A Virtual Future?

Those were the days when PCs had just about made the transition from the world of DOS and Windows 3.11 to Windows 95. MacOS was largely monochromatic and Linux had no GUI to speak of. I am talking of the period around 1997-98. Bill Gates was cool, Steve Jobs was almost God and not too many had heard of Bill Joy or accessed the Internet. The world of computing was really, really small. But to those of us who used to dabble in graphics, there was no body that could lay a bigger claim to Godhead than Kai Krause. 

Kai's claim to Godhood arose from one small product-Kai's Power Tools. Or KPT as it used to be fondly called. KPT was add-on to Photoshop for adding special effects to pictures. And what made KPT that cool was it's out-of-the-world interface, vibrant colors and real-time manipulation of images. You had to see it to believe it. 

And remember, all this was done on the skimpy hardware available in those days. For many of us, the ultimate fantasy was an OS that had the KPT interface.

It has taken many years, but today's OSs and applications are slowly inching towards that paradise. They still have a long way to go. On a scale of one to ten, we are still at about one and a half. But I believe that sooner than later computing will reach there, and that real-time modeling and manipulation of large volumes of data and its presentation as interactive, vibrant visual images will become a reality. 

Forget large volumes of data, today, we are struggling to represent even simple tables in a meaningful way. But at the high end, visualization of information is already happening. Weather patterns, the human body, Petroleum deposits, flying aircraft, all of them can today be visually modeled and better understood at a very high cost of a few million dollars per set up. It is my belief that this will become more realistic, more affordable, more useable and more real time in the years to come. And that would radically change the way we understand and interact with data and the environment around us.

Like with everything else, the more visible impact of this will be in entertainment. Does that mean that we would be able to inhabit virtual worlds? Unlikely. But immersive gaming worlds can soon become the norm and for a brief while, we may be able to leave the humdrum of every day life and make a quick virtual trip to a favorite getaway without actually going there, much like we go to a cinema or the neighborhood park. 

Combine this capability with x-ray machines, microscopes or telescopes and we will be able to model and interact with almost anything that exists. Our understanding of the world around us and its processes can improve many fold!

How soon will all this happen? May be faster than we expect it!

For the record, Metacreations, the company that Kai set up to develop KPT developed many other similar tools, and had a very successful public issue. 

Kai left the company and by 1999, KPT was acquired by Corel and Scansoft acquired some of the other Kai line of software. None of these products seem to exist independently today. Kai Krause is believed to be working on something called TimeDoubler that was supposed to debut in 2004.

Krishna Kumar, Editor