Author: admin

I am here at the sixth annual Facebook Oculus Connect conference in San Jose, also known as OC6. It’s interesting for me, being a person primarily interested in physically co-located experiences, to attend a conference that is focused on people who are using VR to communicate at a distance.

The goals are very different, yet the enabling technologies have a large amount of overlap. The Oculus Quest headset was designed mainly for people who are not in the same location as the people they are interacting with. Yet it turns out to be a really great device for co-located shared immersive experiences.

I was very happy to see that they are finally integrating hand and finger recognition into the Quest. It’s a technology that has been around for quite a while, but it wasn’t available until now on consumer level VR headsets.

I also learned about their vision of the shared future. There is a forthcoming product called Horizon which will allow people to hang out together in a shared virtual world, and even build elements of that world for themselves. It’s sort of like if High Fidelity were not open source.

But here’s the thing: Because the VR sensors can only track your head and hands, the system has no idea what is going on below your waist. In other words, they can only reconstruct your body pose from the waist up.

I find this to be problematic. Even though I understand that there is something profoundly powerful about people across the world being able to share a sense of physical presence.

Alas, it seems that in the future, we will all be hanging out in a world where nobody is wearing pants.

Reach out your hand if your cup be empty
If your cup is full may it be again
Let it be known there is a fountain
That was not made by the hands of man

There is a road, no simple highway
Between the dawn and the dark of night
And if you go, no one may follow
That path is for your steps alone

For this is all a dream we dreamed one afternoon

— RIP Robert Hunter, 1941-2019

Today on our Future Reality Lab blog I gave an example of how adding constraints to a problem can make the problem easier to solve. I suspect the principle generalizes.

Sometimes, when you have a task before you, the hardest part is simply knowing where to begin. In such cases, taking the first step can be very challenging.

By reducing the set of possibilities, constraints can help you to take that first step. The way I like to describe this is by inverting an old Zen koan:

A journey of a single step begins with a thousand miles.

My mom is in the process of moving, so today I helped sift through the many decades of books that have accumulated in the house. Each book needed to be sorted into “keep”, “throw away”, “give away”, or “save for particular family member”.

It was a strange feeling to watch my own childhood and early adult experiences pass before my eyes, and to hold pieces of those experiences in my hands. Memories I had not engaged with for quite a few decades came roaring back.

This was a very different experience from sorting through somebody else’s collection of fantasy and science fiction books. For one thing, I was catching glimpses of the various stages of my very own existence.

There was that essay I wrote in college, a copy of my very first published conference paper, my high school graduation yearbook, my favorite book of magic tricks. Each item by itself seemed a bit random, but taken together they started to form a mosaic of my life.

I think this may be as close as I ever get to an actual working time machine.

In my kitchen I have a microwave oven that was manufactured thirty two years ago. It was made in a year when Duran Duran was on top of the charts, when martial law had just ended in Taiwan, when Prozac was approved by the FDA, when the very first version of Photoshop was released, when our world was Rick Rolled for the first time ever.

I have been using this microwave oven pretty much every day for many years, and it runs perfectly, which I find astonishing. After all, we currently live in a world where electronic items are meant to be disposable.

An entire segment of our economy is based on the principle of designing and manufacturing things so that they will break down. After all, if some piece of technology lasts forever, how are you going to get people to buy another one?

Yet clearly the designers of this microwave oven did not get the memo. It appears they designed it to last forever.

I realize that by using a piece of equipment that just keeps on functioning perfectly, decade after decade, I am doing grievous harm to our economy. By using this microwave to heat up my food, I am undoubtedly taking food out the mouths of hard working people.

Should I be feeling guilty about this? After all, how are we going to keep people employed if things that we buy simply keep, you know, working?

Today a friend told me about comedy flowing upstream. What I mean by that is that usually we think of comedy flowing downstream — from professional comedians to ordinary people like you and me.

But it seems that a funny incident within a blog post of mine from about a year ago was relayed to the granddaughter of Mel Brooks.

Please understand that to me Mel Brooks is a god. If he is Mount Olympus, the rest of us are just hanging out in a bar in downtown Kokkinopilos.

Imagine my surprise to learn that my little joke was relayed by to Mel himself by his granddaughter. And it seems that he found it very funny.

So now I can die happy. But maybe not right away…

A very generous individual donated to our lab his collection of classic fantasy and science fiction books and magazines. This morning I went through all thirty three boxes, and took a wondrous stroll down memory lane.

I also needed to figure out just how many books and magazines there were in the collection. When you go by total shelf space, it came to just under 90 running feet.

After that, I spent quite a bit of time this afternoon searching on-line for a set of shelves that would do justice to this wonderful gift. Fortunately I managed to find just the thing, and it is now on order — a physical object to contain other physical objects.

When I was a kid, it was easy to think of literature in terms of running feet of shelf space. Yet that idea is gradually fading from the culture.

The notion of having a physical book in your hands, of actually turning the page to measure your progress along an author’s thought, is slowly retreating from our collective practice. Soon everything will be rectangular screens, followed by whatever technology comes after screens.

Still, our lab now has our beautiful classic fantasy and science fiction library, in glorious print on paper. I love the fact that all of those retro visions of the future are contained in a retro medium.

After all, you can’t properly understand the future unless you properly understand the past.

Today is the 18th of September. That means it is the 261st day of the year.

Interestingly, since September is the ninth month of the year, there are a lot of nines here.

In fact, today’s month, day of the month and day of the year are all multiples of nine.

When I first noticed this, I thought “wow, I’ll bet that’s the only day of the year for which that is true!”

But then I realized there are two other days of the year for which it is also true. You can probably figure out what they are.

A few hours after I posted about Sharpiegate, my cousin Ben emailed me an image he had created. I like his creation so much that I will give the remainder of this post over to it. Enjoy!

Today, as part of research for our next immersive VR project, I rewatched the very first episode of The Outer Limits. It was called The Galaxy Being.

I was struck not so much the deep layers of irony of the narrative (a given, since the very existence of the series was essentially a response to The Twilight Zone). Rather I was compelled by the sumptuous of the imagery, the oddly compelling black and white cinematography, the — strange as it is to say — romance of dystopia.

I found myself drawn into the show’s unnerving ethos of “Reality is not what you have been led to believe.” When you think about it, such shows were, in some way, our collective introduction to the existential relativism of the ’60s.

But most of all, I was astonished by the timing. By some odd coincidence, the day that I chose to reintroduce myself to this series — today, the 16th of September — was the very day of the year that The Outer Limits first aired in 1963.

For some reason, I feel that this realization needs to be accompanied by a theramin.