The Time I Blew A Potential Deal With Dreamworks

Way, way back in the early 90s, I was a huge Amiga enthusiast. The Amiga being the most amazing personal computer ever devised. Consequently, I also became a huge Video Toaster enthusiast. The Video Toaster was a broadcast studio on a card for the Amiga. It did pretty much everything you could have wanted. Switcher, 24-bit Paintbox, Character Generator, Video Effects, and 3D. To name some of the bigger features.

I didn’t have one at the time, but I did have a pretty beefy Amiga capable of supporting one, and plans to acquire one as soon as I could. What I did have, however, was their Revolution demo tape, which they sent me in the mail.

Mind. Blown.

Hopelessly entranced, I took it over to my SoCal pot dealer, Tom’s. Tom was a great guy, of course. A bit of a surfer dude type who did custom tilework. He also had a gorgeous girlfriend from the Philippines or somewhere. Super cool, nice, fun people. The house was so obviously a dealer’s house. Multiple trucks, pythons, a huge St. Bernard, motorcycles, endless traffic. He once grew a ten-foot pot plant in his backyard. In a subdivision. Pre-legalization.

Anyway, I put the tape on, and no one there paid the least bit of attention to it. They were more of a Motley Crue crowd or whatever.

But I watched it. As I had watched it ten times before. This time, though, something clicked in my head. I got a piece of a realtor’s promo notepad and sketched a simple schematic.

Camera out to Video Toaster in, add effects, Video Toaster out to VR goggles.

Simple, except there were not really any VR goggles to go around, at the time. I did manage to talk to an incredibly intelligent wizard named Leo. I won’t drag him into this yet again, but Leo wore a cape. Leo wrote commercial games. Leo wrote hardware drivers for video cards. Leo worked on major game console releases.

Naturally, I accosted him onboard the Queen Mary at an AmiExpo in Long Beach.

After I confronted him about the damn difficulty of his Roger Rabbit game, and the extremely annoying disk swapping, we talked a bit about VR.

“Oh, just get a few Sony Watchmen. Take them apart. Roll your own goggles.”

Leo was that sort of genius. Is, I should say.

So, fast forward a few years, and I was in the Honors Program at University of Louisiana at Lafayette. I took two Honors classes that semester, and one was with a 30 year-old professor named Ty. Or, as he liked to be called, DixieFlatline.

Tyrone was a very driven individual, and this was his first time teaching an Honors class. “Push the kids a little bit,” they told him.

There were seventeen of us, and he immediately pushed eleven of them into dropping the class.

For the six of us that remained, he gave us an utterly incomprehensible graduate-level communication textbook, and a simple syllabus:  Write a graduate-level communication paper for publication. As freshmen.

He was very big on the idea of mash-up sort of stuff like the Heideggerian Phenomenology of the SugarBuster’s Diet. Stuff that was probably beyond the grasp of the people involved. But we all gave our topics, and he approved them. One girl’s was on Abortion…

So, I explained to him what I was already working on, and he approved that.

“Oh, like that movie Strange Days.”

“The what?”

I had to go and rent it.

At any rate, I went about writing the paper that I had really planned on writing four years later. It was a good stretch, for me. When you write something like that, you have your thesis, of course, and begin with a survey of the state of the art.

It was a great semester. The best ever. I had access to so many research avenues and learned so many things. At this point, I posit that Ivan Sutherland was a genius in the same league as Nikola Tesla.

One day I was wandering around campus as I often did, and found myself in the basement of the Apparel Research Lab.

Yes, this is a thing.

They had some rather nifty pieces of kit, An automated specimen cabinet that held 10,000 jars, all retrievable with a few keypresses. Machines to print fabric designs, and then cut them out automatically. And in one small glass room, the most expensive SGI computer I had ever seen, with a sexy pair of VR goggles sitting on a stand.

“Ho-lee shit,” I said. “Can I use that?”

“Ah, it’s broken,” my escort said.

I looked at the fan, and it was crusted with more dust and dirt than you would ever allow on your Gateway desktop PC. So sad. But the goggles worked… I had to write a formal proposal, but the next day I was granted access to use them. Score!

The final leg of my paper involved lab work and testing with real-world users, and then interviewing them. My classmates, in this case, as we were all in over our heads together.

So I lugged in about $10,000 worth of gear and set it all up. Amiga, Video Toaster, SVHS deck to make it all connect, a Sony color security camera for eyes, and connected it all to the goggles. It worked without a hitch. Using that set-up, I was able to key video onto the wall so that when the goggles were on, the wall was a display. Take the goggles, off, it disappears. Giant virtual screens. Then I put the goggles on a sixty-five year old woman, flipped a switch, and made her hallucinate.

Double success.

There was still some raver culture, and although the virtual display was cool, pretty much everyone wanted the hallucinogenic glasses shrunk down to Walkman size. So, we all finalized our papers. The abortion girl gave the most disturbing presentation I have ever witnessed. Five of the six of us turned in work and got our A’s. Here's mine.

“WHAT IS THE FUCKING POINT?”, you don’t ask, politely.

My point is that a few years later, I cold-called Dreamworks (among others) until I got the ear of someone in a position to do something. I wanted to develop a concept theater.

A hundred people could walk into a theater at a hundred different times and watch a hundred different movies on the same shared screen. Pause, rewind, watch in groups. It could be entertainment, a school or university, arcade, and community meeting center all at the same time, and allow Hollywood to release their entire catalog at once. Netflix for theaters. The aging, dying theaters. I think Netflix, if it existed at the time, still shipped DVDs in the mail.

Conversely, you could develop a cable box that would allow an entire family to each watch different channels at the same time, on their wall-sized display, while still being able to interact with each other.

And the Dreamworks guy told me to write up a formal proposal, because it sounded interesting and doable.

That was the same week I started the Rhyme Torrents Project, an effort to legitimize nerd rappers for inclusion on Wikipedia. A three or four-year journey. Fun, ultimately, but pointless and silly, at the same time. Naturally, I threw myself into that project with both feet.

That’s right. I never followed up on the Dreamworks stuff. At all. Ever.