The Holy Grail of Interactive Television

The wizards of the communications revolution are about to cast their spell over us. It's not just the dozens of new television channels opening up - we're already pretty familiar with what television brings us - but their are plans to conjure up a lot more different kinds of products and services. A dazzling parade of amusement parks and arcades, computer games and on-line services, sporting teams and similar pastimes are being readied to beguile and bewitch the audience and consumer. This is on top of the over three hours each day we already sit spellbound in front of our television screens - more for those with computers.

There's so much action because communications and entertainment are big business - and getting bigger. Americans spend over three hundred billion dollars a year - and Australians nearly ten billion - on entertainment alone. That's a lot of getting together and having fun - except when we're getting down to work, of course.

The holy grail for today's communications wizards is to find a way to guide us through the maze of different technologies and available services and provide a simple and easy method to get useful information and entertainment. And one that hopefully leaves us time to have a social life and still meet people face to face. This application could make its discoverer very wealthy and at least give us an alternative to Bill Gates' boyish smile - or was that a Cheshire grin - wherever we go.

The current idea is that we need a single unifying concept, like a map, to make sense of all the information out there. In a similar way, the successful "map" for the computer was the imaginary "desktop and windows" combination that presented computer functions as familiar objects in an office. Now, instead of just a desktop, a virtual electronic Camelot is being summoned up on the other side of your television and computer screen. Computer designers and engineers have created computer-generated "villages" with shopping malls you can buy and sell goods in, libraries you can access books in, schools, town halls, movie theatres and post offices offering other activities and delights - all for a small fee of course.

The increasing impact which new kinds of communications and entertainment have on our lives, the economy and our society is a matter of concern for the government and it has called together advisers in a series of round tables to assist with future town planning. One of the series, the Broadband Services Expert Group, released its final report, Networking Australia's Future, last week with proposals for the future of these services.

Ed McCracken, the head of Silicon Graphics Inc., maker of the computers that brought to animated "life" the fantastic digital dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, reckons the entertainment industry is now "the driving force for the new technology as defence used to be". His company is also deeply involved in the largest and most costly experiment in new technology and entertainment - the Time-Warner, Orlando, Florida, trial, that uses a shopping mall theme for its make-believe world.

Aptly, it's right next door to Disneyworld.