Doom...
That puts in mind of when I was in sixth form in the mid nineties. Back then I was growing up in the rural backwater of Martlesham, which just happened to be next door to BT Labs... Went along to a open day for schools where they were showing off all sorts of variously cool and dull stuff.
Anyway most of the kids there were younger, and not interested in much beyond "shiny" for about 5 minutes. A friend and I got talking to the postgrad manning one of the stands, and must have demonstrated actual interest. The stand was demonstrating shape recognition by having a massive Barco rear projection screen (about 5m x 2m) that you stood a few metres away from while it projected your image overlaid with a cartoon dog. If you patted it's head it would wag it's tail, kick it and it would scamper off in a sulk. So, this was interesting for all of two minutes, but the postgrad said to friend and I "are you in a hurrry?" with sufficient enthusiasm that we said we weren't. He that scampered behind the stack of SGI Indigos (yes, that's stack - it was a joint project with MIT) to do stuff while handing us a massive supersoaker that had a microswitch taped under the trigger with a cable running to the workstations...
Next thing we know and Doom is booting up on the Barco - we were then given instructions to just move if we wanted to move and simply point & shoot. Pretty impressive for the time & almost certainly the most expensive gaming rig I've ever played on!
The postscript comes about ten years later, when stumbling across the launch "popup" in Covent Garden for XBox Kinect. When asked by the rent-a-smile what I thought of the cool tech in it, I simply commented that it was just as good as when I tried it 10 years ago. The confused expression was priceless! More seriously, it was impressive to see functionality that was using a hundred thousand pounds or so of kit only 10 years before replicated in a console costing less than a thousand. Seems the dog got axed somewhere along the way though. ;-)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
