Author: admin

It is a haiku
And yet more than a haiku
It is a blog post

When people end up widely adopting self-driving cars, it is possible that cars will become anonymous. Rather than being objects of status and privilege, automobiles might evolve into a more granular version of buses. When you need a car, one will show up, but it won’t matter which car, any more than you currently care (in most cases) which car you are getting into when you take a taxi or Uber.

When the iPad first came out, I thought that would be the best way to think about it. Rather than being singular objects of status conscious owners, interactive tablets would be arguably be more useful if they were completely anonymous.

In this scenario, when you pick up any iPad, its camera looks at your face, retrieves your data from the Cloud, and then becomes, as long as you are holding it, “your” iPad. And this would happen for any digital tablet you pick up, for just as long as you are using it.

If you think of the growing data Cloud itself as the more “real” part of our shared digital ecosystem, then this makes perfect sense. After all, when you look out of any window in your house, you are looking into the same world outside. Reality itself doesn’t change based on which window you look out of.

But this way of looking at things goes against Apple’s revenue model, which is based on selling their hardware as a highly marked up object of status and privilege. Yet there is nothing that inherently dictates such a relationship between user and machine. One day the market might drive both the car and the digital tablet in the same practical direction: to become an interchangeable window into our shared digitally enhanced world, freely interchangeable with any other such window.

It is said that those
Whom the Gods wish to destroy
They first give budgets

Our little research group is in production. We are working on a forthcoming future reality performance in which we plan to combine a futuristic computer-generated soundscape, interpretive dance, and an immersive virtual reality world.

Today we received a visit from a colleague of one of our collaborators who works in a very different medium — Tibetan singing bowls. Rather than rely in the latest of computer-mediated technology, her art makes use of beautiful hand-blown glass bowls that produce deep and powerfully resonant tones as she rubs a special mallet around their rim.

As I listened to our visitor play these instruments, my analytic left brain was telling me “Oh, that’s just [blah blah, fill in boring physics explanation here].” But my intuitive right brain became filled with a growing sense of awe and wonder. As you feel these sounds all through your body, you cannot help but be profoundly moved.

We are looking at ways to combine the singing bowls with our forthcoming high-tech performance. Our hope is to merge and dissolve between the ancient Tibetan tones and the new sorts of sounds that we can generate via computer to be experienced in a virtual space.

I am not sure how it will all turn out, but at this point I feel very inspired.

it all seems like fun
and games, until somebody
loses a country

After an intense and wonderful day “prototyping the future” with my collaborators, I am left with an interesting question: Am I collaborating with these people because I want to develop new ideas for the future, or do I want to develop new ideas for the future because it lets me collaborate with these people?

Of course these two questions cannot be totally disentangled from each other. We are inspired by our collaborators, and that inspiration leads to new discoveries. In a sense we are parents, bringing forth our children into the world. Except that those children are wondrous new ideas.

Fortunately I do not need to answer this question. I am in a beautiful professional relationship with brilliant and exciting people, and together we will have many children. What more could one ever ask for?

I have several projects going on at NYU at the same time. Some of these are visions for what life might be like in the future. They generally use existing equipment — or sometimes oddball mash-ups of existing equipment — to create demonstrations of what everyday life might be like ten or even twenty years from now.

But other projects aim differently. Rather than look far off into the future, they aim to create a prototype of an alternate present. Instead of asking: “What could we do if we had the technology of the future?” these projects ask: “What could we do right now if we were thinking about things differently?”

It is important for research labs like ours to do both types of prototyping. We need to do the first type because corporations have no strong interest in prototyping products that are still ten or twenty years off. There is simply no profit in it. Yet they support our lab — and other labs like ours — because if our prototypes succeed then those companies are given a glimpse into where things might be going in the long run, which is always useful.

And it is important for research labs to do the second type of prototyping — demonstrations of a parallel vision for uses of today’s technology — because corporations are often constrained to follow well-defined markets. It can be too expensive for those companies, with their large fixed costs and overhead, to start creating prototypes of products that people do not already know they want.

But somebody has to dip their toe in the water and try out those crazy new ideas, and a research lab is a great place for that. Yet another reason to go into University research. 🙂

That research talk I mentioned several months ago, which I gave at Emily Carr in Vancouver, where everything seemed to come together, is now on-line. Here is the link:

      https://vimeo.com/147890026

The talk itself takes up the first 49 minutes. After that it’s all Q&A, which is also fun. The questions from the audience were really great.

Enjoy!

Today, as research for an article I’m working on, I went back and reread many of my posts on this blog since January 1, 2015. Even though my search went back only one year, the results were pretty overwhelming.

I could actually feel, as I read, the gradual changing of the seasons, variations over weeks and months of my own outlook and mindset. There was a definite contour to those changes, like caves and reefs in an undersea landscape. And within those caves and reefs were surprising little pockets of exploration that I had quite forgotten about.

I am tempted now to try to write a filter that shows those changes in mindset, perhaps laid out in graphical form. With such a filter in hand it would be fun to go spelunking through this or other blogs, searching for buried treasure.

the opening of
Grimm, when Adolph Hitler turns
into Dan Ackroyd