Linz

I came here because I had an extra day to use before I had reserved my room in Vienna. The only reason I considered coming here was the fact that Linz is on the train route from Salzburg to Vienna.

As it turns out, though, this place has an amazing VR/pervasive computing museum. There's a VR flight simulator where I was suspended in the air and controlled my flight with hand motions. It wasn't all that user friendly, but it was kind of cool to be flying over Linz. They also have exhibits of modern research into RFIDs, human-computer interaction, and digital imagery. One floor had several that involved small plastic "memory devices." For instance, these small green cubes could be inserted in to a video recorder, which would then record five seconds of video "into the cube." When I then took the cube back to this table, the video would be shown in the 3D virtual world at the location of where the cube was placed on the table. In reality, the video would be saved on a server and associated with the pattern on the top of the cube. The cool thing is the software that can, in real time, analyze the video from the camera above the table to find the location of the cube at which to put the video in the display on the wall.

Another exhibit showed several actors who were asked to smile for a camera for like an hour or some god-awfully long time. Software would analyze their facial expressions and beep at them any time they put no feeling behind the smile. (Check out the pics of me flying... ;-))

The bad thing about Linz, though, is the hostels here. There are two: one good one way out in the suburbs, and a smaller one closer to the city center. They both are only open after 5pm... which I didn't know. And I carried my pack all the way out to the good one in the morning to find that out (I hid it there for the day, though). I came back later to find that it was booked for the day, which left me with the other hostel. My first clue was the fact that it was only open for two hours at night. The sketchy (but nice), old man took up me to this room, and, when he opened the door, I was immediately hit with the rancid smell of BO, which I think came from the fat guy who was apparently living in the room. I did my best to keep my mind off of what could possibly living on the shower floor and facet handles while I took a shower before going for a walk to use up the rest of my night... I was hard pressed to find anything to do, though. Needless to say, I left for Vienna as soon as I could this morning.