Author: admin

This past Friday, global financial markets lost about two trillion dollars, in the wake of the results of the Brexit vote. That’s a very large number, and I’m trying to wrap my head around it.

Here are are several ways to look at it: Assuming the market was open for eight hours, that’s two hundred and fifty billion dollars an hour.

Which comes out to a little more than four billion dollars a minute. Still a little difficult to grasp.

Fortunately, the financial markets lost only about seventy million dollars a second. Ah, now that’s a much easier number to understand. 🙂

For the last two years I have been working, with my students, on two related projects. One, called Holojam, allows people to walk around together in the same physical room, wearing very lightweight VR headsets, to share a kind of radical augmented reality: We are all physically together, but we are all visually sharing a fantasy world, as though we have entered the Star Trek Holodeck.

The other project, called Chalktalk, allows drawings to come to life, sort of like a real-life version of Harold and the Purple Crayon.

For months I have been working on putting those two projects together. Technically it has been very complicated. I needed to completely rewrite large portions of Chalktalk, build my own virtual reality modeling software and renderer, and learn more about web sockets and other bits and pieces of internet plumbing than I ever thought I’d need to know.

And just yesterday, it finally all started working together. I am able to draw things in Chalktalk and then see them come magically to life floating in the air before me. Other people can also share the experience with me.

The basic components are now all there, for example, to allow somebody to give a Chalktalk lecture in virtual reality for a group of people. Each person can each walk around the 3D animated chalkboard and look at it from his or her own perspective.

There are still a few wrinkles to work out, but things are now in the home stretch. And it feels great!

I woke up this morning wondering how much of Great Britain’s vote to leave the EU was motivated by fear of immigrants. Whether or not we’re talking about full scale xenophobia, the fundamental message seemed pretty clear from the rhetoric employed by the “Leave” spokespeople: Too many foreigners are arriving on England’s pleasant shores.

In the course of the day, I discovered that everyone I spoke with had had exactly the same thought. And like me, they had all linked it to the Trump campaign.

Here is the worry, in a nutshell: If a campaign essentially rooted in fear, xenophobia, resentment and thinly disguised racism can sway a populace, we’re probably all in trouble.

I was at the NYVR MeetUp this evening. In one cool augmented reality demo, a woman pointed her iPad at the audience. Up on the projection screen we could see MeetUp attendees, in real time, in the live video feed from the tablet’s point. Those attendees began waving happily at the camera.

She then chose from a menu of items, until she had selected a Coca Cola vending machine (Coca Cola is one of their company’s clients). As soon as she did this, we could see, up on the projection screen, a full sized Coca Cola vending machine, as though it were right there in the room, next to those MeetUp attendees.

Gesturing on her iPad, she then proceeded to move the virtual Coca Cola machine around the room, then open and slose its doors, and finally replace the contents by other Coca Cola drinks like Fanta and Sprite. It was all very impressive.

“In the virtual world,” she said, “I can do anything I want.”

I didn’t agree. Turning to the person next to me, I said, “I don’t think she can fill the vending machine with Pepsi.”

There is a clash between our paper-based tradition of visual iconography and our use of computers. For centuries, if you wanted to write a visual mark — a symbol, or logo, or indicator of any sort — you expected it to be immutable.

But if we phase out paper as a primary means of visual communication (and there is good reason to believe we might), then that expectation of immutability will eventually shift. A “written” icon will no longer need to be fixed in appearance, but will be able to vary over time, depending on some changing context.

Whether we are looking at a logical AND gate, or a stop sign, or a right-facing arrow, we may find ourselves no longer satisfied with a particular appearance. Instead, we will expect that symbol to indicate some current state, and to change in appearance when that state changes.

Such expectations are still low, because marks on paper are still the cultural norm. But once paper starts to disappear from the equation, all bets will be off.

The best thing about
Getting a really bad cold
Is getting better

I recently watched a short documentary about Frank Sinatra. The film didn’t go into great detail — it mainly covered the dramatic outlines of his outsized life and career.

In a sense, Sinatra’s life was neatly divided into three acts. From the time he was started his singing career at 19, he quickly shot up through the ranks, becoming a superstar in a few short years.

Yet there was a hitch: It all came crashing down in his thirties, when his marriage to Ava Gardner fell apart just as his popularity and his career started to tank. In the sad second act, the once golden boy was now on the outside looking in.

But ever ambitious, Sinatra set about rebuilding his career. He created a third act for himself by systematically reinventing his legend, first as a serious actor in Hollywood movies, then as a wildly successful nightclub entertainer and entrepreneur.

But this was not at all the same Frank Sinatra. He was now older, heavier, more guarded, more in control. His focus this time was on building an unassailable power base, creating a fast empire under his command, and entering the corridors of power, from Hollywood to Las Vegas to Washington. He now demanded unquestioning loyalty from those around him, and could be ruthless when he sensed that loyalty wavering.

So here we have a man in three parts: The sweet gangly younth, fresh faced and honored as a wunderkind, then the exile to the wilderness, and finally the grizzled older warrior, powerful in his reach, dangerous when crossed. He is still charming, but now with an unmistakeable hint of menace just below the shiny surface.

One thing that strikes me about this narrative arc is how well it also describes the life story of Steve Jobs. Which makes me wonder, is this a common pattern?

Suddenly out of nowhere, on a beautiful warm New York day in June, I am felled by a summer cold. Just like that. I feel so oxymoronic.

It’s probably my body’s delayed reaction to my refusal to take things more slowly after the stress of international travel. A kind of biological work slowdown, the employee’s union of my system sending a stern warning to management about unfair conditions on the job.

In any case, war has clearly been declared, and that war is being fought with yours truly as the battle zone. No sense in fighting it. All I can do now is get plenty of sleep and drink plenty of water.

Which is probably what I should have done before I ever got this summer cold.

i dreamt I wrote this.
when I awoke it turned out
it was just a dream.

For the last two days I’ve been talking about go-to movies. I mean the kind of movie you enjoy so much that you have watched it over and over, to the point where you no longer have any idea how many times you have seen it.

TV series are different, because they are longer. In the U.S., a successful television series lasts about seven seasons — enough time for the network to accumulate enough episodes for syndication. After that the show lives on in a sort of perpetual twilight afterlife of reruns and rentals.

Which leads me to today’s topic.

I am now in my seventeenth year of watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That is, I have viewed the entire series, all seven seasons, twice through, and am now on my third time around.

So at the moment I am once again in season three — for the third time.

I suppose you could say that for me Buffy is a go-to TV series. At what point, I wonder, does that become true. Is it after the first time you’ve seen the entire series through, and are now jumping in for your second time around? Or do you need to be watching for at least the third time?