Author: admin

Today I happened to look at the clock and noticed it was 3:14. And my first thought was that this was a Pi moment.

By that I mean something very specific: At some point during that minute, the time was exactly 3:14:15.92653589793… In other words, at some infinitely tiny moment, the time on the clock was exactly Pi.

What’s the big deal? you might well ask. After all, isn’t that true of lots of other numbers? There is a moment when the time on the clock is exactly two, and another when it’s exactly the square root of ten.

But Pi is special. There is even a day of the year — March 14 — devoted to Pi, and a moment of that day — a little before four in the afternoon — when all the infinite digits of Pi line up on both the calendar and the clock.

I have lots of friends who celebrate Pi Day, and I think that’s wonderful. But hey, why should we have to wait?

Why enjoy Pi only one day a year when we can have Pi every day?

Today I will be teaching my first class of the semester. A whole new crop of students, a whole new adventure.

This is the second and a half class that I have taught online over Zoom. The fall class was entirely online, and the second half of last year’s spring class was as well.

It is an odd mix of bad and good. The bad is that it is much more difficult to get to know the students well and to get a sense of how they are doing without being able to “read the room”.

The good is that we definitely acquire certain superpowers online, which is particularly useful for a technical subject such as computer science. Live coding becomes really powerful when everybody is online, so it becomes more of a master class.

But I would still give all that up in a heartbeat to be able to teach in person again. I am very much looking forward to the day when we can do that.

When a group of people get together in a physical room, they start to talk to each other in a distinctive way. When you listen to the happy chatter of people in a room, you know right away that they are engaged in that most human of activities, enjoying each other’s company.

You never hear that kind of joyful noise in a Zoom call. Something essential is simply missing.

It seems to me that a useful measure of the effectiveness of remote virtual co-presence would be the presence of just this sort of happy chatter. We could probably develop an instrument, perhaps employing machine learning, that would recognize this distinctive style of human communication.

This suggests an interesting potential method of instrumenting research in this area: For any given proposed solution to virtual co-presence, measure the degree to which party talk spontaneously emerges. Based on that measurement, continually iterate the experimental design.

I really love the latest Pixar film Soul. It works on so many levels.

But am I the only one who has noticed how much it borrows from the 1984 movie All of Me? I could go on and on about the great number of similarities and parallels between the two films.

You might just want to rent All of Me

Yesterday I posted a tongue-in-cheek answer to the question “When will everybody embrace VR?” For better or verse, I argued that it will happen when we can all share a drink together in VR worlds.

Well, maybe it’s sort of like that, but maybe not exactly. Perhaps the important thing to share will be a meal, or a cup of coffee.

What these experiences all have in common is that they transcend the virtual and involve a real commitment with our physical selves. When we imbibe food or drink, we are involving our biological self, and thereby committing to our sensed reality.

I am not sure exactly what will be the threshold for all of us agreeing to believe in a shared world which is actually a technologically enabled consensual hallucination. But I suspect it will involve some level of commitment which is not just of the mind, but also of the body.

When will people all embrace VR?
The answer is more simple than you think:
When no matter just how far apart we are
We all can get together for a drink

Today I changed my Zoom background. So instead of being virtually in our NYU lab, I am now in a pleasant traditional room with a lovely view of a tree outside the window.

But every time I jump into VR in my Oculus Quest 2, that background becomes irrelevant. But at some point, we will be having the equivalent of Zoom meetings in something a lot more like VR than video.

When that happens, what will be the equivalent of Zoom backgrounds? Will we all share the same virtual world? Or will we each bring our own vision of a virtual world into the shared social space?

Will I see us all in a Lego world while you see us basking on the beach in Hawaii? And if so, will that change the nature of our social interaction with each other?

I guess only time will tell.

We’re working on some VR research projects at NYU that we want to eventually release to the public. One thing we need to force ourselves to keep in mind is what I call the “number of clicks” problem.

When you are working on something for a long time, elbows deep, you tend to forget how many steps it takes to do things. After a fairly short while, you become a sort of expert.

You know, without thinking, “oh, I just click on this, then that, then that third thing.” It eventually becomes so second nature that you don’t even realize you are doing those things.

But other people are not experts. To anyone having the same experience for the first time, all of those clicks seem like work.

What’s worse, if someone gets even a single click wrong, they hit a dead end. That makes people feel stupid. And people don’t like feeling stupid.

So as we design things meant to be used by the public, we always need to keep in mind that our final version needs to be very accessible. Which means, ideally, no more than one click.

We all accumulate stuff. Books lamps, dishware, that weird lamp your aunt got you for your thirteenth birthday.

Stuff grows around us, in our closets, on our desk, within our bookshelves. Over time it grows, seemingly without rhyme or reason.

When the world starts to shift to technologically enabled mixed reality, some of that stuff will go digital. The toy puzzle on your desk might be a four dimensional hypercube, seemingly part of the physical world, but actually only a sequence of bits stored in the Cloud.

We will still accumulate stuff in our house or apartment, but the stuff will be different, perhaps odder and more mutable. We will continue to resist tossing it out, for sentimental reasons.

But there will be one dramatic change: When we pack up our things to move from one house to another, future stuff will be a heck of a lot easier to take with us.

Today I ventured out to a coffee shop that had a very impressive looking array of desserts. So I bought some and took them home.

Alas, none of them were at all tasty. It was a major disappointment.

But it got me thinking. If I were the head of marketing for this establishment, how would I handle this? Is there something positive I could say, which would also be true?

I’ve put some thought into this, and now I think I have it. Here is what I think would be a great slogan for this place:

“Try our desserts. They look even better than they taste!”