Once upon a time, when I was living in Vermont, I used to drive around the mountains during Autumn looking for the perfect scene. I had in mind what it should consist of, and would judge each potential frame with the expectations in my mind.

The results after developing them was always disappointing. It just couldn’t live up to the expectations— One tree was brilliant, but the tree next to it had already dropped its leaves, and the other was still partly green— and so it would continue. I just couldn’t find perfection.

Duh… perfection exists only in the mind… or maybe after a good Photoshop session.

Once upon another time, we interconnected geeks developed these online games called MUDs. They were text based games that prefigured their graphical counterparts like Everquest and the like. But the goal in building a virtual world is the same: To render as many details as you can, to make the world seem more real.

The same holds true for these computer animated movies like Shrek and Monsters, Inc… It takes time (money) to animate each individual hair independently of the others, and few people in the audience will notice. But with it, everyone will feel the movie is closer to reality.

In fact, the ironic twist to this is the huge amount of effort involved in rendering aspects in virtual space that we spend huge amounts of effort in trying to remove from meat space. People spend more money for thicker paper that doesn’t show the next page, and yet the latest craze is transparent windows for our desktops.

In the case of our online games, rendered real-life annoyances are quaintly enjoyed and appreciated. What if we took that attitude back into meat space with us, and think, the dirt on this window would be very difficult to render, and is, in its own way, quite interesting to look at.

Just an idea.