When the internet and technology catch up, I would like to have live, surround sound, multiple monitor video representations of various places. ie: busy subway platform, airport, sunny vacation spot, top of mount everest, underwater, hubble telescope, and other events/places of interest both live and historical. Webcasts and streaming video files could be filmed from rotating, multiveiwpoint cameras and the images and dipole recordings could be combined to create sublime realism without strapping VR goggles on or isolating yourself from the real world.-- plasticornflake, Feb 13 2003 yellowstone park - old faithful webcam http://www.nps.gov/.../oldfaithfulcam.htmThere are many thousand other webcams. [nicholaswhitworth, Apr 03 2010] WIBNI.-- phoenix, Feb 13 2003 I disagree with the WIBNI comment. If you were to have maybe 4 or 5 video cameras (maybe more) all around in a circle so you get 360 degrees (making sure to set the frame not as high as the camera has, so one can go up and down), then all that would be necessary would the software to implement this. Granted, there would be a good amount of overlap, in which case you would just need to calibrate the software to account for this and to overlap (or cut part of) some of the video feeds. The only real hangup I can see at all is that it could take a good amount of bandwith to display at any reasonable quality. I don't see how any rotating cameras or w/e as alluded to in the post are necessary, but a video stream that would be just like a Quicktime VR except constantly changing could work find given you had a computer with enough ram and bandwith the download it fast enough. Perhaps it would work better if instead you downloaded a pre-existing 5 minute clip, so the bandwith concerns wouldn't be there.
Wow, this was one long annotation...-- catboy17, Feb 29 2004 I'm sorry to say, this might not even be a WIBNI. I can't see how it's differnet from TV (multi monitor adds nothing - just get a bigger telly). But the point is - people don't want to watch 'a field' on TV, they want to watch people dying and relationships being put under pressure. I think you get these kinds of shots in TV sales rooms. Video of dolphins and trees.
And as for your computer... you've got webcams. Which people dont watch because they've got this website open over the desktop.
I've included a link to a webcam of old faithful at yellowstone park. There are many other fantastic web-cams.
My version of this idea is that you have 2 cafes. One in NYC the other in London /paris / rome... and they have live video of the scene outside the cafe. So in NYC, you see rome etc. Though - this might turn into friends waving at each other - like an internet chat forum and web cams.
The futures bright, but at the moment its very low quality....-- nicholaswhitworth, Apr 03 2010 random, halfbakery