Let’s pull Augmented Reality and climax with JISM

Oh come on! It's ripe for renaming

No news is not good news

Recently on BBC Radio Five Live, a sports reporter fell silent for a few seconds during a news summary before announcing that his script was no longer scrolling. He then spent the next minute elaborating bizarrely on the only sports item he could still see on screen, a report on a Division Two football match he hadn’t seen and didn’t know anything about, between teams he’d only vaguely heard of because he’d noticed their town names while driving up the A1 last summer.

Even more memorable was the occasion on BBC Radio 4 when the on-the-hour newsreader, impeccably and without missing a beat, informed listeners that she would have to stop reading the news because her computer was going to restart in order to update Windows. Just as she passed back to the main programme, we could hear the restart chime in the background.

Live public presentations at trade shows, exhibitions and conferences are the worst, though. I recently attended an IEEE event in Cyprus, during which one intellectual giant after another took to the podium to demonstrate their inability to operate a projector. These smart men and women could send me to the Moon, talk for days about photons or sketch a working model of a viable flying car on a napkin, but none of them could persuade PowerPoint to progress to the next slide.

I was sorely tempted to run up to the mic like they do in medical emergencies in the movies and shout: “is there an engineer in the house?”

Back to my Augmented Reality man. He wore a wacky headset mic; we wore wireless headphones. It was like a silent disco, minus the stench of teen sweat and Red Bull. The demo had practically been purpose-built for failure from the start.

“Can everyone hear me OK?”, he asked. I know he asked this because I can lipread. Cue five minutes of Santa’s little helpers running around the audience, swapping out headphones, playing with volume controls, switching off and back on again and so on.

“Are we OK now?” Yes, we nod. The nodding causes all our headphones to fall off and land on the floor. Batteries fall out; some headphones can’t be revived; more running for the demo elves.

At last, the show begins. After a brief preamble, the presenter announces he will show us a demo of AR in action, triggered on his iPad. This involves having to pull the plugs from his laptop, laboriously change their various adapters and replug them into his tablet.

We can see the camera view from his tablet. Then we can’t. Then we can. Oh, it’s gone again. It is like a Blake Edwards comedy: the plasma display behind him appears fine while he is looking at it but mischievously goes blank every time he turns away.

Despite this, he insists on swapping all the connections between his laptop and iPad several times during the demo, with accompanying fiddling, dropping of cables onto the floor, loose connections and, worst of all, delivering a running commentary of what we can already see he is doing.

For a while, he is unaware that we are being treated to the sight of his iPad’s desktop wallpaper. It’s a bit indistinct, but I’m guessing he was either recently married or is a bridal cross-dresser.