Author: admin

I had a great dinner the other night with some very interesting people, most of whom are either running start-ups related to VR or are investing in start-ups related to VR. The conversation was fun, wide-ranging, and incredibly interesting from start to end.

At some point early in the evening, while everybody was standing around holding a drink and happily chatting away, I said “You know what would be a good test of success for VR? If we could all have this good a time while meeting in VR.”

Everybody agreed that was not going happen any time soon. I think this has something to do with those drinks everybody was holding.

I gave a talk this evening, to a really wonderful crowd of enthusiastic people. And I made mistakes.

In particular, I spent too much time on the canned portion, the platitudes, the sound bites reiterating receive wisdom. Not nearly enough time on the live demo, the good stuff.

After all, it’s the live demo, the high wire act, the part that might at any moment fail, which puts the audience on the edge of their seat. That’s how they know you really mean it, that you are putting yourself at risk, that you are not merely reciting platitudes from some position paper you wrote back in the day.

Next time, caution be damned. It’s all going to be live demos.

I was having some great conversations this evening with people who are passionate about virtual reality and its possibilities. But I noticed that everybody has a different idea of what those possibilities are.

Some of the conversations were amazing, but other conversations were slightly surreal, as people spoke past each other, coming from very different ideas of what they want.

I was reminded of the story of the blind men and the elephant. Each blind man, trying to understand the elephant, feels a different part of its body.

The blind man touching its sturdy leg says “The elephant is like a tree.” The blind man touching its massive side says “The elephant is like a wall.” The man touching its floppy ears says “The elephant is like a flower.” Whereas the man touching its trunk says “The elephant is like a snake!”

Of course they were all right, and they were all wrong. VR is indeed everything its defenders or detractors claim it to be. And it is also something else entirely.

Cinéma vérité often uses a shaky hand-held camera to emphasize the fact that one is seeing something being filmed. Of course, audience members are still sitting in their seats, and all this apparent shakiness is taking place within a rock-steady rectangular frame — the screen itself.

You can’t quite do the same thing in virtual reality, because there is no frame. In the content itself, you need to keep the horizon line steady. Once the visual horizon line becomes shaky, people quickly become nauseous, and sometimes they fall over.

Film doesn’t have this problem because the screen border itself creates a physiological horizon line, whatever the on-screen content. Which leads to the question: What other fundamental differences are there in the way we perceive “reality” in a film and in virtual reality?

If we take the frame of the screen as a metaphor, perhaps there are other ways that removing the cinematic frame can alter the experience. For example, what about the flow of time itself?

A filmmaker asks only that you face the screen, offering an implicit promise: As long as you are looking in the proper direction, the film itself will do all the work of directing your attention. Cuts, camera movements, changes of scene, these are all done for you.

But this may not be the case in virtual reality, where there isn’t necessary a “proper” direction. In a sense, our narrative horizon line might not be there. Which means we may need to create that narrative horizon line some other way.

It’s not yet entirely clear how best to do that.

I was watching a puppet show this evening, and it struck me how uniquely powerful the gaze of the puppet can be.

Humans are burdened by our literalness. We have human faces and bodies, we have real lives of our own, we are flesh. This limits our ability to embody abstraction, to focus down our essence to a single powerful idea.

As Scott McCloud pointed out in Understanding Comics, on some deep level we identify a photo-realistic representation of a person as “the other”, whereas we identify a simplified representation of a person as “the self”.

This transference, augmented by an uncanny stillness, operates when we watch a puppet on stage. We are not seeing the puppet the way we see an actor. We see the puppet as ourself. When the puppet looks at something, we feel that it is we who are looking, through the puppet’s eyes.

And it’s what happens next that makes it all exciting: We find ourselves questioning why we are looking, how it makes us feel, what it all really means. We project our emotions onto the puppet, and through that projection we are able to see more deeply into our own soul.

I was talking with my friend Oliver about my “Bit” post from the other day. I described to him my possibly dystopian vision of the time-traveling superpower of being able to send a bit of information to the past. It was dystopian because if you screw up, you annihilate your entire time line. Definitely not fun.

Oliver pointed out that there is another way of looking at all this: If you screw up, then you’ve only annihilated the time line of everything that happened after you received the bit of information from the future. So the “early” version of you that gets info from the future is just fine. It’s only the future version of you, the one that has screwed up, which becomes disappeared.

Which means that you actually never get it wrong. The only version of future you which ends up existing is the one that never makes any mistakes.

Oliver’s version of all this is much friendly than mine: Everything always works out by definition.

I must admit, this is a much nicer way to think about time travel.

This evening I went to a little gathering in honor of Marvin. I had lovely conversations with his family, close friends, people who were connected to each other through the very fortunate circumstance of having known this marvelous person.

To my surprise a friend of mine — somebody I’ve known for decades — told me that she reads my blog faithfully. It’s “Ken redux”, she said, a kind of boiled down snapshot of me, offered up in little posts.

I had never thought of it that way. For me, this blog isn’t about me. Rather, it’s about everything outside of myself — a chronicle of the wonder of all the things going on in the world.

But of course to anybody else who is not me, it’s the other way around. You are seeing me looking out, and what you see is my act of looking outward — which is, of course, a kind of representation of me.

This whole “I / thou” duality is so ingrained, so taken for granted, that we rarely even think about it. So it was odd, yet strangely fascinating, to see my little mirror onto the world held up to me by a friend, and to realize that what it was reflecting was my own face.

Here’s an odd twist on the time travel genre: Suppose you could send a single bit of information back to yourself in the past every so often — say, once a month. This is just enough information to tell your past self the answer to true/false questions.

But even this little bit would be an enormous superpower. The you that is in the past could frame questions such as “Will Google stock go up this month?”, and instantly learn the correct answer. To make this all work, the you that is in the future would simply need to make sure to send the proper “true” or “false” answer back in time.

But here’s the kicker: If you screw up even once — if you ever send the wrong bit back, or fail to send any answer at all — then your particular time line would cease to exist, a victim of paradox.

There might still, perhaps, be an infinite number of other versions of you off in parallel universes. But the one with your unique memories and life experiences would vanish. We’re talking existential retirement with extreme prejudice.

Would you want such a superpower? Or would it be too nerve wracking? I’m a bit conflicted myself.

Marvin Minsky, who sadly passed away earlier this week, wasn’t just the smartest person I knew. I think he might have been the smartest person that anybody knew. He was in a whole different category.

But I’m not really talking here about intelligence on something as obvious as a linear scale. It’s more that Marvin’s mind was extraordinarily free. He could fly through idea space the way a swallow flies through the air. He would see connections where nobody else even thought to look, leap effortlessly from one concept to an entire new category of concepts, and in general make anybody he was talking with feel ten times smarter.

And all of this without an ounce of hubris. Marvin didn’t care who you were, or whether you were the “right” sort of intellectual. I’ve seen him ignore a room filled with Nobel prize winners, to focus on conversation with a single high school student, just because that student was seriously interested in discussing ideas. He was a true democrat, who believed in the power and the potential of each individual human mind.

I will miss him deeply. The world is a poorer place for having lost him.