Author: admin

I’ve been watching Marvel’s Daredevil on Netflix. The basic premise is that the superhero is blind, and because he is blind, he uses his other senses, including hearing, touch, smell and proprioception, to a highly enhanced degree.

Our hero can focus on the changing sound of a heartbeat to hear somebody lurking in the shadows, or sense a bullet quickly enough to dodge it in time. He can stop an opponent with a well aimed twirl and kick even if that opponent is coming up from behind.

Since I was a kid I’ve thought of Daredevil as a wonderful premise. Not only does it turn the whole “disabilities” concept on its head, but it also gets kids thinking about talents and capabilities other than the obvious ones. The not so hidden message: You too can be a superhero, even if everyone around you thinks you are a misfit.

Watching this show now I find myself thinking about the future of virtual reality. Maria Lantin and I recently performed a dance duet in a downtown Manhattan gallery, both of us dancing while wearing VR headsets. I think this may have been the first time that a dance was performed by two people who could see the physical world only through VR.

During the entire dance we were both literally blind in the sense that our headsets blocked our view of the physical world around us. Yet we could both see an alternate view of that world, one that showed not only each other, but also choreography, sight lines, and hints as to what was behind us.

In a way we were experiencing a cyber-enabled version of Daredevil’s alternate perception of the world. During the performance I felt very good, as though I was seeing reality in a whole new way.

It’s possible I was getting a glimpse into the future.

I’ve come to realize that when I talk about our lab’s research, I’m generally trying to convey two concepts. One of them is very easy, but the other is a little tricky to get across.

The easy concept is that in the future we will all have those cyber-contact lenses, and will share physical reality just as we do now, except with enhanced senses — essentially the scenario Vernor Vinge describes in Rainbows End. Everybody gets this idea, perhaps because it is a straightforward extension of the cyber-enhanced physical existence we have today.

But the second concept is sometimes met with confusion: The concept that language and conversation itself will consequently evolve. For example, when I demonstrate ideas about how language might evolve to contain a more visual vocabulary, I will sometimes draw a stick figure of a bird. The bird I’ve drawn will then come to life, start to walk around and react to its environment.

People will then sometimes ask: “But isn’t that fake? You created something beforehand, and you are just making it appear as though you drew it now.” I think the confusion comes from the relationship between different parts of language.

When we talk with each other through verbal speech, we rely on most words to already exist. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to hold a conversation. The bird is essentially a word in a different sort of language.

When I draw it, I’m not claiming to invent a new word on the spot, but rather to show how, in the future, we might converse with each other in a visually enhanced world after such a visually shareable language has had time to develop.

It’s a crucial concept, but alas one that is easy to misinterpret. I still haven’t figured out the best way to get this concept across in a clear and unambiguous way.

But I’m working on it.

This morning I saw a young guy walking toward Washington Square Park with his bros, who stood out because of the hoodie he was wearing. On it was printed the word “OBEY!” in large block letters.

On a surface level, devoid of any historical context, this bold and simple statement certainly stood on its own, as an archly ironic hipster commentary on the sad state of our society. In one word it managed to deconstruct the hypocracy of the pseudo-meritocratic structure of our capitalist driven so-colled democracy, giving the lie to that politicial system’s implicit and arguably disengenuous promise of opportunity for all.

I’m pretty sure that if I had gone up to the young man and had asked him to explain the meaning of his hoodie message, he would have said just about the same thing. Although maybe in different words.

But if you are a geek, obsessed with popular culture, that word “OBEY!” has an entire additional layer of meaning. Specifically, it is a key part of the visual iconography of the iconic cult 1988 John Carpenter film They Live, which cleverly recontextualized society’s unseen social and economic oppressor class as literal aliens from another planet.

But it appears that I am even further out on the geek scale. When I see that hoodie message, I think of the 1963 Ray Nelson short story “Eight O’clock in the Morning”, the basis for the film. Of course it helps that when I was a child, I would read sci fi voraciously.

So for me, the word “OBEY!” immediately evokes the Nelson story. I realize this makes me very very geeky, but I’m fine with that. 🙂

Some words, like “click” and “murmur”, are anomatopoeitic — their sound evokes their meaning. But what about emoticons?

Today somebody sent me a text that got me thinking about this. Because at the end of that text was a familiar little emoticon: <3

On an obvious level this is anomatopoetic, as are all emoticons, since its visual appearance evokes its meaning: In this case, it literally looks like a sideways heart. But this emoticon also works on another level.

After all, taken literally, the characters “<3” mean “less than three”. Which is, in fact, a description of how many people it takes to fall in love.

As they say, “two’s company, three’s a crowd”. We often talk about couples being in love, but rarely about triads being in love.

So here is an instance in which an emoticon not only looks like what it means, but also acts like what it means. You could say this is an example of “onemotipoea”.

I wonder how many other examples of this there are.

I was away in Europe for a week, now am back in NYC for just five days, then will be off to California for two weeks. So a month’s worth of stuff that I need to do in NYC has to be accomplished in just those five short days.

Needless to say my schedule is very packed this week. Somebody cancelled a meeting for tomorrow and apologized profusely, but my reaction was actually elation. At last, a small window of time not already allocated!

But then somebody else “really needed to meet with me,” so even that little sliver of unscheduled time went away. Sigh.

I have been attempting to bank on the fluid nature of time, squeezing four weeks of meetings into five days. But I now realize that time is an incompressible fluid.

I saw a talk a few days ago by Yehuda Duenyas. He was discussing his varied and wonderful art projects, which range widely in technique from immersive theater to virtual reality to simulated flight to motion tracked public performance.

But running through all of his creations, whatever their technical details, is a powerful positive message. Unlike much art I’ve seen in recent years, which reflects a general cynicism about the state of the world, Yehuda’s work always conveys a sense of possibility, an idea that we can build a better and kinder world together.

The last few words of his talk resonated with me especially well. He said that he wanted to create work that would “help us to become the magical beings that we are destined to be.”

I am totally with him there. And I could not have said it better.

I just came back from Europe, where, like almost everywhere else in the world, temperature is measured in degrees Celcius. The U.S. and its territories still use Fahrenheit, a distinction shared only with the Bahamas, Belize, the Cayman Islands and Palau.

I hadn’t really appreciated the superiority of Celcius until I had the pleasure this past week of using a European shower that lets you press a button to increase or decrease the temperature in incrments of one degreee Celcius. In such situations you really come to appreciate the difference.

The shower starts off at 38^oC, a fine temperature that many will enjoy. After clicking up to 41^oC, I found my perfect shower. But here’s the thing: Every increment feels unique and useful. A 40^oC shower feels clearly distinct from a 39^oC shower, and so forth.

In Fahrenheits the quantum is too small. I don’t think I would be able to tell the difference between, say a 102F shower and a 103F shower.

After this experience, I am sold on the superiority of Celcius. Now if we could just get the U.S. to switch from the English system to the Metric system. In the U.K. they converted decades ago, and over there in London they actually are English.

Today I flew on a Zeppelin. It was amazing, and in some ways rather the opposite of airplane flight.

Getting a plane into the sky is, manifestly, an assault upon the elements. Everything is loud and rushing, as powerful engines force air against wings at high speed. It is as though humankind is literally hurling itself up into the heavens through sheer force of will.

But you don’t exactly fly in a Zeppelin, you float. As I told a friend earlier today, Zeppelins feel like graceful and gentle sea creatures gliding majestically through the sky. These magnificent floating apparitions are like something out of a beautiful dream.

I also learned that there are only twenty four registered Zeppelin pilots in the entire world. Only two of those are women, and one was our pilot, Kate Board. She was very cool, and we learned an awful lot from her about Zeppelins.

And don’t worry (just in case you were worrying), they fill them with helium these days. 😉

I was telling a colleague about my experience the other day where several participant on a panel I was running wouldn’t open up and talk freely, because they were representing large companies. “It’s frustrating,” I told my colleague, “because they were perfectly willing to speak freely with me over lunch just a few hours before the panel.”

“That’s because you were under a FrieNDA”, my colleague said. I had never heard the term, so he explained.

It’s sort of like an NDA, he said (it stands for “non-disclosure agreement”), except that a FrieNDA is not a legal thing. Instead, it’s the idea that if somebody tells you something in a one-on-one conversation, then they never really said it. They are essentially trusting that you will be smart enough not to publicly say “so and so from [fill in name of large company] said this.”

And that makes sense to me, because we all understand where the boundaries are. For example, it would be perfectly ok for me to repeat what they said in other one-on-one conversations, because that’s just me claiming they said something. There’s no real evidence chain proving that they really ever said it.

But if they themselves were to say the same thing in a public panel, then they have no plausible deniability. If their company gets pissed off that they’ve spilled the beans about something, they are screwed.

The end result of this process is that I get to know all sorts of amazing things that I would never tell you in this blog. But if you and I were just talking over beer, I might end up telling you some of those things.

After all, no matter what you might end up learning over that beer about what somebody told me, officially they never said it. That, my friend, is the beauty of a FrieNDA.

We’ve been doing our Holojam project for more than a year now at NYU. It’s a variant of Virtual Reality in which people hang out together in physical reality, except that everyone wears a motion tracked GearVR headset, so all participants see each other as avatars in a virtual world.

When you enter the space, it’s like walking into the Holodeck. The usual rules of reality are suspended, because you can see impossible things. In particular, we give people wands that they can use to draw in the air. We have found that people immediately get it, and they gleefully start drawing all sorts of shapes in the air.

We’ve been showing it this week at the FMX conference in Stuttgart. Except this time something went wrong. We had three people in the space, but one of the three wands stopped working. At first my students were panicked. What would happen if people were in the space, but couldn’t do anything there?

But then a curious thing happened: When there are three people in the Holojam world, but only two have wands, participants create a sort of game out of it. Two of them will draw something, while the third watches. And then they will start to hand the wand around.

Instead of everybody just drawing in the air, grooving on their new-found superpower, people are forced to interact with each other, because that superpower is now a scarce resource. Less is more, as scarcity creates comradery, participants turn the sharing of the wands into a new meta-game, and the experience becomes richer for everyone.

My students and I were astonished that it took us more than a year to realize this.