MediaBar demo - from 1996
Here’s I demo I did back in 1996 - showing off this cyber-theme restaurant operating system we developed called ‘MediaBar’. It featured CD ROM, Music and Video jukeboxes, a food and drink ordering system, multi-player games all written in Director, with a early digital video server and Internet hookup.
Folks would log into the system via a video camera and multiple people could be logged into one station (which theoretically was assigned to each table in a cyber-theme restaurant.)
The location based entertainment business was riding high in 1996 and we had hopped to build the Apple cafe - which Apple announced in Oct. ‘96. That’s back when I was still bullish in Apple, and built everything with 8500’s and Sun servers. Unfortunately everything was single sourced, so when the 100BaseT cards stopped working or Director couldn’t deal with 250M files, it really effected everything.
Mediabar and Mediaband taught me allot - which i’m still using today. Communities forming around partying, pervasive multimedia infrastructure, on-line socializing and relying upon technology in social environments all came out of these experiences.
The video is really about the making of my house at 701 Rhode Island on Potrero Hill - which we laid on top of MediaBand performance of a 40’s swing classic. lots of great IP was develoepd for that project, so we have prior art (all dating back to mid-’96) on:
- face in an interface
- multiple faces connoting multiple people logged into one station
- multiple players games over closed circuit broadband network
- on-line food and drink ordering system
- audio and video jukebox with playlists associated with profile records
- Internet browsing at restaurant seats
- drag and drop UI dashboard in cyber entertainment venue
Mediaband 3.0 is was a descendant of the band I formed to created Interactive Music videos back in (’92-’94.) We produced a CD ROM called “Meet the MediaBand“. We also produced several live interactive music videos, pre-dating dance dance Revolution and Guitar Hero.
On the video you hear Don Pearson explaining our multimedia network and I wrap it all up (my hair is fairly long.) Don was the head of Ultra Sound the Grateful Dead’s sound company for 17 years - until Jerry died. he then became the president of Canter Technology.
Enjoy and Merry X-mas and happy Hanukkah to everyone.
Video storage courtesy of Facebook.
Here’s a quiz - identify some of the folks in the video.
Tags: Don Pearson, Mediaband, Mediabar
Add a comment
Cool. A blast from the past. I miss those days.
Cool. A blast from the past. I miss those days.
I remember from afar across the Pacific. Influenced me in my designing of broadband spaces. Happy chanukah
I remember from afar across the Pacific. Influenced me in my designing of broadband spaces. Happy chanukah
I saw you demo MediaBand at Milia back in the nineties, as a teenager working on my “electronic magazine” (HTML at that point wasn’t advanced enough for our purposes, so it was distributed as proprietary Windows and Mac formats). It was exciting stuff; in fact, lots of the things I saw during those years has yet to really make it onto the web. Another great demo from the same era involved tagged objects in video - something someone might want to think about again now.
I saw you demo MediaBand at Milia back in the nineties, as a teenager working on my “electronic magazine” (HTML at that point wasn’t advanced enough for our purposes, so it was distributed as proprietary Windows and Mac formats). It was exciting stuff; in fact, lots of the things I saw during those years has yet to really make it onto the web. Another great demo from the same era involved tagged objects in video - something someone might want to think about again now.