This is a magical scene. It looks like a contest between age and youth, taking place in a different universe. The scene seems frozen in time. What sort of game are they playing? What are the stakes for the outcome?

In truth, the answers are quite prosaic. The scene takes place in a small museum in New York City. There are a number of high-tech exhibits, some more successful than others. What you see here is not actually a game, but a new form of human-computer interface. The things that look like rocks actually have the same function as a computer mouse. As you move them to different areas of the display, different information is shown. Sort of a cross between a touch screen and a mouse, and certainly with the ruggedness required for something like this, left in out in public for people to play with.

The light from the screens gives an interesting aspect to the faces. The rendering in black and white lets us concentrate on the tonal values in the image. Much of the background has been removed by covering it with black to hide extraneous detail and focus your attention on the two people and the interesting shape of the table.

One of the problems with showing pictures on the web is that the screen is very much smaller than a print that would be shown in a gallery. In the larger print, there is plenty of room to show the entire background of a picture. Here, the image has been cropped to show the central area of interest.