wisecracks with James Bond, or hunt-
ing for clues and discussing the evidence with Columbo. These are
only some of the possibilities for the souped-up devices of the
future. A CD player is coming that will plug into any screen—TV, PC,
anything. It will play games, education-ware, CD-ROM-type pro-
grams, and whole new classes of user-controlled experiences with
the lifelike quality of TV.
Farther down the road we may encounter laptop, palm-top, and
maybe even credit-card-sized machines that will do it all: compute,
play music, receive TV programming, run full sound-and-motion
interactive programs—and, yes, even let you read novels.