Fountain Musings

By way of BoingBoing comes the DataFountain.   Simple, seductive - use fountains to communicate passers-by information about the world.  In this case, currency exchange rates.  It is often attractive to leverage the aesthetic contours of worlds to communicate ideas and information.  In the real world, however, materials and physics can be an impediment.    Virtual worlds, on the other hand...   Yet I am hard-pressed to think of any instance where any sort of in-world gauge, kiosk, headline, any surrogate is used in a virtual world to communicate something substantial about the state of that world.    Datafountains would be cool...  But why stop there, when the trees sway in that copse yonder ... they almost speak...