In an effort to make holiday postcards more interesting, Pamela Barber
of California has filed a British patent application (2 235 347) on a video
system which lets a tourist combine a posed snapshot with a pre-programmed
landscape background of their choice.
Barber envisages a kiosk near every famous sight. The kiosk has a video
screen, on which the customer can display a series of landscape shots stored
in video memory. A video camera in the kiosk blends a portrait picture of
the tourist with the background.
The tourist presses a button and the composite image is temporarily
stored in the memory. A colour printer then produces a copy of the image
on a postcard.
Barber also suggests that with her system people can send ‘having a
wonderful time’ postcards from exotic lands, when in fact all they did was
find a video postcard kiosk with exotic backgrounds.
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