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.