Author: admin

I went to the dentist today, and at some point I realized that the time of the appointment was 2:30. The dentist didn’t know why I suddenly started to laugh.

if you or your loved ones or spouse
are designing a virtual house
    do your work in VR
    because — hey — there you are!
do not bother with tablet or mouse

Having rewatched Funny Girl after many years, I am thinking about the entire oeuvre of Barbra Streisand. In many ways she was tragically before her time.

Films like Yentl, Prince of Tides and The Mirror has Two Faces are extraordinary. Had they been directed by a man, they would have been far more widely talked about, examined, analyzed and copied.

Instead, they were all received with a kind of cultural resentment. In the general critical discourse, there seemed to be a troubling undertone of “Who does she think she is anyway?”

Like Ida Lupino before her, Streisand has been an auteur female filmmaker in an American film industry that couldn’t conceive of such a thing. Until recently, a masterful writer / director / actor who happened to be female was simply ignored by the Academy.

In Europe things were different. A Vargas or Wertmüller was widely recognized as an original voice — ironically, even in the U.S. But America did not extend the same courtesy to its own.

Hopefully we will continue to evolve. Alas, some kinds of progress are woefully slow. And that is tragic, partly because brilliant young artists will be discouraged from enriching our lives, simply because of meaningless and destructive cultural preconceptions.

Just rewatched the 1968 movie Funny Girl. Barbra Streisand was amazing. Omar Sharif was amazing. The movie was amazing.

The song “People Who Need People” is running through my head. They really don’t make movies like they used to. Why can’t they?

if you found a world
where magic was possible,
what would you do first?

To follow up on yesterday’s post, what is the logical conclusion of audio-only mixed reality? For a while now, I’ve thought it would be very good spatial audio for telecommunication.

Imagine you have an excellent pair of earbuds connected to a powerful computer. Both your head movement and the physical characteristics of the surrounding physical world are fed to that computer.

The computer computes an audio channel which makes it sound exactly as though another person is in the room with you. You can hear your friend talking, walking or speaking, exactly as though they were physically present.

The only wrinkle is that your friend is invisible. You can do this with multiple friends at the same time — you will all hear each other perfectly well as though you are standing next to each other or sitting around a table together, but you will all be invisible to each other.

Someday soon, as technology supports mass adoption of such capabilities, we may come to take this mode of communication for granted. It will simply seem like a normal way to converse with our friends and colleagues.

I was chairing the Visions session of the ACM/UIST conference today, and one of the speakers talked about ubiquitous future mixed reality glasses. Somebody asked him a question about seeing versus hearing.

The question was whether the visual sense would dominate the experience. The answer from the speaker was an emphatic yes.

Now I am on a conference call with researchers at Bose that touches on how to create compelling spatial audio for future wearables. So here the focus is clearly on what everyone hears versus what everyone sees.

I must say that I’ve been having a far more compelling experience in the audio-only High Fidelity experience than the highly visual experiences of AltSpace and similar VR apps. Such apps all include spatial audio, but they don’t focus on it.

Maybe there is something to be said for simply hearing other people in a mixed reality teleconference without the distraction of also seeing their avatars. That might be a great question for a research study!

Yesterday somebody told me about a recipe for beet pasta. That’s pasta which is made from beets, which I think is a perfectly reasonable idea.

But I misunderstood. I thought they were saying “Beat pasta”. I suddenly had all sorts of visions in my head of Allen Ginsberg reciting poetry around a theme of starchy italian food.

Or Neal Cassidy on the road with Jack Kerouac deconstructing the American dream while sharing a plate of ziti, maybe with some nice sauce. You could build an entire theme restaurant around this stuff.

Of course what I had heard made no sense on an objective level, but in those few seconds I had somehow constructed an entire alternate reality in my head. So when discovered that we were actually talking about “beet pasta”, I was downright disappointed.

In my mind that alternate reality lingers, and part of me still wants to open a Beat pasta theme restaurant. The first dish on the menu would definitely be Spaghetti Ferlinghetti.

There are some objects I have in my possession which I treasure. Not because they have some intrinsic monetary value, but because they were given to me by somebody important to me.

Such an object might be a gift from an old friend, or a favorite uncle. Perhaps it was from someone I have not seen in years, or who has sadly passed away.

In each case, the thing I hold in my hand represents the person, in an oddly powerful way. The object serves as a kind of proxy, a totem of the bond between us.

Our society has now entered a time when people are physically separated, not by choice but rather by sad circumstance. I wonder whether that will have an effect on the gifting of physical objects.

We may end up developing a greater craving for such objects, and a new renewed appreciation for their power. When we can no longer experience the physical comfort of the person they represent, such objects might end up having an even greater value.

Eventually, if this forced separation persists, our society might develop a new emotional economy around the exchange of symbolic physical objects. It would be but a pale echo of what was lost, yet an echo with the power to resonate in our hearts.

Not that long ago, USB-C connectors were an oddity. If you had a device that expected one, you needed to remember to bring a special adaptor, to connect with the rest of the digital world.

But today I noticed that all the digital devices I use every day are USB-C connected. That includes my Apple MacBook computer, my Google Pixel phone and my Facebook Oculus Quest 2.

Whenever lots of major competing corporations can agree on something, there is most likely a good reason. And as a consumer, I certainly find it convenient to standardize on one form factor — and also not to have to worry about which way to plug it in. 🙂

I wonder what was going on behind the scenes to make that transition happen so quickly and pervasively.