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Crowds outside the tent. (Post photo by Craig Herndon)

Inside the Inaugural Technology Tent

ON THE MALL -- Shirley Kreiger’s future reached out to her inside the Technology Playground today, dragging her onto the Internet along with thousands like her nationwide.

The school principal from Woodbridge, Conn., had received a mysterious letter at work last week telling her that someone had created a home page for her school on the World Wide Web.

Today, when she arrived in Washington for President Clinton’s second inauguration, she found out who was behind the letter.

"Oh my goodness, this is exciting!" Kreiger said as she stared at an IBM-powered computer system displaying her name on Ezra Academy’s new Web page inside an exhibition tent. Her daughter had spotted the display of the new American School Directory and dragged her over.

"I didn’t understand your letter, and it was on my to-do pile for next week," Kreiger told Tom D. Crook, president of Computers for Education Inc., the Tennessee-based firm that is striving to create a home page for each of the nation’s 106,000 schools. "Who are you, and why are you doing it?"

Kreiger’s question resonated throughout Techno Playground, a multimedia exhibition where more than two dozen vendors are displaying a mixture of prototypes and real products designed to give Americans a peek at their virtual futures.

Visitors browse exhibits (Craig Herndon, The Washington Post)

For the vendors, the future is something to dream and scheme about. In addition to the school network, the futuristic visions include a space-based global paging system, a new Internet animation program, a video-camera-in-a-pipe that would allow emergency medical technicians to see inside the blocked airways of choking patients and a host of virtual reality systems.

Hundreds of curious people waited for hours in sub-freezing cold to get inside the tent, where access was tightly controlled to allow hands-on interaction of the kind that Kreiger experienced.

"Don’t worry; it’s free," Crook told the puzzled principal about her home page. He told her she would receive a password and special software that would allow her staff to add their own material to their home page. "Each teacher will have his or her own page, where they can post homework assignments. We’re going to give every teacher and student in America their own home page."

"Who pays for it?" Kreiger asked. Crook explained that his company will use the Web pages to sell magazine subscriptions through the schools and eventually add other forms of commerce.

Kreiger was thrilled to see space for digital snapshots and an alumni center. "We’re a small private school. We don’t have a home page," she said. "It’s very valuable for us if alumni can see what we’re doing, and teachers can publish their homework assignments."

The massive school network, which already has 2 million Web pages and is being built jointly by IBM, Apple Computer and Vanderbilt University, is one of many next-generation dreams on display in the techno-tent at Inaugural-land.

The most popular exhibits were virtual-reality games aimed at kids. CCG’s MetaMedia’s CyberSoccer was a runaway hit. Children waited patiently for their chance to don a pink cotton glove that allowed them to interact with a virtual soccer ball. Both the child and nonexistent ball are projected onto big-screen TVs, where the crowd can watch the action.

A few booths away, a performance animation display projected participating children onto a huge screen to interact with Reginald, a virtual character resembling a giant red insect. Reginald’s animation was controlled by a man in a wet suit 15 feet away. In fact, what looked like a wet suit was a "data suit," which picks up magnetic field data projected from a big gray ball and feeds it into a Silicon Graphics computer. A video camera films the participating audience members and projects them on the screen with Reginald.

Way weird stuff.

There was simpler stuff, too. In the first two hours, 300 people stood in front of computers and typed e-mails to President Clinton that instantly flashed up on a movie screen overhead.

"I told him congratulations," said 14-year-old Marie Mills, of Lenexa, Kansas.

Gore shakes hands (Craig Herndon, The Washington Post)

AT 1:30 p.m, Vice President Gore and a retinue of Secret Service agents entered the tent. People fought for aisle positions (impolitely pushing aside PBS’s Lamb Chop) for a chance to shake the hand of the man who wants to wire every American school to the Internet and build a next-generation super-computer network.

So what will life be like in the next millennium, according to the Inaugural-land vendors? You can see for yourself, because this show is so virtual and over-the-edge that you don’t really have to be here to experience it. All the exhibitors have Web sites, offering slower-motion versions of their Mall displays. So you can take your own American Journey from home to learn about the vendors who are creating our techno-tomorrow.