Reality distortion field

TELEPHONY: Now watch cricket on your mobile phones, courtesy Airtel's Cricinfo Genie.

Cricket, live, on your mobile "" haven't we heard this one before? But Cricinfo Genie by Airtel claims to be the real McCoy "" in a sense. It enables the user to watch animated images of the actual game in progress. It's not exactly live action, but it's a close simulation of it.

Every time a ball is delivered, the computer application simulates what's happening on the cricket ground, reproducing the actual as-seen-on-TV images in a high-quality animated format.

Elaborates Hemant Sachdev, head of marketing, Airtel: "If Shoaib Akhtar comes in to ball to Dravid, the application will replicate an animated image of Akhtar bowling to Dravid. The sequence will follow the action... if the ball is hit for six, the animated character would do exactly the same."

Subscribers can watch the game ball by ball, though with a 30-second time lag. But there's a bigger glitch. Or several, rather. The software application operates on stock images of players, and these are not attempting to be photo-realistic.

The animation characters do not resemble the cricketers. To identify who's who, you need a scroll commentary on the screen (saying, for example, "Akhtar bowling to Dravid", or "Dravid hits Akhtar for six over mid-on").

Interested in joining the 15,000-odd phone users who are currently soft-testing the Genie's beta version? Or is "realism" not real enough for you unless it's "photo-realism"?