Author: admin

Sometime in the next few years we will get the augmented reality glasses that we really want. I’m not talking about earlier experiments like Google Glass, but something more like A.R. on your phone, placing virtual objects directly into the 3D world around you, as though they are part of reality.

When this happens, visual text will start to show up in face to face conversations. I am curious to know what sorts of text everyone will end up using.

This is not a technical question, but more of a psychological and sociological one. What sorts of text floating in the air will end up supporting and enhancing face to face conversation, rather than just being annoying or distracting.

In one extreme we may end up with emojis. In between is something like short Instant Messages or even single words and phrases. At the other extreme, we will read entire documents together, perhaps jumping from one doc to another via hyperlinks as our discussion progresses. Or we might end up using a mix of all of these things, depending on context.

Whatever it is, it will all seem perfectly normal to kids who will grow up with it. Hopefully that “normal” won’t include ads everywhere.

A few days ago I talked about reading through notable birthdays on Wikipedia. Since then I’ve been thinking about it a bit more.

The collective editorial voice of Wikipedia is continually making a choice about whose birthday gets mentioned. On any given date of birth, only a few people are considered notable enough for inclusion.

This is not surprising. If the list were allowed to grow unchecked, it would be essentially useless.

When you look at the resulting list, an interesting yet unsurprising pattern emerges: The older you are, the more important you need to be to make the list.

Go back a few centuries, and the bar becomes very high. Leonardo Da Vinci (April 15) and Johann Sebastian Bach (March 21) make the list, but many august and famous personages from their time do not.

But the recent list is far more inclusive. Essentially, the later you were born, the less important you need to be to make the cut.

I wonder whether this is something that goes beyond mere issues of cultural bias. It might have something to do with our fundamentally logarithmic way of perceiving things, just as our perception of intervals of musical pitch is on a logarithmic scale, not a linear scale.

We believe that we think of time linearly, but when it comes right down to it, our experience of history is not based on equal intervals of time, but rather on equal ratios of time. Our collective consciousness creates intervals of perception that grow progressively larger as we peer further into the past.

I think there should be a rule on Zoom that all 30 minute meetings should actually be 25 minutes, with a 5 minute “rest” period between one meeting and the next. Similarly, all hour long meetings should actually be 50 minutes.

There should be a software feature that enforces this. Maybe it can be a setting that is turned on by default.

The way things work right now, it seems that we are expected to jump from one meeting to the next — to the next, to the next — without any expectation of a break in between. I don’t think that is good for either the mind or the body.

Eventually, in the far future, I am waiting for the technology to advance to the point where during those five minute breaks, Zoom will serve us all fine chocolates and hot cocoa. Now that would really be human-centered technology!

Today, as is my habit, I went to the Wikipedia and looked up what notable people were born on this day of the year. I have an informal contest going with myself to see how many of the names I recognize.

Most of the names are new to me, but every once in a while something catches my eye, and I end up looking up somebody who has led a fascinating life. Since this is the Wikipedia, starting with birthdays generally leads me to eventually read about some fascinating topic or other. Before you know it, an hour has gone by.

I wonder how many other people regularly go through the Wikipedia birthdays. I am pretty sure that I am far from the only one.

Columbia, Helena, Raleigh, Pierre,
So many cool baby names are in there.
Austin and Madison, Cheyenne and Lincoln,
Montgomery — these are great names, I am thinkin’.
Olympia’s regal, Frankfort’s exotic,
Phoenix is lovely, if somewhat quixotic.
Capital cities sure sound very pretty
But please do not name your next kid Carson City.

Having recently memorized the list of 50 United States in alphabetical order, I thought it would be a good exercise to memorize the corresponding state capitals. It’s something I’d always wanted to do, and I remember being a bit jealous when growing up of those kids who could tell you the capital of any state.

So today I set about doing it, and I discovered the wonders of scaffolded learning. Since I already know the state names in order, it turned out to take very little time to memorize their corresponding state capitals.

Some of them I already knew (like Albany, since I come from New York). Others were surprising enough to me (like Dover, Delaware), that they were — ironically — particularly easy to remember.

It turned out to take no more than about 30 minutes to commit all the state capitals to memory. Now I can go through the states in my head in alphabetical order, from Alaska through Wyoming, and rattle off their respective capital cities with confidence, from Montgomery through Cheyenne.

But please don’t ask me to list the state capitals in alphabetical order. I guess there’s only so much you can get from scaffolded learning.

Like many people, when I was a kid I read Edwin Abbot’s wonderful novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, written in 1884. Essentially, Abbot posits a universe that has only two dimensions, and then explores what it would be like to live in such a world.

I imagine that when people in Flatland eventually developed computers, their user interfaces would be one dimensional, since in 2D you can only see things along a line. But eventually somebody would start thinking about the crazy notion of providing fully 2D computer interfaces, in the spirit of our own recent ideas of immersive virtual reality.

When that happens, I wonder whether there would be pushback. Maybe people would think that going full 2D is just too crazy, and they would end up settling on something more practical, like 1.5D — perhaps lines with layers of depth.

As long as we are discussing 2.5D interfaces, it’s only fair to talk about some of the issues with collaborating in 2.5D. In particular, imagine you are sitting across a virtual table from somebody in VR.

The two of you are in remote locations, but VR gives you both the illusion that you are physically face to face. Hiroshi Ishii published a technical paper nearly 30 years ago presenting a system called ClearBoard, in which the two people see each other as though they are looking through a mirror.

By showing the other person in mirror reversal, ClearBoard allowed both collaborators to properly read text on a screen that appears to hover in the space between them. This is something we can’t actually do in physical reality, because in the real world one of the two people would end up seeing the text backwards.

In our Future Reality Lab we’ve been playing with these sorts of interfaces. But as we have moved from 2D to 2.5D, we’ve encountered some issues.

In particular, what happens when we are both looking at a 3D object like a cube? Should we both be looking at the same face of the cube?

Or should you always be looking at the front face when I am looking at the rear face? And if I bring an object toward me to look at it more closely, should that object become more near to you as well, or further away from you as it would be in real life?

I don’t know that there is a single correct answer to these questions. One of the exciting things about doing research in this space is that we are forced to think hard about many things we’ve probably never thought about before.

It was fascinating to watch the dueling headlines yesterday. Two wildly different realities were competing for our collective attention.

On the one hand, there was an historic turnabout in legislative power. Where the Republicans had dominated the Federal government, suddenly the Democrats were in control of the Senate, as well as the House of Representatives and the presidency.

Yet the competing narrative, based entirely on a fake narrative, ended up pushing reality right off the front page. For several hours, a sort of deadly clown convention grabbed the attention of an astonished and mortified world.

And the head clown, the one who called the circus into town in the first place, didn’t even have the courage to show up. Sad.

Hopefully the side show is now over, and grown-ups can get on with the serious business of cleaning up the mess we are now in. Unfortunately that may take a while, considering that this mess has been in the making for four years.

Wow, it’s actually happening today. A group of people are trying to stop the democratic handover from one duly elected administration to the next.

They are literally trying to storm the barricades to invade the Capitol building. I would not have expected that anyone would be so stupid as to lightly throw away the democratic process. Democracy may be messy, but it’s a whole lot better than any of the alternatives.

These people may be under the impression that living in a functioning democracy is a natural right, rather than a hard-won privilege. If so, I invite them to try living in an actual fascist dictatorship, and find out first-hand about the alternative.