Author: admin

Have you ever suddenly locked eyes with another person? Even if it only lasts a moment, it is a powerful sensation.

We can tell when somebody is looking right into our eyes even if they are all the way across a room. It is quite remarkable that we can do this, considering the tolerances involved.

At some point wearable technology will advance far enough that our devices will know exactly where we are looking. When that happens, the computer network will know when two people are looking directly into each others’ eyes.

Which means that eye contact will become a way to trigger various other modes of communication. For example, we might be able to speak softly under our breath, and be heard only by the person we are locking eyes with.

The possibilities for more powerful forms of communication are endless. And at some point it will all just be taken for granted.

The software that I let you play with yesterday and the week before is not an isolated thing. It’s part of a larger set of ideas that we’ve been discussing in our Future Reality Lab at NYU about what the world might look like after everyone has those fully functional XR glasses about ten years from now.

Ever since I was a little kid and read Harold and the Purple Crayon, I thought to myself “Why can’t we just sketch things in the world to make them?” After playing around with this idea for a few years, I reached the conclusion that sketching in 3D space is really difficult, whereas sketching images of 3D things on a 2D surface is much easier and more natural.

So the general thought is that one day everyone will just be able to make quick and easy 2D sketches of whatever 3D thing they are trying to describe. Given the right technology to support all of this, that thing will then show up in the world and come to life for everyone to see.

Assuming everyone remembers to bring their glasses.

This week is unusual because instead of doing something new, I am posting a refinement of what I did last week.

I took out all of the upside and backwards reflections, and added more different glyphs.

I also added an on-line tutorial. You can now click on any glyph to see how it drawn. I think this approach is more practical.

You can check it out here.

May the Fourth be with you!

Computers are not just a medium for creating art. They are a medium for creating media for creating art.

Instead of building tools and instruments only in the physical world, we can use computers to make up our own alternate worlds, in which a far greater number of tools and instruments become possible.

But does this actually advance art? When we vastly increase the possibility space of new media, are we actually serving the purposes of art?

I have no idea what the right answer is. But it seems like an important question to ask.

I am one of those people who starts projects and never finishes them. Sometimes I will spend days upon days on something, just to decide that I’m not quite happy with it.

Which means that I’ve got lots of half finished orphan projects on my computer. Some of them were surely just a waste of time. But it’s always possible that some of them might one day prove useful.

Every once in a while I’ll see a presentation of cool work by somebody else that somehow reminds me of one of my sad little orphans. Then I will dig up that project and look at it again.

And every once in a while when that happens, I’ll get inspired and actually finish one of those things and release it to the world. And then it is an orphan no more.

Many years ago, before there was a Web, there was group text chat. The larger population didn’t pay much attention, but if you were a certain kind of computer nerd, chatrooms were essential.

In my first encounters with chatrooms, one acronym jumped out at me. I would see it over and over again, and I couldn’t figure out, from context, what it meant.

I’m speaking of STtNG. People in chatrooms would talk to each other about it with a sort of knowing insider’s knowledge.

Eventually I learned what it stood for. And that meant, I guess, that I had joined that elite club of insiders.

But meanwhile, time moved on. The acronym STtNG has long since fallen out of use, even among the elite of computer nerds. You can Google it of course, but the term is no longer common knowledge among the digerati.

So it seems that STtNG has journeyed through its effective lifecycle. I wonder how many other acronyms have gone through a similar journey.

Today I saw two different performances of the same play. First, I went to the matinee, and then I went back in the evening.

Unlike a movie, no two performances of a play are exactly the same. A subtle shift in timing and emphasis can create very different experiences from one performance to the next.

There’s just something so amazing about seeing something that is not exactly like anything anyone has ever seen before or will ever see again. There’s really nothing like live theater.

For some reason today I found myself thinking about a parallel between The Simpsons and Interview with the Vampire. Admittedly an odd choice for parallels, but there you have it.

To me, one of the most affecting moments in the film adaptation of Interview the Vampire is when Kirsten Dunst, playing the eternally 10-year-old vampire Claudia, cuts off her hair in defiance. An old soul trapped for all time in a child’s body, she is tired of being adored by everyone but taken seriously by no one.

To her horror, when she wakes up the next morning, her long hair is back exactly the way it was. She realizes in that moment that she cannot escape her fate.

Then there is the moment in one episode of The Simpsons when Homer is preparing to go on a romantic date with Marge. In front of the bathroom mirror, he shaves off his five o’clock shadow — the only time we’ve ever seen him without it.

Homer rubs his chin appreciatively, and says to his reflection, with great self-satisfaction, “Smooth as a baby’s bottom!” A few short seconds later, his five o’clock shadow pops back on his face, fully formed.

One moment is tragic, the other comic, and the two fictional worlds could not be more different. And yet, in dramatic terms, they are exactly the same moment.

Which is awesome.

Since I’ve started Widget Wednesdays, my productivity has definitely gone up. Committing to posting a program a week has been good for me.

I find that days before each Wednesday, I find myself wondering what I might post next. I begin exploring possibilities in my mind, and inevitably a story starts to take shape.

It’s really all about committing to a deadline. I know that it’s an artificial deadline, but even artificial deadlines can be very productive.

I’ve been working on a graphics project that involves letting people make freehand drawings and then turning those drawings into various shapes. In order to test the core algorithm and explain it to my students, I implemented a very simple stand-along version of it.

The goal was to make the simplest possible version of the algorithm, so that the whole thing consists of only a few hundred lines of Javascript code. That way the students can easily look through the code to understand the algorithm without wading through thousands of lines of code within some larger software program.

The algorithm doesn’t care what set of drawings it recognizes, but this evening, for simplicity, I decided to make a little test case that consists of only the capital English letters.

One cool thing is that it recognizes your letter whether you draw it forward, backward, upside down or mirror flipped, and it will morph even a crude drawing into a nice looking letter.

You can try it for yourself here.