Headcasting's cool!

[SteveC]

I've showed a couple of people here at work (I work in an electronic business department) and they were quite impressed.

So there.

------------------
Cheers,
Steve

"Life is what we make of it, yet most of us just fake"

[rylan]

lol.. I showed a bunch of people here at work the "new" G550.. they were laughing their asses off about the headcasting stuff. Our sales, marketing, and tech support dept thought it was a bad joke.

[mdhome]

I work in an IT department and showed the demo of Dan wood to 3 other people (all men). All three were decidedly impressed with comments ranging from cool to excellent. Two other people (a man and a woman) were shown both Dan and Lea. The man didnt say a word (though i'm not sure if he though I wanted him to). The woman on the other hand was quite vociferous and didnt believe that anyone could look so young and have such nice skin as Lea. She would only use it if she could change her appearance through makeup etc and make herself look younger.

The moral of this is
1) Men are more pragmatic about technology than women.
2) Never ask a woman her opinion of technology
3) Headcasting is probably a far better technology than most of us give it credit.

I personally cant wait to get my face scanned. I've been told by the chaps in work that they will have a job telling me and the following apart
http://users.powernet.co.uk/mdhome/gorilla.gif

regards MD

[az]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by mdhome:
1) Men are more pragmatic about technology than women.</font>

I disagree

The men think the tech is "cool", the woman is pragmatic and already thinks of ways of putting the technology to good use - the woman prbably wants the tech to work, the men want it to NOT work properly, so they can fix and tweak it and feel better afterwards

Let's just HOPE that HeadCasting will be more accepted by the public than by us

AZ

[mdhome]

The *new reworked* moral of this is

4) Never underestimate a women:-)

[az]

*LOL

AZ

[Darin]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by az:
... The men think the tech is "cool", the woman is pragmatic and already thinks of ways of putting the technology to good use ... </font>

Matrox needs to hunt this woman down & offer her huge sums of cash. I just honestly can't see any practical use for it. There are a few advantages to video conferencing over traditional phone based conference calls... you can see facial expressions (a lot of communication there), hold up items that might need to be seen, see what's going on around a person at that point in time, but head casting offers none of these advantages, and has the added disadvantage of requiring a lot of setup in advance (taking pictures, sending them off, & waiting for them to be processed). IMO, this is one of the most ludicrous things I've heard of in a while. I have a 45 minute commute, and I honestly spent a good third of that on the way home last night laughing or smiling to myself (alone) thinking about headcasting, and some of the comments in these forums about it.

[mdhome]

Interestingly enough some of the comments from people in the office was 'Wouldnt this be great in games'. Take it for whats its worth but its a shame matrox wont be investing in this technology.


regards MD

[PurpleHaze]

I'm female, and I just think headcasting is stupid.

Good skin or not, while other graphics cards are adding useful features, good ol' Matrox is concentrating on floating disembodied heads.

I swear, it's got -something- to do with french canadian culture. Kinda like (and I can say it, because I'm of this heritage) how Japanese people love to take pictures, sing about food, and pay $50 a month to have animations of Hello Kitty on their cel phones.

It's just a cultural thing. and I totally think Headcasting is a cultural thing. :P No US company would think that up as a graphics card feature.

Now where's that song about pancakes I wrote...erm...


------------------
Ami Y. Koriuchi - foxyviolet@hotmail.com
SYSTEM1
Asus A7V133 - K7 - 1.2 GHZ - GeForce 2 GTS 64mb
768 MB PC133 - 170 GB UDMA100 7200 RPM - 60GB LVD 160 10K RPM

SYSTEM2
Asus P3BF 1003.A - P3-500 - G400Max
256MB 6NS - 75 GB of 10k RPM SCSI UW

Hello... my name is ami. and this is my signature.

[This message has been edited by PurpleHaze (edited 21 June 2001).]

[Greebe]

Ami, that's because US companies don't realise the demand for this overseas, where bandwidth is grossly limited in most places.

It may sound silly and dumb now, but does have it's place in the world.

[2Whyzzi]

Pure speculation on my part, of course But, I don't think it's a French Canadian thing. Disembodied talking heads just doesn't doesn't seem to be thier style (Well, aside from maybe French Canadian Politics :P).

No, I'd have to go with my gut and say it's gottah be a German/Europe thing. Kind of like the Videophone.

I shudder to think what hacks ppl will think up and create for the HeadCasting Engine.

=-=-
PC1: Intel Celeron2 566@850MHz 1.8v, Abit BH6 + Slotket!!!, 384Megs of PC-133 RAM CAS3
ATI Radeon LE @ 166 Core/Mem drv 4.13.7115

PC2: AMD Duron 850@975MHz, MSI K7T Turbo r3.0, 256Megs of PC-133 Crucial CAS2
Matrox G400 SH, rev 3 PD 6.51.012

PC3 (TestBox): AMD K6-2 500MHz FSB, FIC 503+ rev 1.1, 128Megs of PC-100 CAS3
Savage4 16Meg

[Strade]

IT's difficult to say where's this Headcasting come from... but as a FrenchCanadian... I can say something...

We are weird enough to think about these kind
of technologies!

hehheeheh
;O)

[Greebe]

[Jorden]

I just wonder if it might have a webcam-in port. If this GPU is using the webcam attached to the PC, doesn't it slow down then? Wouldn't it be more practical to attach your (USB) webcam directly to the G550, therefor making sure the input is without too much delays?

Jord.

[This message has been edited by Jorden (edited 21 June 2001).]

[Darin]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by Greebe:
Ami, that's because US companies don't realise the demand for this overseas, where bandwidth is grossly limited in most places.

It may sound silly and dumb now, but does have it's place in the world. </font>

Even if the whole world still connected via 56K, I just don't get it. I see no advantage to this over a regular phone call. The image on screen has nothing to do with what's goin on at the other end. If there really were a market for this, ANY company could come up with software that modeled your head, and lipsynced to either audio in or an audio stream within the computer, no need for a special vid card.

I think Matrox is a great company, but I just think Headcasting is an embarrassment. I read that the G550 might have even better 2D than the G400 series. If so, this is great, but the Headcasting gimmick is giving the card a bad name, IMHO. The money they spent on it could have gone to SO many other places.