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Comment by skhr0680 | Hacker News Reader

Oil paintings look quite different depending on the angle you view them from too, that's something that I don't think can be recreated without some kind of VR / head tracking

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I did early interactive multimedia art history documentaries, with voyages into paintings through voiced over descriptions and closeup montages. It was captivating work, each documentary being 7 hours of material, in 8 languages. Because Philips and Sony were trying to prove CD-ROMs to the consumer back then, 42 years ago, they spent money. We got access to museum archives, worked on some of the first digital scans of a good number of well known pieces, and had celebrities reading the voiced over narratives. We had these weird Sony News Unix workstations with newspaper layout monitors - huge grey scale displays, spoiled me until 4K monitors finally arrived. That was '89-'94, the end of the dawn of all this digital media we take for granted today.

That must have been quite a fun ride! It really boggles my mind how you can get such cheap light high quality monitors now. And now we just waste them displaying these ugly orange web pages and Skittles colored TypeScript code.

I remember hearing about the Sony News Unix workstation, and being dismayed that it didn't run Sun's NeWS window system. ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_NEWS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

Sounds really interesting. Is this still available somewhere?

The platform no longer exists, it was "CD-I", a pre-internet hybrid CD-ROM format with extensions for real time streaming. Intimate experience with that early real time streaming got me on the original Sony PlayStation OS team in Tokyo.

Very true! See my previous comment on Paul Debevec's Light Stage and Rouen Revisited, and check out some of the vidoes of Paul Debevec talking about and demonstrating it -- he's great at explaining and showing how it works, and it's useful in many different ways, including AR/VR, video games, movie production, art appreciation, online museums, historical preservation, 3D portraits (they captured Obama!):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30069100

Scanning and Printing a 3D Portrait of President Barack Obama:

https://vgl.ict.usc.edu/Research/PresidentialPortrait/

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