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"The only real way to maintain privacy is to be uninteresting. It may be that privacy is a passing fad."
- Larry Niven
 |
| Prime Radiant | ||
| A projector that puts all of a vast collection of writings on the wall of a special conference room. You could interact with it by writing on the wall; changes were stored. |
Why don't they have this kind of projector in conference rooms? One particularly nifty aspect of this device was that people who stood before it cast no shadow, despite the fact that it seemed to radiate from a single device in the middle of the room. You could interact with it (change the content) by writing directly on the wall of the room. Teachers from the old school might appreciate being able to write directly on the "slide" and have it saved automatically for the next time they gave the lecture.
| The long walls of the room glowed to life. Finally, the fine neatly printed equations in black, with an occasional red hairline that wavered through the darker forest like a staggering rillet.
They stood together in the light. Each wall was thirty feet long, and ten high. The writing was small and covered every inch. "This is not the whole Plan," said the First Speaker. "To get it all upon both walls, the individual equations would have to be reduced to microscopic size - but that is not necessary..." ...The student pointed a finger and as he did so, the line of equations marched down the wall, until the single series of functions he had thought of - one could scarcely have believed that the quick, generalized gesture of the finger to have been sufficient - was at eye-level. |
| From Second Foundation,
by Isaac Asimov. Published by Doubleday in 1953 Additional resources -
|
I wonder if this sort of projector and screen might lend itself to extended work, as opposed to ordinary terminals, on which one is forced to scroll much more often.
I've seen various kinds of electronic whiteboards. I believe that some of them allow at least minimal interaction between the board and the application that projects images upon it. For example, you could press the pen upon a section of the screen to move ahead to the next page.
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Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
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Okay, sf fans. If you could have some art created from a science fiction sentence, what sentence would you pick?
'There were the cleaners, with large padded feet, who were apparently polishing their way the whole length...'
It's fascinating to me how the Apollo program forced people to think outside their usual boxes.
'Some will combine in place to form more complicated structures, like excavators or centipedes.'
'the hair-fine wire going deep into Owen's brain, down into the pleasure center.'
'There was a dim whirring, and the spheres tipped and began to rotate...'
'The houses are prefabricated units... and they sell at the flat rate of five hundred dollars a room — set up.'
