Author: admin

The other day, I posted a particular teaching challenge:

“Suppose you are giving a lecture on a favorite topic of your choice. You and everybody else in the room are wearing XR glasses, so that you can make anything at all magically appear for everybody to see and hear, as though it were actually in the room.

“What would you choose as your lecture topic? And what would your audio-visuals be?”

And I realized that I needed to ask myself this question, and discover what my own answer would be. After a few days thought, it came to me.

I would show people how to make my noise function. My visuals would evolve gradually from the algorithm to a 3D model of the resulting noise itself.

Today I started building this on my handy dandy Quest 3. I don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but I am having fun!

I notice that for me there are two distinct steps to writing useful software. The first step is to just get it working. If it doesn’t work, then it’s not going to be useful to anybody.

But then after that, there is the question of making it useful to people who are not me. Not only should it be useful for the particular problem that I am trying to solve, but it should also be able to help other people to solve different problems.

To make things useful for other people, I need to pull out all of the independently useful bits, give each one an interface that is clean and easy to use, and all the while make sure that I haven’t broken anything. When all that is done, then I can go on to working on other projects.

So every time I solve a problem for myself, I am also creating new tools that can help other people to get things done. Most other programmers also think and work this way.

Which means that for most programmers, the act of coding is inherently generous. The ability to continually build useful tools for the community is one of the wonderful things about programming.

Today, October 21, is the day in history when Thomas Edison applied for a patent for his version of the electric light bulb. Which was, in many ways, the canonical invention. In fact, the light bulb is the most often used symbol for the idea of invention itself.

Today is also the day in history, in fact exactly 40 years ago, when a length of one meter was first officially defined as the distance that light travels through a vacuum in a precisely defined period of time.

I can’t help but feel that those two events are connected. Each of these bright ideas, in its way, illuminates the other.

Suppose you are giving a lecture on a favorite topic of your choice. You and everybody else in the room are wearing XR glasses, so that you can make anything at all magically appear for everybody to see and hear, as though it were actually in the room.

What would you choose as your lecture topic? And what would your audio-visuals be?

I am in the lobby of a theater right now, waiting to see a play. Fortunately, it doesn’t bother the ushers that I am sitting in a corner typing away on my computer while I wait for the house to open.

My recent experience with the Meta Quest 3 has gotten me thinking: Imagine live theater with every audience member wearing XR glasses. The computer would not replace the live performance, but would rather provide scenery and lighting cues and special effects that complement the actors’ performances.

What would that be like? I guess the best way to find out would be like is to try it.

Maybe I will do just that. 🙂

Most of the time these days, the only way I can get out of endless meetings and rounds of emails is to have a plausible reason to not be near my phone. This is not a good thing.

There is something freeing about leaving my phone at home. All of a sudden I have gone dark, cybernetically invisible, off the grid.

At such times, nobody can reach me except the person I am physically with, and therefore I can be completely in the moment. It’s odd to realize that until a mere three decades ago, this was our usual state of being.

As smart glasses gradually replace smart phones, there will be times when we will wish we didn’t have them. Yes, our smart glasses will let us experience infinite worlds. But something that can liberate you can also bind you.

Sometimes I will simply want to be away from all those endless ways to connect. If anybody later asks me why they couldn’t find me, I might just say “I forgot my glasses.”

There seems to be a lot of debate these days about which is “better” — the Apple Vision Pro or the Meta Quest 3. To me it seems odd to compare a $3500 device and a $500 device.

On the other hand, there is an argument to be made that the low end device is categorically more important than the high end device. Consider a rough analogy.

In the 1950s one could ask which was “better” — a new-fangled high end stereo hi-fi system or a new-fangled transistor radio. Both were technologies for delivering music to music lovers, but other than that, they couldn’t have been more different.

To me the answer is obvious. One was a fancy toy for rich people. The other got into the hands of young people everywhere, and changed everything.

I usually travel on a budget airline. You can get in-flight Internet, but you need to pay for it. I never do.

If the Internet were free, I would likely spend the entire time answering emails and working on various on-line documents. Most of the time this is an obligation, and not particularly enjoyable.

So instead, since I am off the grid for a few hours, I program, which is something I really love to do. I usually end up creating something cool and fun, and also productive, in that uninterrupted alone time.

What I save by taking a budget airline cannot be counted in dollars. Having time free from obligations is in many ways more valuable than money.

As Thoreau said, “The world is too much with us.” And he didn’t even have the Internet.

Three great writers — P.G. Wodehouse, Mario Puzo and Italo Calvino — were all born on this day, October 15. All were brilliant, yet they were as different as different could be.

Which gets me to wondering: If the three of them had collaborated, what novelistic work of mad genius would they have produced together?

The irony is not lost on me. While my current research is in mixed reality, I spent most of today happily organizing the literally thousands of books in my new office — books that I have accumulated over the course of decades.

Yet it will all come together in future reality. One day, not too long from now, I will be looking at all of those books on my bookshelves, while wearing my mixed reality glasses.

I will be able to mention an author, or topic, or favorite literary phrase, or an abstract concept. And then I will see various books on the shelf light up in response, letting me know that they contain the answers I seek.

I will have the option to take a book down from the shelf and flip to the page that my A.I. assistant suggests. Or I can opt to simply see the relevant contents of the book floating in front of me, perhaps in the form of an A.I. created animation.

This will all seem perfectly normal. And we will wonder how people in earlier times managed to live without it.