Years from now, New York University's experimental interactive TV show - Yorb: An Interactive Neighborhood - may turn out to be the 8-track tape deck of multimedia. But until then, beware. This superlow-tech work-in-progress, produced by NYU students on a shoestring budget and skeletal electronics, is teaching a few tricks to media giants.
By tuning in to Manhattan public-access cable and dialing a local phone number, you're off into the madly inventive landscapes of Yorb (short for "your orb"). Characters are assigned to as many as four callers, who navigate using the telephone's number pad; one of the four becomes the pilot. Pressing 1 moves the pilot left, 2 straight ahead, 3 to the right. The navigator leads viewers through sites such as the Yorb Drive-In movie theater, a surrealistic playland called Daléwood, a petting zoo, and a community fair that posts information on real-life local groups. If the explorations get too dull, Yorb yanks the caller and lets in another. Anywhere from one to several dozen folks get on the
air during each hourlong show. At the bottom of the screen appears a live text box that is linked to the Echo bulletin board. Chat ranges from the sublime ("Why Yorb?") to the slime ("Man, that Yorb hostess is a major babe!").
The brains behind the defiantly simple Yorb is San Francisco Bay area multimedia veteran Nick West, a proponent of interactivity geared toward communication, not commerce. Now in its third year, Yorb resists stasis by constantly branching out, trying new projects like providing a virtual "house" to local artists, or showcasing photographs from students at a nearby middle school. The whole show should be accessible via the Web early this year.
"Yorb is a lot like New York," West explains. "Things go in and out of business regularly." Unfortunately for Yorb fans, its audio and video signals can go in and out of commission with some regularity as well. But if the 5,000 or so people who call in each week are an indication, viewers don't seem to mind Yorb's technical mishaps too much.
Yorb: An Electronic Neighborhood Thursdays, 11 p.m. to midnight, Manhattan Cable public-access channel 34. To participate, call +1 (212) 443 9672, or telnet to echonyc.com and use the username and password "yorb." New York University Interactive Telecommunications Program: +1 (212) 998 1880, e-mail nick@inch.com, on the Web at www.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu:80/~yorb/web/home.html.
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