sit London. sit. staaay. good city.The BBC has, of this week, start­ed using the Weath­er­scape XT graph­ics pack­age cre­at­ed by Welling­ton-based Met­Ser­vice (the only com­mer­cial­ly run state weath­er fore­cast­ing ser­vice in the world, would­n’t you know?).

You’ll see the new graph­ics if you tune into the hourly weath­er updates on BBC inter­na­tion­al. They’ll look famil­iar to New Zealand view­ers who have been see­ing the 3D ‘Fly­bys’ and ‘Hov­ers’ on TV1 and TV3 for the last few years, but, for the Brits, and, indeed, a decent pro­por­tion of the rest of the world, this sort of tech­no­log­i­cal wiz­ardry has come as a bit of a shock. From the BBC ‘Have your say’ page, come these quotes from dis­mayed Brits…

Sor­ry but the con­stant zoom­ing around makes me feel sea­sick and leaves lit­tle time to digest what is going on in any one region before zoom­ing off some­where else.
Ian Kirk, Poole, UK

The old sym­bols were clear and well under­stood by every­one (includ­ing the visu­al­ly impaired) — now, this smudgy fudgey mess makes it hard to work out what is going on, and the motion around the coun­try is sick-mak­ing.
Stu­art, Edin­burgh, Scot­land

Sor­ry, I don’t like it — I want clear con­cise infor­ma­tion. What on earth is the point of doing pseu­do 3D maps? If the weath­er was 3D I’d under­stand it but I’m not a pilot — I have my feet firm­ly placed at ground lev­el. 2D is just fine, very clear and very con­cise. Anoth­er exam­ple of tech­no­log­i­cal mad­ness.
Stu­art Quick, Man­ches­ter

“If the weath­er was 3D”? Real­ly. (And we hope the peo­ple get­ting motion sick­ness from watch­ing a short 3D ani­ma­tion on tel­ly get what­ev­er prob­lem they’re suf­fer­ing from seen to.) All this, and dozens more com­plaints, after just one day of broad­cast­ing. Ahh, the Brits. Did any­one men­tion ‘nation­al stereo­types’? No, thought not.

Our favourite quote was from anoth­er dis­cus­sion forum run­ning red-hot with crit­i­cism of the new sys­tem, where Chris, a man pre­sum­ably au fait with the vagaries of Eng­lish weath­er, laments…

cloudy, maybe rain, although it might snow. Or, potentially, sunshine.Does this mean the death of the British Weath­er Sym­bol? You know that black cloud with a bit of sun behind it and a rain drop and a snow drop com­ing out of it? It cov­ered all bases that one.

Any­way, also keep an eye out for more Welling­ton-based cre­ative-IT suc­cess­es in the near future, with Sid­he Inter­ac­tive going from strength-to-strength in the high­ly com­pet­i­tive con­sole games mar­ket (a new release due from them soon for the PSP hand­held), and some com­pa­ny called Weta Work­shop is involved in what looks like to be quite an inter­est­ing project out there in Mirar­mar.