Heraldry == Profit?
Oct. 7th, 2004 03:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swestrupHoly Fuck-a-duck, but I think I just found a profitable business model based on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
_sps_ and my proposed Active Heraldic Extensions for Internet Browsers. Not only that, I can see how to integrate it with my design for the Intelligent Heraldic Database and with a points-of-difference engine that an SCA member once asked me to look into for him.
I don't know how much money I could make off of this idea, but considering that Active Heraldic Extensions were a joke and the Intelligent Heraldic Database was an idea I had when I was still in High School some time around 1980, I'm amazed.
I doubt that the details would make sense to anyone else but_sps_ so I'll just put it this way:
Imagine a website that can let you interactively design a piece of heraldry. Either a standard shield, or the whole full thingamy with supporters and mottos and crowns and whatnot. It would allow both old-school static heraldry, or the new active kind that can move and is designed for video displays. For a small fee you can register the thing with the New Internet Guild of Heralds and be presented with its heraldic description as well as a rendered image in one (or more) file formats of your choosing. Once its been registered, folks can look up your name and find your heraldic symbols, or can do searches for various symbols and find your identity. As in days of old, no one will be allowed to register an image that comes within a few points of similarity of your own. For a small extra fee, you can order it embazoned on a mug or cap or something.
Now, the REAL money making scheme is that, just as in days of old, there are combinations of colors/patterns/symbols/whatever that are forbidden except by express permission of the king (which am I). So, you convince an RPG video game company to license a set of icons/patterns/symbols/whathaveyou and forbid anyone from using them unless you are presented with a cryptographically-signed unlock token that was issued by the game and bound to that registered user. So, if you want to get the skull-with-meteors-for-eyes symbol on your personal mug, you have to defeat the second-level warlord in the game, etc. You can cause envy and awe by having symbols and patterns on your mug that indicate you had to frag 7000 other gamers to unlock it...
Finally, since we put the active heraldry in there at the moment, the instant someone has a way of wrapping an OLED screen around a mug and making it dishwasher safe, you can buy a mug with an animated version of your heraldic symbol.
_sps_ and my proposed Active Heraldic Extensions for Internet Browsers. Not only that, I can see how to integrate it with my design for the Intelligent Heraldic Database and with a points-of-difference engine that an SCA member once asked me to look into for him.I don't know how much money I could make off of this idea, but considering that Active Heraldic Extensions were a joke and the Intelligent Heraldic Database was an idea I had when I was still in High School some time around 1980, I'm amazed.
I doubt that the details would make sense to anyone else but
_sps_ so I'll just put it this way:Imagine a website that can let you interactively design a piece of heraldry. Either a standard shield, or the whole full thingamy with supporters and mottos and crowns and whatnot. It would allow both old-school static heraldry, or the new active kind that can move and is designed for video displays. For a small fee you can register the thing with the New Internet Guild of Heralds and be presented with its heraldic description as well as a rendered image in one (or more) file formats of your choosing. Once its been registered, folks can look up your name and find your heraldic symbols, or can do searches for various symbols and find your identity. As in days of old, no one will be allowed to register an image that comes within a few points of similarity of your own. For a small extra fee, you can order it embazoned on a mug or cap or something.
Now, the REAL money making scheme is that, just as in days of old, there are combinations of colors/patterns/symbols/whatever that are forbidden except by express permission of the king (which am I). So, you convince an RPG video game company to license a set of icons/patterns/symbols/whathaveyou and forbid anyone from using them unless you are presented with a cryptographically-signed unlock token that was issued by the game and bound to that registered user. So, if you want to get the skull-with-meteors-for-eyes symbol on your personal mug, you have to defeat the second-level warlord in the game, etc. You can cause envy and awe by having symbols and patterns on your mug that indicate you had to frag 7000 other gamers to unlock it...
Finally, since we put the active heraldry in there at the moment, the instant someone has a way of wrapping an OLED screen around a mug and making it dishwasher safe, you can buy a mug with an animated version of your heraldic symbol.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-07 08:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-07 09:40 am (UTC)Of course, it gets a little better if the rewards are differences applied to a basic design which people will want to share between games (does attaching it to an online nym make matters better or worse?).
no subject
Date: 2004-10-07 10:33 am (UTC)One of the good things about this plan is that the heralds have been thinking about this for a large number of years, and there seems to be some good ideas about how to go about handling this sort of problem. Also, if I wanted to get serious about this, I would need to engage a graphic artist/designer to help work out the (graphic aspect of the) licensing angle, although I could probably start things off with just scan-converted heraldic artwork from the net and books.