Originally published online on Microsoft Internet Magazine, February 24, 1997. Rare Birds in Cyberspace Dominic Gates Imagine a live television show broadcasting 24 hours a day from inside an aviary. The camera is concealed behind the eyes of a large vividly colored robot bird half macaw, half owl.
Viewers watch as small gray birds flit by, and visitors to the aviary peer into the cage.
Occasionally someone waves at the camera. Welcome to Rara Avis, a real-time multimedia broadcast from the Huntington Art Gallery at the University of Texas in Austin. Internet users with CU-SeeMe as well as looking through the Macowl's video eyes, will hear sounds in the gallery, and can even speak directly into the cage. For less technologically advanced viewers, a fresh still image from the live feed is posted on the Web every minute. If Rara Avis were television, it would qualify as stupefyingly boring programming.