The Quest for the Perfect ExerGame

Last Friday evening I was able to round off my time in Vienna and take in a hardware exhibition and and a display of creative computer graphics on a big screen – so called “Demos”. The Demoscene is a computer art subculture that specializes in the production of Demos, which are non-interactive audio-visual presentations run in real-time on a computer. The main goal of a Demo is to show off programming, artistic, and musical skills.

The hardware exhibition featured many different types of early home computers that I remember from the eighties and brought back a few memories. The graphics and the accompanying soundtracks produced on the assorted hardware were pretty amazing given the limited computing power available at the time.

The demos shown in the outdoor cinema were all amazing in their own right from the very recent all the back to the 1980’s – along with their “eighties sounding” music (hence the reference to Ultravox’s hit single “Vienna” in the post title).

Having not known anything about the “Demoscene” before, it was perhaps a fortunate oversight on my part as to the contextual meaning of “live” that caught my eye on the exhibition poster. In the context of “Demos” it means computed in “real time”, hence the challenge of pushing the hardware to the limits.

But in researching this post, I had a few thoughts and came across this video clip in the context of interactive video jockying (iVJing?) - (takes a minute to really get going). I am sure there is the potential for an ExerGame in there somewhere…..