I then wondered what a multiuser version of such a system might look like—everyone has a remote control either for their own camera, or a single one. A related thought, which I’ve had before, is remote controls to tag media with markers while recording. This seems like such an obvious system to have when making movies. Each time something interesting happens, click your remote control and a marker will show up later on in post-production. Today, script supervisors, if we tell them, will write down timecode and then we will navigate to that timecode and add the marker. It is a huge waste of time.

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Walter M. described something to me the other day which made me nostalgic for the days of analog: he said he was working on flatbed device that allowed you to easily jog the magnetic audio tape back and forth over the playhead, so you could “navigate” a recorded sentence over and over with ease, back and forth. This was particularly useful because he was working with Russian audio and did not know the language. The interface allowed very tactile control over each phoneme of the recording, and he though it might be easier to learn a foreign language this way. I’m not describing it well, but words I want to throw into this conversation are: ballistics, weight, inertia. This is something a mouse and cursor simply do not have, and so our connection to the media is less physical.

We can simulate physics fairly well on the computer, so we could create media that responds more realistically to touch gestures, but without some significant haptic response, touch plus physics simulations almost does not seem to be enough.