Conference hydra::amiga_v1

4625.0. "Dan's apartment, via Amiga" by MR4DEC::GAY (Underground living can be Hobbit forming) Mon Mar 25 1991 16:00

    It is always true that the real uses of a technology are found by
    people outside of the mainstream that developed the technology.  Those in
    the mainstream tend to see new developments as ways to improve what
    already exists (ex: horseless carriages - the inventors never thought of
    freeways, drive-ins, and drive-through funeral parlors)
    
    Here is an existing (albeit clumsy) virtual reality using the Amiga
    that I have not seen in ANY of the v.r. proposals I have read.
    
    People are strange critters.
    
    
From:	WONDER::CROLL "I can call spirits from the vasty deep.  24-Mar-1991 1538" 24-Mar-91 15:48
To:	@TIDBITS,@TIDBITSO
CC:	
Subj:	no weirder than watching a midseason basketball game...

From: The New Yorker, March 18. 1991, pp. 34-36

DAN'S PEOPLE

Many theoretical-minded scholars of interactive telecommunications have tried
to explain the phenomenon of Dan's Apartment.  There is Theory A, dreamed up by
the people at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at N.Y.U., and also a
mordantly revised version of that theory, called Theory B.  There is Dan's
Mom's standard interpretation, and even the mindbending Dan's Own Theory.  Only
a month ago, before Dan's Apartment became a phenomenon, it was just an
apartment:  a generic lonely-guy one-bedroom on Eighteenth Street at First
Avenue -- the two-seater sofa with the scratchy tweed fabric, the big TV with
all the cables coming out of the back, the three desultory framed posters, the
wooden dish drainer, the old refrigerator with a six-pack inside and stuff
Scotch-Taped on the front, the ten-speed on its kickstand over by the door, the
unmade futon.  Then, in the waning weeks of the Gulf War, Dan decided to put
his apartment on television, and Dan's apartment became "Dan's Apartment," the
late-night cable phenomenon.  Veteran grazers -- as people who skim back and
forth across the entire cable spectrum are called -- decided that on weeknights
from eleven to eleven-thirty (on Manhatten's Cable's Channel 25) and again from
midnight to one o'clock (on Channel 6) it was a good idea to ignore Ted and
Bernie and Arsenio and Rick Dees and just spend half an hour or so walking
around inside Dan's Apartment.

Here is what a visit to Dan's Apartment is like.  First, you see a picture of
Dan's living room, and then you hear a man's voice -- Dan's voice -- say, "Now
anyone can navigate Dan's Apartment just by speaking into their telephone."
Then a telephone number appears on the screen, and, invariably, seconds later a
sign appears:  "WE HAVE A CALLER."  Then a menu of commands appears on the
screen: "Turn Left," "Turn Right," "Go," "Reverse."  The caller (whom you can't
hear at home) speaks one of the commands into the telephone, the command is
highlighted on the screen, and then you get to see a little bit of Dan's
Apartment.  The camera turns left or right or goes forward or reverses, and
sees exactly what you would see if you were actually at Dan's Apartment at
Eighteenth and First.  It's all there, miraculously available:  you can stroll
from the living room toward the bedroom, with the unmade futon beckoning you
on; you can take a quick trip down the hall to look at the Medico lock; you can
even (this is late-night, public access TV) stride boldly, clinically, into
Dan's bathroom, to look at Dan's shower curtain and his roll of bathroom
tissue.  (The decor of Dan's apartment is described by Dan himself as Early
Inertia.  "I sort of feel that I got in on the ground floor of that style,
before anyone else got there," he says.)  Each caller is allowed four moves
within Dan's Apartment, and then Dan's voice announces, "Time for another
caller.  We hope you enjoyed your tour."  Then another caller is allowed on the
line.

The technology that enables Dan to give interactive tours of his apartment is
nothing phenomenal, you discover when you visit Dan in Dan's Lab -- a
windowless cubical at the N.Y.U. Interactive Telecommunications Program, in the
Tisch School of the Arts, where Daniel B. O'Sullivan ) to give him is full
I.D.-card name) is a graduate student.  Dan recorded moving images of his
apartment on a video disk, wrote a simple "tree" program on a Macintosh,
installed the program in an Amiga computer, wired that to a voice-recognition
decoder he bought at Radio Shack for twelve dollars, hooked the whole thing up
to a telephone line, and then sent it "upstream" on Manhattan Cable's cable,
which happens to run underneath Broadway just by the Tisch School of the Arts,
and which some of the students there have arranged to tap into.  (On a video
disk you can pick out any image or sequence at will, without having to run
through the material before or after it, just the way you can on a musical
compact disk; that's what allows Dan to give his visitors choices.)  "It's
primitive stuff," Dan says.  "And the voice activator doesn't really work all
that well.  People have got stuck for twenty minutes in my bathroom."

Here is the real phenomenon:  There is always another caller.  No matter how
late it is, or how long "Dan's Apartment" has been on the air, there is always
a backup of people waiting to get into Dan's Apartment.  "It has become soft of
like an after-hour club for couch potatoes," Dan says, bemused.  

No one is exactly sure how many people watch other people walk around in Dan's
Apartment each night, but everybody agrees that there are a lot of them --
enough to have kept "Dan's Apartment" on the air for more than a month without
any lag between callers.  Some people -- reporters, for example -- have dialed
frantically for hours in the hope of becoming the activating caller, without
success.

"What's weird about this is that no one has ever wanted to come and visit me in
my apartment," Dan says.  "I think it's an interesting apartment -- I mean,
it's *my* apartment.  Well, I inherited the lease from my sister, and I got
most of the furniture from my mom.  But no one ever actually comes to visit me
in my apartment.  I don't have enough chairs, for one thing, and also -- well,
people never seemed all that anxious to come and visit me in my apartment. 
Sometimes I would say to the guys -- you know, end of the evening, eleven
o'clock, midnight -- 'Hey, come over to my place,' and people would say, 'Yeah,
well,' but it just sort of never took off.  But then I put my apartment on
television, and it's like half the people in New York *flew* off their sofas
and onto the phone.  People I could never get to come over to my apartment come
up to me now and say -- really *peeved* -- 'Hey, Dan, I tried for an hour last
night to get through, but I never could -- somebody else was always ahead of me
in line to visit your apartment.'"

Dan's Apartment as we know it today is but as shadow of Dan's Apartment as it
was meant to be.  "My plan was originally much grander,"  Dan says.  "You were
going to be able to walk through my apartment as though it was a Macintosh
screen, and click on all the real-life icons.  You could click on my TV and
watch what Dan watches, click on the neighbor's window and see the shadows Dan
sees, click on the bookcase and read Dan's Tom Clancy books.  You could even
turn on the lights.  But it was too much work.  So I thought, Well, I'll just
do 'Dan's Apartment, Part One,' as a kind of pilot.  I figured all of us around
here would have to do the calling until we got the bugs ironed out.  But then
'Dan's Apartment' just happened, as we say in television.

"Our first theory about why people were so involved with Dan's Apartment we
called Theory A:  People will watch anything on television *if you let them
control it*.  It's all about empowerment.  If you let people have control over
what they're watching on television -- let them decide whether to go right or
left or backward -- they'll love it.  That feeling of control will be enough
even if they know in advance that whatever they're controlling -- for example,
their own path inside my apartment -- is, let's face it, not that thrilling. 
But the trouble with Theory A was that so many more people were watching Dan's
Apartment than were actually getting through on the phone.  We're still trying
to get the numbers, but it must be at least ten to one -- for every person who
gets through, ten don't, and still sit there and watch.  So then we had to
arrive at a more parsimonious theory.  Theory B:  *People will watch anything
on television*.  Which, when you think about it, is not counterintuitive.  I
mean, people watching Dan's Apartment is no weirder than people watching a
midseason basketball game.  It's just the pull of the narrative.  You want to
find out what happens next, even if you know whatever happens next is not going
to be that exciting.  Of course, I got the furniture from my mom, and she
thinks people just like to look at my apartment because it has so much cool
furniture in it.  One of my own theories about the apartment is this -- that is
proves that no matter how lonely you think you are, there is always someone out
there who is even lonelier."