June 23, 2004

It's Here!

The Drift Table actually arrived today, and (after quite a bit of fiddling) it works!

At the time of writing, I'm drifting over Marelybone - Paddington is the default start location - powered by the mighty weight of Contemporary Artists by Colin Naylor and Genesis P. Orridge.

Tomorrow, Barry is dropping off a special map of some sort, which I'll be able to use to pinpoint my 'location' more exactly. (I had planned to do some monkeying around with GeoURL, which maps documents on the web to real-world locations - or in this case virtual table-bound real-world locations - but their server is down for maintenance. Can I sense a pattern forming here?)

A few quick first impressions:

• The drifting is much faster than I expected

  I'm in bloody Stoke Newington already! (Not for long - I hope to be safely up North by this evening.)

• The detail of images in the viewport is impressive.

  Red cars are certainly popular in London, and I think I just spotted a footy team caught mid-game (though it could just be a splotchy pitch).

• It's really very noisy indeed.

  Fair enough, considering there's a PC inside, presumably working quite hard, but noisiness isn't really a sought-after quality in home furnishings (yet?).

• It's quite wee.

  For some reason I was expecting a hulking great thing, but it's well under a metre square. About the size of a coffee table, in fact. Funny that.

• It doesn't have Scotland in it.

  I'm sure there's a perfectly good reason for this, but I had rather been looking forward to steering toward my house.

• It matches my radio.

  Er, just sayin' - it's actually a piece of furniture, as well as a geowank eye-strain device.

I'll post some photos of the Table in situ tomorrow (doubtless accompanied by some more, 'Coo! I'm in Sutton Coldfield!' wittering).

And if anyone would like to come and have a look at the Drift Table doing its thing, do drop me a line.

Posted by Jack on June 23, 2004 04:41 PM
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Location: Marylebone