Author: admin

It is obvious that there are similarities between actors from different eras of Hollywood. Audrey Hepburn and Amanda Seyfried share an elegantly elfin innocence with Leslie Caron, George Clooney and Cary Grant are the square jawed grown-up leading man with a sense of self-deprecating humor, Brad Pitt, Clark Gable and Hugh Grant the irresistable charmer with a devilishly boyish streak, Jerry Lewis and Jim Carrey the manically nutty comic with an undercurrent of bathos, aspiration toward romantic lead and a dash of occasional menace.

We recognize these similarities not merely as one individual to another, but in terms of various qualities that we associate with a Hollywood star. I suspect we could lay these qualities out in a multidimensional space, along such axes as childlike ↔ grown-up, masculine ↔ feminine, serious ↔ comic, upbeat ↔ tragic, knowing ↔ innocent, and so forth.

How many dimensions would we need to effectively classify all the major stars, and how accurately could we position each one, perhaps with the assistance of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk? With the right choice of dimensions, would they fall into constellations, with the constellation containing Clooney and Grant far away, in the celestial sphere, from the constellation that contains Pitt and Gable?

One part of Minority Report that many people remember very vividly is when Tom Cruise, wearing those cool black gloves, waves his hands around, arms outstretched in front of him, to move virtual objects on what appears to be a holographic screen. There is something iconic about this image, and I am sure it has influenced how many people think of the future of computer interfaces.

There has also been quite a bit of grumbling about this vision of interfacing with a computer. There is something awkward about needing to hold your arms out in front of you for extended periods of time. Even John Underkoffler, the real-life MIT researcher who designed this interface paradigm, has given up on it. Tom Cruise may look great doing all those arm movements, but they sure seem tiring.

But I think it all starts to make sense once we deconstruct Steven Spielberg’s probable intention in creating such an image. The fact that this is exactly the wrong vision for the future is precisely why it works so well.

In reality — as opposed to science fiction fantasies — the human body is supremely lazy, and that is a good thing. Our minds are incredibly good at moving our bodies, in performance of any given task, in a way that uses the smallest amount of energy.

You see this in just about every sort of human movement, from walking, to sitting down or standing up, to reaching for or throwing an object. No matter what the task, we have an uncanny ability to perform that task in an extremely energy conserving way.

This makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective. Food can be a scarce resource, and in day to day life there is no survival value in wasting energy on unnecessary movement.

The only situations in which such wasteful movements might be of use are where they carry a social message. Typically those situations come down to social dominance and sexual display. We deliberately move in an energy wasteful way to show that we can. By demonstrating our fitness, we prove a point to potential rivals or potential mates.

And this is precisely what Tom Cruise’s character is doing, on a level of storytelling. By having him perform these power gestures — gestures that nobody else in the film seems to be able to perform as well — Spielberg is telling us that John Anderton is the alpha male in our story. By doing that, he is usefully cluing in the audience to much that will happen later on in the film.

Ever the master visual storyteller, Steven Spielberg is not really interested in predicting what the technological future will look like. Rather, he is interested in guiding our emotions, via cinematic art, through a compelling character driven narrative.

I was just talking to a colleague here at NYU who, like me, is insanely busy and oversubscribed. We both have lots of projects going on in parallel, and sometimes just simply through the day seems to be one giant juggling act.

I told him my personal theory about these things. Some people — and I suspect he and I are both in this club — are plate jugglers. We work best when we are juggling lots of plates in the air at the same time.

Of course every once in a while you just can’t help yourself. You succumb to the temptation to look up and see how many plates there are in the air. And that’s when you notice that a large number of plates are hurtling down at you from above.

I told him that my usual strategy at such moments (and I suspect it is his strategy as well) is to look down, grab the nearest plate I see, and toss it in the air.

There are various kinds of time travel story. Some, like Rian Johnson’s Looper posit that time has many potential branches. When you travel back in time, you can change the course of history and thereby move your reality to another branch.

Others, like Robert Heinlein’s By his Bootstraps, posit that there is only a single time line. Anything you do by jumping back in time inevitably leads to the exact conditions that caused you to jump back in the first place.

I’m fascinated by the constraints imposed by this second kind of time travel story. Inevitably such stories convey a sense that free will is an illusion, since no matter what you do, you always end up in the same place.

But there is another interesting aspect to the linear time travel story: Higher bandwidth interventions lead to ever stranger realities. For example, if you could only send a single bit of information — true or false — from the future to, say, a year into the past, then it is reasonably plausible that whatever happens over the course of that year, the same bit value will always end up being sent back in time.

Even if a character in the story is actively trying to flip that bit, there are many reasonable storylines that could result in that character’s intent always being foiled. This is particularly true if we know that this is a linear time travel story, and that therefore paradoxes are not part of its fictional universe.

But every time we add more bits to the connection, things get a little nuttier. At the opposite extreme, a live video feed always shows reality as seen from one minute into the future. Whatever we try to do, our near future ends up being whatever is in that video. Clearly this scenario is vastly outside the bounds of any psychologically plausible narrative.

So the question I’m wondering is this: What information bandwidth that would be large enough to “break” a linear time travel story?

At a meeting I attended earlier this week, a physicist who creates nano-scale materials with novel properties was explaining the intricacies of his research. Apparently, much of what he does is based around creating imperfect crystals, in which the carefully engineered imperfections impart exactly the right properties.

At one point he said: “To make the right imperfect crystal, you first need to figure out how to make a perfect crystal.” And that thought really resonated with me.

In my own work in computer graphics and animation, from texturing to 3D modeling to character animation, that’s one of the fundamental principles. You first need to ask yourself what the “perfect” version would be of, say, a marble texture, or a cloud shape, or a human walk.

Then you need to artfully add imperfections, to match the sorts of imperfections one would expect to see in the real world. In a sense, what people are really looking for is the structure through the noise.

You absolutely must have the structure, whether in an arm gesture or an ocean wave or a wisp of smoke — the perfect crystal. But you must also have just the right amount of imperfection.

Symmetry and noise need each other in all things, including human relationships. The interplay between them is what tells us it’s real.

I realize that it might not win me any coolness points to use a quote from Jiminy Cricket as the title of a blog post. Still, it’s probably the right thought to start off today’s discussion.

I’ve been thinking about fate. A general goes to war, makes some daring decisions based on inspired guesswork, and wins the war. The general is lionized, celebrated as a hero, and goes down in history as a great and inspiring personage.

Another general, in a different time and place, makes essentially the same decisions, based on the same imperfect information, but this time things don’t work out so well. The war is lost, the enemy triumphant. This general is branded as a coward and a traitor — or worse, an incompetent.

We make decisions all the time based on incomplete information, relying on our intuition to fill in the gaps. Sometimes things work out great, and sometimes not so great. Nearly always, we lay the credit or blame at our own feet.

Why do we do this? What is it about our human nature that drives us to insist that everything which happens to us was due to our own agency — either our own genius or our own damned fault?

Maybe, win or lose, life is just more interesting that way.

When I think of discussions about which elements are reality are more important, I think of Coppélia and Avatar. Coppélia was the life-like doll created by the nefarious Doctor Coppélius in a comic ballet based on several stories by E.T.A Hoffmann.

Young Franz, a foolish romantic, falls in love with her. Infatuated by her physical presence, he eventually discovers that she is nothing but a puppet. In the end, he realizes he has been loving an illusion. It is a compelling tale, and I suspect Alex Garland was taking careful notes.

James Cameron’s film contains a nearly perfectly complementary concept: The mind and personality of the crippled human Jake Sully is transferred into the powerful body of a ten foot tall Na’vi. In this new form he becomes the mate of Neytiri, a female Na’vi.

In perhaps the film’s most poignant scene, toward the end of the film Neytiri cradles the tiny crippled body of her human lover, understanding that the soul of the great Na’vi warrior she has come to love resides in this odd and broken little alien creature. Like every other version of the Frog Prince, Avatar raises some very interesting questions about the nature of identity.

The puppet Coppélia and the Na’vi Jake Sully represent two quite different aspects of “reality”. Which one seems more real to you?

I was having a conversation with some students yesterday about possible future technologies, such as contact lenses that will allow everyone to see virtual objects floating in the air. One student took issue with this vision, because he thought that it would take people away from reality.

Not surprisingly, we then had a rousing discussion about what, exactly, constitutes “reality”. And eventually I realized that he and I were talking past each other in a very specific way.

“Reality” can be defined at least two different ways. One definition focuses on the physical: Reality is whatever physically exists, which I can therefore directly experience through my body’s senses. This was the definition the student was assuming.

According to this definition of reality, an experience of going to the theatre is real, in a way that watching a movie is not, because in the former case the actors and the audience physically share the same room.

The definition I was assuming is rather different. To me, the more important part of reality consists of our interaction with other minds. Most often these are human minds, but in some cases those minds can belong to individuals of other species.

According to this definition of reality, an experience of going to the theatre is real, in a way that watching a movie is not, because in the former case the actors and the audience are aware of each other, and therefore their minds have an opportunity to mutually influence each other.

Obviously what I am describing is a continuum. Physical reality and psychological reality are both extremely useful concepts. But which is the more essential?

Today somebody mentioned those old transistor radios from the 1960s, and how much our relationship with technology has changed since then. But I was struck by quite the opposite thought.

The transistor radio was, first and foremost, a fetish object, a cultural touchstone, a way for a young post-war generation to say “I’m hip, I’m trendy, I’m rock’n’roll.” This was back when rock and roll was much more strongly identified with youthful rebellion.

All you needed to do was carry this slightly expensive yet affordable little box of cutting edge technology in your pocket, and you gained instant street cred. Functionally, the device connected you to the vanguard of communication culture, while its very existence in your pocket connected you to the future.

When considered as a tribal totem, this is exactly the function of today’s iPhone. So from an essentialist perspective, nothing has changed in half a century.

We are supposed to give a demo to a major funder in less than two weeks. So at our weekly lab meeting today, rather than talk about all the cool and crazy projects we might work on, I set the agenda to putting on the best demo we can for this near-term deadline.

It was interesting to see how that changed the dynamics of the meeting. All the things you want in a meeting — people keeping their comments short, staying on message, listening carefully to each other — were amplified. There was no “meeting bloat”.

Of course we can’t spend all of our time in this sort of production mode. If we did, it wouldn’t be a research lab. But I think that sometimes having this sort of “forcing function” is good for us. It gives us concrete goals, a clear context for working shoulder to shoulder, and a sense of satisfaction when it’s done.

And of course it also means that in less than two weeks from now, all of our research hardware and software will be up and running, ready to be used for the rest of the semester. Which may be even more important than the demo. 🙂