1. The film: The King of Kong. This surprisingly riveting documentary film focuses primarily on an intense rivalry between the world’s two best players of the classic arcade game “Donkey Kong”.

   Why this is the future? Professional video game journalism has taken off¹, and professional video gaming will follow. One day its popularity will eclipse that of football². Howard Stern and friends may laugh at some of the wackier folk on display in The King of Kong, but video games are starting to move away from the sorts of repetitious action that favor people who these days get classified socially as geeks or diagnosed by professionals as OCD, Aspergers, &c. Nerds have already ascended to create the information economy³, next they’ll take over the world of sports, and the jocks who adapt and survive will be or become a little nerdier than those of today.

2. The player: I watched the film in Mac OS X’s built-in media center application Front Row, using the Understudy plugin to allow me to use the simple Front Row interface to browse to and watch films using Netflix’s instant streaming service. Movies and TV shows, streamed over the internet, at high quality, for a low monthly fee; This service is already good enough to start beating out premium cable subscriptions for geeks on a budget. Streaming entertainment has begun to slip from the future⁴ category into the present.
   
   Imagine this image displayed up on a large-screen TV. That’s what Front Row’s main menu looks like after the Understudy plugin is installed. I’d show what Understudy’s menu looks like, and a netflix queue displayed in Front Row using the plugin, but Netflix is down at the moment so I can’t do so.
3. The controller: Since my mac lacks an infra-red receiver, I could not use Apple’s simple remote control to navigate my way around Front Row. But why use an infra-red remote when my phone itself is a portable touchscreen device connected via wifi to the same network as my computer media center? Instead of ancient tech, I used an iPhone application called Air Mouse Pro, which communicates with a server application running on my computer⁵ over the local network. With this application, I could not only send keystrokes from my phone that were equivalent to the arrows, volume, and menu keys on the normal Apple remote, but I could also launch and exit Front Row, move and click the mouse pointer, and type anything at all on a virtual keyboard. All this without worrying about my distance from the media center or a need to maintain a line of sight between and IR emitter and receiver.⁶ Fortuitously, in my hour of need it came to pass that Air Mouse Pro was on sale for $1.99 (down from its normal price of $5.99, for one week). If it’s still on sale at this price, you can find it here: Air Mouse Pro SALE. Here’s a randomly-selected video review of this app from youtube, in case you’re curious how it works.

   So I streamed video to my media center and controlled playback over a network using a wifi touchscreen device. This is the slightly kludgy present, and a sign of things to come. You and your grandmother will all be watching movies and TV this way in a few years.

1. As the career of videogaming journalist and The Daily of the University of Washington alumnus Jason Ocampo can attest. [↩]
2. by “football” I mean the sport played with a truncated icosahedron or the other sport also called football that uses a prolate spheroid [↩]
3. I typed it, but I’m not actually sure what it means. Maybe one too few buzzwords? Information Economy? “Hey farmer, I’ll trade you this metadata-encrusted search result for that pound of soybeans…” [↩]
4. There’s just something so delightfully obnoxious about the capitalized phrase “the future”, don’t you think? [↩]
5. The Air Mouse server application is available for both Windows and Mac [↩]
6. I probably could have accomplished much of the same with a vnc application, but most of them are more expensive, and I wasnt sure how the vnc application would interact with applications that play hardware-accelerated video such as Front Row. [↩]

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 12th, 2009 at 8:04 pm and is filed under Apple, Geeky, Media, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.