Author: admin

I have been bingeing The Big Bang Theory, planning on going through all 11 seasons, every episode in order. It is great fun!

There is so much real physics in this show that it occurs to me it would be a great launching point for an educational opportunity. Somebody should build a series of science books around this show, with each new theory mentioned in the series being an entry point for a real introduction to the actual underlying science.

It seems to me that with such a friendly introduction, many people might be interested in learning more, especially if the books were well written and made very accessible. I wonder whether somebody has already done something like that.

If not, maybe somebody should.

Just because you can be in VR doesn’t mean you should be in VR. As our lab is getting serious about working together in virtual worlds, we are appreciating the power of asymmetric interfaces.

Some things work incredibly well in virtual reality. For example, it’s far easier to walk around a 3D environment while selecting and gathering things if you are completely immersed in a virtual world.

But some things are simply easier with an old fashioned screen and keyboard. Typing, for example. Why try to reimagine typing text when there is already an incredibly efficient way of doing it?

So we are starting to think in terms of team members who are seeing and interacting with the same virtual world through very different lenses. Some might be wearing VR glasses, others might be sitting at a laptop computer and typing away. Still others might be walking around holding an iPad and using multitouch gestures to make things happen.

The whole paradigm of “one size fits all” is inherently broken. After all, nobody is arguing which is better — an airplane, a bus, a car, a bicycle or walking with your own two feet. Each is best for some transportation tasks, and really bad for others.

Let’s embrace socially shared VR, but also embrace diversity. The future belongs to asymmetric interfaces.

In a few months we may be emerging from this pandemic, and people will be able to go back to meeting in person. But I seriously doubt that things will go back to exactly the way they were.

We now know that some things that work better on-line. Certain kinds of collaboration and information sharing are best when people are meeting over Zoom, or in VR, or possible in platforms that are still in development.

So I suspect that in the post-COVID world we will end up with a different mix of real and virtual. It won’t be the same as what we have been forced to go through this past year, but it won’t be exactly the same as what we had before that.

Just as people have learned to mix real life with the Web and with SmartPhones, I suspect we will end up mixing real life with new kinds of virtual meeting spaces. Whatever the mix might be, I hope it ends up bringing people closer together in the ways that really matter.

Since yesterday’s post I have been trying to imagine in my head how I would build a software tool/experience for learning the periodic table of the elements in virtual reality. It’s not so much that I want that particular tool, but rather I am trying to figure out whether it would confer unique advantages to the learning process.

It would be wonderful if it should turn out that a well designed learning tool in immersive VR is fundamentally better than what we have had until now. I am thinking that this particular learning task is right on the border between sufficiently challenging and sufficiently contained that we could do proper controlled experiments to figure out how well it works.

In a future post I might come back with some ideas about what such a learning experience would be like, and how we might instrument it so that we can properly assess its effectiveness relative to other approaches.

The other day somebody asked me if I knew the Greek alphabet, and I realized I didn’t. I managed to get just five letters in — to ε — and then I got stuck, which is not very impressive.

So I set about memorizing the whole thing, and it was surprisingly easy. For one thing, you can clearly see how our own alphabet is a variant, and that makes things loads easier.

Entire runs of letters essentially look like ABCDE or KLMN or OPRSTU. Once you see that, you’re about 80% of the way to having the whole thing memorized.

Also, there are only twenty four letters. I found myself learning it as six runs of four: First α, β, γ, δ, then ε, ζ, η, θ, all the up to the final φ, χ, ψ, ω.

When you break it down like that, it goes very quickly. And that’s pretty much the alpha and the omega of the Greek alphabet.

Now I want to memorize all of the elements in the periodic table. That might take a little longer.

There will come a point when putting on your VR glasses and talking with a friend who is physically somewhere else will feel more “present” than talking with them when they are right in front of you. I don’t know how long it will be before that happens, but sooner or later it will. That will be the crossover point.

There will be two elements to that future experience. The first will be the sense that the person is right there in front of you, with proper 3D perspective and perfectly correct spatial audio. You will be able to get all of the subtleties eye movement, body language and facial expression, like you now do when talking to somebody face to face.

The second element will be all of the super powers that you will both have. Objects and text that float in the air, the ability to modify your appearance at will, being able to instantly transport yourselves into any location. These are just a few of the new powers will will have in future “virtually present” face to face conversations, that we will eventually take for granted.

There will be other future super powers that nobody has yet thought of, but they will. A good analogy might be the Apple App Store. Many of the apps didn’t occur to people right away, but in hindsight they seemed obvious.

There will likely be a similar learning curve involved here, as we all gradually get used to the possibilities. Who knows — maybe you or one of your children will end up coming up with a killer app for the future experiential economy.

To continue the thought…

If there were a deeper world than this, wouldn’t there also be a deeper world than that?

When do we just give up and say it’s turtles all the way down?

There is a deeper world than this.

If only I can find it.

I am pretty sure it was around here somewhere…

I read an essay today that started with the line “Two scientists walk into a bar.” The author then goes on to describe a vast diversity among the sciences. Whereas some sciences focus on very concrete studies of data, others are built around a very high level of abstraction.

There is a sort of continuum at work here. Biologists deal with concrete data, while chemists work at a more abstract level. Physics is even more abstract, and mathematics is the most abstract of all.

I was disappointed to see that the essay did not actually contain a “two scientists walk into a bar” joke. I thought the essay would be stronger if there were an actual joke that proved its point.

So I wrote one:

A mathematician and a biologist walk into a bar.

“Why are you and I hanging out together?” the mathematician asks. “Of all the scientific fields, mine is the most abstract, and yours is the most concrete.”

“That’s true,” the biologist replies, “but we have Chemistry between us.”

In my fantasies of what I want for future computer interfaces, I keep thinking about smart clay. That’s my go-to term for something that doesn’t exist, but that I would really like to exist.

I would like to be able to pick up a lump of clay, mold into the shape of a creature, and then have that creature come to life. The creature should understand, based on the shape I made, that this is its head, that’s an arm, these are its legs.

When I poke in little indentations for the eyes, it then knows how to look at things. If I give it a nice little paunch of a belly, it should waddle appropriately.

And if I make two such creatures out of clay, they will happily play together with each other — and with me.

Is that asking too much?