Author: admin

Thanks to everyone for your wonderfully thoughtful comments over the last few days in response to my posts about the Oculus Rift. I’ve really learned a lot from reading them.

Yesterday evening I got a very nice email from Palmer Luckey, who laid out for me the chronology of his involvement with this technology. It is now clear to me that, independent of whatever Mark Bolas had been doing, by the time they first met Palmer had already been thinking about achieving wide angle stereo VR by placing cheap plastic lenses in front of a single SmartPhone screen and de-warping the resulting distorted view.

Then, coincidentally, I had a long chat this morning with an old friend who spent several years as a venture capitalist, focusing on funding Silicon Valley tech start-ups. He had an interesting take on the whole thing.

My friend said that VCs don’t really care who came up with something first — as long as nobody is suing anybody for IP theft. VCs are focused only on execution. In other words, the most original idea in the world will fail in the marketplace if badly executed, whereas a very unoriginal idea can be wildly successful if brought to market well.

And so my thinking about this whole space has evolved in the last few days. It could be argued that, as proud as he is of having come up with the Oculus tech, Palmer’s real triumph has been of a different nature.

More tomorrow.

To expand on yesterday’s post, I don’t think the problem with Mark Bolas being written out of the Oculus Rift story was the fault of Palmer Luckey. Rather, it was the fault of us, collectively.

In the U.S. we tend to frame all such stories as a “Hero myth”. The first question we ask is often “who was the individual who did this?” The idea that a story can have multiple heroes (which in reality is generally the case) is often too complex to form a compelling national narrative.

So we say that Thomas Edison invented the incandescent lightbulb, that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, that James Clerk Maxwell invented Maxwell’s equations. None of these statements is really true, but they are all convenient myths that have satisfied somebody’s agenda, and that were much easier for people to keep in mind than the far messier and more complicated reality.

Mark Bolas, a professor at USC, an astonishingly prolific innovator, has invented or co-invented many things. One of those things was FOV2GO, an ingenious way to make a very inexpensive, very wide angle virtual reality display.

You start with two really inexpensive lenses, put a SmartPhone screen a few inches away, and wrap the whole thing in an inexpensive housing — which can even be cardboard. If you already have a SmartPhone, you can make one yourself for a few dollars in parts.

One of the students working on this project — Palmer Luckey — spun the basic idea out into a start-up company, Oculus Rift, which added an orientation tracker, more solid packaging and support software, and was recently purchased by Facebook for two billion dollars.

As you might have guessed, Mark is not now wealthy.

This week I’m at the FMX conference, and it seems that at nearly every session Palmer Luckey’s name comes up, but Mark Bolas is never mentioned.

I don’t want to take anything away from Palmer’s contribution. It takes a lot of work to make a successful commercial enterprise, including a level of financial investment, marketing and engineering that is simply not needed in an academic project.

So yes, I understand why Mark is not getting the financial payoff here. Still, in all the hype in the press and elsewhere, shouldn’t a primary inventor of the technology at least be mentioned?

Shouldn’t an inventor get at least a little credit for his own invention?

On a flight across the Atlantic today I decided to rewatch Mary Poppins. It is a film that I revisit often, but I had not seen it in several years.

As it happens, one of the talks I will be giving this week is on the future of interactive cinema. And I realized, watching this Walt Disney movie for children that is now exactly half a century old, that it has much to say for our time.

The vision of being able to paint a picture, and then simply jump into that image to visit a desired alternate reality, is one that still, after fifty years, speaks to the child within us.

The difference is that now we suspect that soon we may be able to make it a reality.

Richard’s comment on yesterday’s post really brought home for me the issue of how prepared our educational system leaves us for being able to bridge C.P. Snow’s Art/Science cultural divide. It would be interesting to design courseware specifically with this in mind.

I don’t think the problem is as acute in music as it is in other fields. Thanks to the influence of Max Mathews and other pioneers, the same students who learn musical history, theory and practice are also able to learn the history, theory and practice of procedural music and its associated technological arc. In fact, NYU’s own Music Technology program is one of those wonderful places where the divide between the two cultures has been all but obliterated.

But for other disciplines, such as the visual arts, the wall of mutual ignorance seems to remain as high as ever. Perhaps courses focusing on specific topics could be specifically designed to combat this mutual ignorance. Of course if we did manage to design such a curriculum, the problem would remain of getting universities to accept such trans-disciplinary courses as legitimate academic offerings.

I was in a room full of people who are deeply committed to knocking down C.P. Snow’s problem of The Two Cultures. To be sure, not everyone in the room was old enough or widely read enough to be familiar with Snow’s famous lecture.

Yet every single one of them would wholeheartedly agree, if asked, that we need to find a way to bridge the great divide between the Arts and the Sciences. Further, they would say that their own work is largely an attempt to bridge that very divide.

Yet a problem with all such efforts is that everyone inevitably comes in with some sort of bias, and the nature of your own bias is that you can’t see it. In this case, most of the participants are coming to the conversation from a strong background in the sciences.

This really hit home for me when somebody got up to speak — one of the rare individuals who has put in the effort required to be equally conversant in “Art-talk” and “Science-talk”. She started describing the work of Sol LeWitt, and then casually asked how many people were familiar with his work.

To my immense surprise and disappointment, almost nobody in the room knew who he was.

Trying to think of an analogy going the other way, I likened it in my mind to a group of artists intent on bridging the art/science divide in the use of procedural techniques, and none of them knowing the names “John von Neumann” or “Jim Blinn”.

And I was forced to admit to myself that it would be very difficult for me to convince my own computer science department to include a for-credit course about LeWitt or the other proceduralists.

Clearly something is very wrong here. But I’m not sure what to do about it.

I was at a meeting this week of fellow researchers on a large project, and everyone was introducing themselves. One of the people in the room was from the large company that was funding the project.

When it was time for him to introduce himself, he said something that I thought was really delightful. Talking about how important it was for funding to happen seamlessly, without requiring us researchers to jump through too many hoops, he said:

“Every once in a while the man comes out from behind the curtain and you have to confront him, but for the most part we try to maintain the illusion.”

I think this is a wonderful statement of what we all really want in so many aspects of our lives: We know there is a man behind the curtain, and we are often very glad that he is there, doing things just out of sight. Of course the curtain is there for a reason — so we can all pretend he isn’t there.

And for the most part, we would prefer to maintain the illusion.

I was very sad to hear today that the previous President of NYU, Jay Oliva, passed away.

It’s hard to describe the positive effect that this man had on our University. Whereas other presidents of great universities carry themselves with a certain “air of command”, Jay never did any such thing. He continually reminded us, through his policies and his wonderfully warm personal style, that we are, after all, just people on this planet, each of us trying to do the best we can.

Our University became a warmer, kinder, more human place under his guidance, and that warmth has become a permanent part of our culture.

I will miss him, as well many in our community.

These last few days there was a big publication deadline in my field, so grad students were scrambling to get their papers finished on time. Weeks like this are exhilarating and exhausting, in equal measure.

From time to time a student would ask me questions about how they should write their paper. And each time this question would trigger something in me.

I would start to verbally outline the possible research questions, methods for empirical validation, engineering tasks, prior and related work, larger overarching themes, possible future directions, and an entire host of other things.

While this was happening, somewhere in the back of my mind I would be thinking “How am I saying all these things? I’m not really as smart as this guy whose words are coming out of my mouth right now.”

And I’d realize that this expertise is almost entirely contextual. The right question, in the right circumstance, triggers my brain to operate in a certain way, evoking a kind of “expert mode”. This is not a mode that I can simply conjure up at will — it surfaces only when needed.

I suppose we all have these little pockets of contextual expertise, ways of thinking and problem solving that emerge from our minds only when we need them. And when we no longer need them, they retract back to some remote corner of our brain, returning us to our usual, slightly clueless selves.

Richard’s comment on yesterday’s post showed something positive at work. But I wonder, aren’t we looking at all of the question of higher education in a fundamentally wrong way? Why should it be the responsibility of young people to pay a high price for higher education? Isn’t in any society’s collective economic interest to do the exact opposite?

After all, if you have a for-profit company, and you are trying to maximize your profitability, your best option is generally to invest in those aspects of your business that will increase long term revenue.

And in the case of a nation, by far the largest potential engine for economic growth resides in the young minds that continually emerge from the population. These minds are, in the long run, the sources of invention, of new business models, new forms of art and entertainment, novel insights into science, technology and medical innovation.

The empirical genetic scientific evidence tells us that innovative minds are distributed rather randomly throughout any population — they don’t tend to be born more into privileged families. Which means that a nation that creates a de facto higher economic hurdle for a poor young person to be educated through the college level is simply self-destructive: The society that does so is like a farmer who consumes his own seed corn.

To put it plainly: Any nation state that figures out how to educate its young people without trapping them into a large debt burden will win, in the economic battlefield, over other nation states.