“If you can't afford acid, watch TV”. It was a mantra of some of my college buddies, but back in college, I couldn't afford acid, and had already developed a dislike of television. We had gotten our first television when I was in elementary school. It was a small black and white TV with two mechanical dials, one for VHF and the other for UHF. The VHF dial gave the choice of twelve channels, from 2 to 13. I never figured out what happened to channel 1. UHF added around 70 more channel options. However, where I lived, we only had three VHF stations.

Acid, I was told, was like sitting down to watch a nine hour show, which you were the star of and which you couldn't turn off or change the channel. It was liked being trapped inside a your own bizarre movie. For years, I had been trapped inside my own little world. I was socially inept and had a speech impediment. Sure, I was mobile and verbal, but I had problems establishing friendships.

Yet for those trapped in a more socially responsible world, acid was an opportunity to look at things from a very different angle. Perhaps that is some of what makes Hunter S. Thompson so interesting. His acid crazed mind looked at Los Vegas, political campaigns, and so many other aspects of American culture from a drastically different viewpoint. This viewpoint resonated with many, thanks to his masterful wordsmanship.

I've been reading Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas on the trains to and from New York during Internet Week this year. Even without the acid, it seems to be helping me look at all of this from a much different viewpoint. It would be too easy to either fall into Internet Fanboydom on the one hand, or some sort of cynicism about the same forces that brought so much crap to the airwaves of my childhood now bringing it to the Internet.

Yet there is an interesting middle ground. The Internet can be a tool that enables people to authentically and creatively connect with other people. Yes, I realize I scored several buzzword bingo points with that sentence, but there is some truth to it.

The first hint of this interesting middle ground was my discussion with the guy from the Not Impossible Foundation who was showing the Eyewriter. This is a cheap do-it-yourself project where you can take parts of a standard pair of sunglasses, a webcam and a few other components and create a pair of glasses that track a persons eye movements. For a person who has lost all ability to move, and perhaps even speak, this is an incredibly enabling project. By moving ones eyes, a person can control a computer and connect with the people around the world. I talked about how this could be used in virtual worlds, like Second Life, and about the acessibilty projects friends of mine who are mobility challenged have done there.

Another toy that caught my eye was the makerbot project. This is essentially a three dimensional printer. If I recall properly, for about a thousand dollars, you can build a printer that will 'print' three dimensional objects. There are a group of people sharing things they have created.

Moving back closer to the field of television, there were a couple people pushing their Augmented Reality wares. Zugara had a couple great demos up. They have built their Augmented Reality code into Flash. The Flash code connects with the webcam and you can have games or shopping experiences on any Flash enabled computer with a webcam. Unfortunately, it seems to use Flash 10, and my Nokia N900 phone only supports Flash 9, so I haven't been able to test it on my phone. Total Immersion was another augmented reality player at Internet Week which apparently had a great Iron Man augmented reality game. Unfortunately, there wasn't anyone at the booth when I sstopped by, so I haven't had a chance to check it out.

The other vendor that particularly caught my eye there was Innovid. They provide interactive preroll for people creating advertisements for online videos. Their authoring language is very 'flash like' and it seems like an inspired video artist could do something very interesting by adding Zugara's Augmented Reality to Innovid's interactive preroll. This could be used for more than just the crass commercialism of online advertising, it could be part of a toolkit for a highly interactive video art form.

This weekend, many of my old college buddies will be gathering for a college reunion. They might trot out their old mantra about acid and television. On the other hand, if they've been following Internet Week, they just might come up with ideas even more creative.