Dev Null
Encyclopedia
Dev Null was an animated virtual reality
Virtual reality
Virtual reality , also known as virtuality, is a term that applies to computer-simulated environments that can simulate physical presence in places in the real world, as well as in imaginary worlds...
character created in 1996 by Leo Laporte
Leo Laporte
Léo Gordon Laporte is an Emmy Award winning, American technology broadcaster, author, and entrepreneur. A former resident of Providence, Rhode Island, he now lives in Petaluma, California with his wife Jennifer and two children, Abby and Henry....
for MSNBC's computer and technology TV series, The Site
The Site
The Site, hosted by Soledad O'Brien, was an hour-long TV program devoted to the Internet revolution. It debuted in July 1996 with MSNBC's launch and aired Monday through Saturday, reaching 35 million homes...
. Espresso barista Dev talked with host Soledad O'Brien
Soledad O'Brien
María de la Soledad Teresa O'Brien is an American Broadcast journalist. She is currently the host of the "In America" documentary unit on CNN, and is best known for anchoring the CNN marquee morning newscast American Morning from July 2003 to April 2007, with Miles O'Brien...
each weeknight in a five-minute segment. Laporte was awarded a 1997 Northern California Emmy for his nightly performances as cyber character Dev Null.
Dev was animated in real time on Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...
computers. Laporte generated both the voice and actions while wearing a VR motion capture suit. When O'Brien sat at the espresso bar to read email from viewers, Dev flirted with her while answering her computer questions. She recalled, "One of the reasons that segment of the show worked is that I could not see him as I was talking to him, and the segment was unscripted. He was funny, and his jokes were not gags."
While O'Brien looked at a piece of tape on the wall indicating Dev's virtual position, the VR suit captured Laporte's actions, and a computer program translated his body movements to create the character, while other human operators controlled facial expressions and accentuated movements of his hair. The control room juxtaposed O'Brien and Dev on the same set using a switcher
Vision mixer
A vision mixer is a device used to select between several different video sources and in some cases Compositing video sources together to create special effects...
.
Laporte recalled arriving at NBC with a 90-page treatment:
- I'll never forget pitching it to NBC at 30 Rock just before Christmas 1995. Then NBC News Director Andrew Lack came in in a three-piece suit and cowboy boots. He propped his booted feet up on the table and said, "Okay, let's hear it." It was like something out of SeinfeldSeinfeldSeinfeld is an American television sitcom that originally aired on NBC from July 5, 1989, to May 14, 1998, lasting nine seasons, and is now in syndication. It was created by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, the latter starring as a fictionalized version of himself...
... I had hoped to be the lead reporter on the show, but the NBC executives told me I had no chance of getting on camera, so they stuck me in a VR suit and the character Dev Null was born. I won an Emmy for it, but the only other competition was a sock puppet character on the local Spanish language station, so it wasn't exactly a competitve category... The Site was a major network's idea of what a technology TV show should look like: big on production values, light on content, but it was an important moment in the mainstreaming of the Internet. I still run into people now and then who remember me as "the guy in the suit."
Producer David Bohrman
David Bohrman
David Bohrman is a television and new media executive, working in network television news, cable news, new media, internet, convergence and consulting. Bohrman created almost a dozen new TV news programs at ABC News, NBC News , CNN, and TechTV....
remembered, "She would do real-time Q&A with this cartoon character who was the smartest person in the world when it came to technology issues. It was great."
See also
- /dev/null/dev/nullIn Unix-like operating systems, /dev/null or the null device is a special file that discards all data written to it and provides no data to any process that reads from it ....
is a special file in Unix-like operating systems that discards all data written to it