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There is an interesting relationship between an improvisational dance troupe and an improvisational jazz ensemble. Both rely on the participants having a highly developed understanding of each other before the performance begins.

Group improvisation is not a free-for-all. Rather, it is an artfully constrained group activity in which collaborators work from a shared vocabulary and grammar. It is this very system of constraints that allows freedom of action during an improvisational performance, since dancers or musicians can be confident that the variations they explore will mesh together.

But musicians have one advantage over dancers: They can always hear what each other is playing, whereas dancers cannot always see what each other is doing. Dancers can see only what is in their field of view, not what is behind them.

Imagine an improvisational dance troupe working within a properly designed shared virtual or augmented reality environment. It should be possible to design a system of visual feedback so that dancers can be aware of all movement in the space — not merely behind them, but even on the other side of opaque walls.

This could open up new possibilities in improv dance, greatly empowering performers who understand how to work with such a visually enriched space. A group of like-minded people (I count myself as one of them) share an interest in how this space might develop.

Eventually, as such techniques mature, ensemble improvisational dance could evolve into a new and fascinating kind of visual music.

An open doorway:
Inspiration. A closed door?
Look for a window.

Yesterday, for the first time since I was a child, I used Elmer’s Glue. The occasion was a prototype I made for a user interface device we want to use for our research.

I didn’t need to actually build the device yet. I just needed to understand how big it should be, and how it would move. So all I really needed was cardboard, adhesive tape (for the hinged parts) and Elmer’s Glue.

Fortunately there was Elmer’s Glue in our lab’s supply closet. I had never looked for it before, but sure enough, there it was. I tried the Elmer’s Glue Stick first, but that turned out to be totally useless on cardboard. So I upgraded.

The Elmer’s Glue worked like a charm. It did exactly what it was supposed to, with no fuss or muss.

And it had one other very important property that I had completely forgotten about since I was about seven years old: If you make a mistake and glue the wrong things together (which I did the first time yesterday), then you can pull them apart and try again, as long as you do it in the first few minutes.

In other words — user interface designers take note — it has an undo function!

I seem to recall, from very early research back in my younger days, that Elmer’s Glue is also edible. I did not try out this feature.

Some months back I mentioned here that I had had started to use the phrase The Holodeck is other people, to help keep things focused on the human and social aspects of shared virtual/augmented reality, rather than just the technical aspects.

I used that phrase again in a talk I gave yesterday. One of the attendees sent me an email today asking, quite reasonably, whether I was consciously doing a shout-out to Sartre, and if so, in what sense I meant it.

In fact I was indeed echoing Sartre. In his play No Exit, one of the character says that “L’Enfer, c’est les autres.” This line is usually translated into English as “Hell is other people.”

In the play, this character perceives the others as Hell because they are all, in fact, in Hell, and their punishment is simply to spend eternity with each other. Of course, they are in Hell only because they make it Hell for each other. If they had been different sorts of people, the same fate might have seemed like Heaven. Quelle ironie!

But it is important not to miss Sartre’s larger point. As he himself has said, when explaining this line of dialog:

When we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves … we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves. Into whatever I say about myself someone else’s judgment always enters. Into whatever I feel within myself someone else’s judgment enters.

As we start to enter virtual worlds together, this powerful interweaving between self and other must not be ignored. In my email reply I said the following:

We define ourselves through the mirror of the view others have of us. So VR/AR will only be truly meaningful when it becomes part of this ongoing exchange of reflected selves that allows us to have a shared humanity.

I spend this evening hanging out with an old friend. We had not seen each other in a while, so there was a bit of catching up to do.

At some point in the evening I noticed that we were using a kind of shorthand. Not of speech, but of feeling. She didn’t need to tell me everything in words, and vice versa. There was another channel of communication at work.

After enough years knowing a person, you develop a kind of language with them. It’s not quite mind reading, but it has a bit of that flavor. After your friendship has gont through enough ups and downs, conflicts and resolutions, you begin to get the lay of the land of each others’ psyches. You know each other, in some deep sense of that word.

New friends and acquaintances are wonderful — enigmas to be solved, undiscovered worlds to explore. But old friends are something else entirely. In some mysterious way they become you, and you become them.

We must never forget just how precious that is.

I had a conversation with a friend today about how people will feel about bots taking on human roles, once VR gets to the point where people are conducting transactions in a virtual world. The specific question was whether people, in general, would protest a bot impersonating a human.

In a more limited way, this is already becoming an issue. During our discussion we checked on-line to see whether anybody had used the phrase “bot or not”, and we got several hits: One to software that analyzes a poem to determine whether it was written by a human or a computer, and another to software that can determine whether a twitter account is being written by a human or a bot.

My sense is that yes, people definitely would object. I’m basing this opinion on that study in Zurich I wrote about back in 2008, which showed that our brains react differently, on a physiological level, depending solely on whether we believe we are interacting with a fellow human or a computer.

Which strongly suggests that the question “is this a real person or not” is one of those things hardwired into our brains. There are just some things about which we are not rational. After all, if somebody tells you that their child is more lovable than your child, your rational mind might understand and even process such an assertion. But deep down, you know that your child is the most lovable child in the world. 🙂

We are setting up demos today, in a place where all around us others are setting up demos as well. Lots and lots of cool demos by lots of cool people.

This evening there will be two hundred people in attendance, if everyone shows up who said they would. A classy capacious crowd coming to comprehend a collectively contributed cornucopia of cleverly creative contemporary communicative capability!

I was talking with a friend today about the experience I had many years ago seeing Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game for the first time. There is a plot twist in this film that most people don’t see until fairly late in the story.

But for some reason, I realized early on what was happening. From that point onward, my companion and I were essentially seeing two different movies. Which was weird, because we were sitting side by side in the same movie theater, watching exactly the same film up on screen.

In today’s conversation, my friend said that he has experienced that kind of things several times. For example, the first time he saw The Usual Suspects (another film with a late plot twist), he didn’t know what was coming. But then he saw it again, this time with his wife, who had never seen it, and he became aware that he and his wife were effectively watching two completely different movies.

He also said that when he saw October Sky, a film about a boy who builds rockets, with his wife and kids, they all had different experiences. Each one of them saw a movie they liked, but for extremely different reasons. One saw a movie about kids on an adventure, another saw a movie about parent/child connectinos, and so on. In some sense that’s the definition of a good family film: There is a good story up there on screen for everybody, even if everyone feel like they are watching a different movie.

I am fascinated by this idea of people sharing an experience, yet having highly asymmetric responses to that experience. I wonder, as writers begin to explore the immersive possibilities of shared virtual reality, how such subjective asymmetries will evolve, in the future of storytelling.

Strange to be flying
Past so many lives, people
I will never know

If you and I are walking around in some future version of everyday reality, and we are wearing those cyber-glasses that visually transform the world around us, we are going to want some other powers as well. And we will get them.

For one thing, I am going to want to point to an object across a room and then see that object float toward me until it ends up in my upturned palm. But that’s not going to happen by itself.

Instead, there will be an army of invisible robots acting as proxies between us and the physical world around us. Most of the time we won’t see these robots.

It’s not that they will be invisible, but rather that there will be no reason to make them look interesting or to make them part of our constructed visual landscape. When we walk across a room they will get out of our way, so there is no particular reason for us to even know they are there, as separate objects.

This idea of things unobtrusively operating on our behalf in the physical world is far from new. The plumbing that brings water to your tap, the restaurant kitchen that you never enter, the engine inside your car, these are but a few examples of things that work on your behalf in the physical world that you do not ordinarily see.

After a while, people won’t even think about the fact that they are always seeing a constructed version of reality. After all, most of us forget that the concrete sidewalks beneath our feet are a constructed reality.

Everyone will simply have the power to make any physical object float through the air and come to them just by pointing at it and issuing verbal commands. This power will come to seem so ordinary that people of the future will wonder how anybody ever got along without it.