Biotelemorphic Cells

 

Not many people would want to take the engine out of a vehicle and put it on a test bed before making an automobile purchase. Pretty weird hey? Well we shall be doing the equivalent of this in the first part of this book. We'll get to the regular driving part in later chapters.

In this first chapter, we are going to be taking an unconventional look at multimedia "players". These are the applications which are supplied with multimedia productions to allow multimedia documents to be run outside of their authoring environment.

These packages of concentrated computer code, provide all the complex coding necessary to interpret any instructions which might be programmed into the documents. They can be thought of as the engines which run the multimedia products described by the documents.

Fig 1.1

Players are the code engines which run multimedia documents

It is difficult to get away from the conventional mind set of seeing a multimedia player as anything other than a program which plays multimedia documents, so, we are going to use one of the little tricks that Zen Masters use to get people to think differently about a familiar object or situation: we are going to invent a new word for them and call these players biotelemorphic cells.

The "bio" prefix is to denote that the programming logic we are going to use with the players derives more from biological organisms than it does from traditional computer programming techniques. As we shall see later, in many ways we can cause multimedia players to emulate complex organic structures.

The "tele" is the implication that the players we shall be considering will often be associated with a connection to the Internet. Although this is not necessary for many applications, it is the ability for players to communicate via the Internet which can give them almost unlimited power.

The "morphic" element in the name is to denote the polymorphic nature of the products which players can materialize within their allotted RAM space. We shall be seeing how these cells can be configured to produce an infinite variety of forms, uses and purposes - allowing them to create phenomena which go way beyond both human design capability and human comprehension.

The "cell" notation is to imply that these players applications are going to be treated as if they were biological cells, where manifestations of the cell are the result of manipulating the "genetic" code contained within the player's "engine nucleus".

Avatars are intimately associated with biotelemorphic cells because it is through these cells that avatars are able to manifest themselves in a variety of different "avatar" forms, roles or situations.

 

copyright 1997 Peter Small - No part of this document can be used or reproduced in any form without express permission

Details of book, CD-ROM and online continuation - peter@genps.demon.co.uk