Toshio Iwai is an innovator in Japan's game, art, and TV worlds. He doesn't make shoot-'em-up or beat-'em-up interactivity. His "Music Insects," a computer toy developed for San Francisco's Exploratorium science museum, allows users to make music with the help of digital insects. After the user paints a picture on a screen, the bugs - each with a different musical timbre or rhythmic personality - crawl over different-colored areas and play pitches assigned to those colors. Some bugs play the drums.
Iwai's latest hit is a Japanese television show called Ugo Ugo Lhuga (Go-Go Girl pronounced backwards - sort of). Ostensibly a children's program, many of its fans are from the nightclub and art scenes who tune in every day for a dose of psychedelic cartoon fun. In the show, which incorporates surrealistic Amiga image files manipulated in real-time, two children travel through virtual worlds with virtual characters (whose lips are synched to live narrators via MIDI signals). The soundtrack is also live, with some of Tokyo's hippest "rave" DJs doing their thing.
Besides its atypical imagery - a "Mr. Feces" that rises out of the toilet to share a daily piece of wisdom (no kidding!), a museum of sounds of different animals mating, and a tomato on the verge of a nervous breakdown - there are also interactive spots. Take "Voice Sumo" for example. Kids from all over Japan draw monsters on postcards and send them in. The drawings are scanned into the computer and put into a cartoon sumo ring, poised for battle. Kids phone up the show, choose a side, and scream as loud as they can into the phone. Whoever raises the highest voltage over the phone pushes the opponent's creature out of the sumo ring. Now that's interactivity.
ELECTRIC WORD
Telegeography The Balance of Global Telecommunications
The Interactive Electric Sumo Scream Show
