Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Early "video" games

Here's a neat image from the excellent Shorpy photo blog site, showing a visual display system from 1924 to show baseball games being played.  If I'm understanding it right, they'd have people sit in the theater, and then they could update the system to reflect actual gameplay, perhaps from radio broadcasts or telegraph - an early version of an abstract graphical representation of reality.

Click for the front view (shown also at left), showing how it would look to the audience.  Here's the back view, showing the strapping young men operating the machine and all the different projector bulbs that had to be coordinated and controlled somehow.  Amazing complexity.  Click on the "full size" link at Shorpy if you want to see all the details of the artwork and rigging.

No comments:

Post a Comment