The opening speech came from Nicholas Negroponte, director of MIT Media Laboratory
and author of bestseller Being Digital. A
fiery techno-evangelist, Mr. Negroponte warned that the world is ruled by "digitally
homeless", who push the computer literate to the margin. |
To view any image full sized just do the click thing... |
He also warned that the financial
potential of the Internet is not being used to the full. But many of the exhibitors did not seem to
agree with him. Most of what they had to offer at the show were new and ingenious ways
to sell their wares through offline and online projects. |
 |
 |
Not surprisingly, all the major publishers were present on the show exhibiting products
that ranged from an endless stream of reference and edutainement CDs to new Internet
service provides. Bertelsman and America Online venture called Europe Online was one
of the more visible projects around. |
 |
IBM came out with a sackfull of CDs most of which
are pure entertainment titles but their most interesting one was the Virtual Musical
adventure where the player strummed along with the likes of Aerosmith learning to play
in a rock and roll band. This was made possible by the Virtual Pick and instrument that
translated simple little scratches across any surface into complex chords that the
computer aligned with music from the CD-ROM. This was the only game that every single
visitor to the show tried out. |
Parallel to the exhibition, the conference program tackled the most important issues of
multimedia business on an international scale. Douglas Adams moderated a conference
on emerging virtual communities. |
 |
He is currently working on a web project called,
surprisingly, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Internet and is disappointed by the
lack of creativity in virtual worlds which are modelled closely on the existing world. |
 |
Other famous names could also be met at MILIA; Laurie Anderson, whose first CD-Rom
Puppet Motel was recently published by the Voyager Company, was pessimistic
about the future of the Internet, and appealed to all multimedia artists to join
in the effort "to insure the Net remains more than a trade show". Which seems quite
the opposite of what Negroponte was saying, really. |
 |
The well known French comic strip artist Jean Giraud (Moebius) appeared at the show
to promote his new CD-Rom - The Arzach Adventure, published by Byron Press Multimedia.
Finally, John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation summed up the events
on MILIA in the closing speech. |
 |