Author: admin

The 13th of Friday’s supposed to be spooky
But the whole superstition is just kind of kooky
Why should a day of the week like a Friday
Be treated like it’s something special like PI Day?
My Fridays are chill, they are kind of like Sundays
The scariest days of my work week are Mondays
Being scared of a Friday is just not my scene
I think I will wait till we reach Halloween

Today I thought of two classic movies. In A Face in the Crowd the true character of Lonesome Rhodes is eventually revealed, and the world discovers what a shallow, egotistical, self-centered jerk their hero is.

In The Dead Zone we eventually learn that charismatic presidential candidate Greg Stillson is a coward. In both cases, it took a situation of crisis for the truth to come out.

The horrific mass slaughter of civilians in Israel by Hamas this week seems to have had a similar effect of revealing true character here in the United States. President Joe Biden rose to the occasion with sensitivity and intelligence, delivering a brilliant speech of support for our ally in the Middle East, and following it up with action.

The former guy, not so much. Trump’s response was ugly, divisive, sneeringly insulting, and shockingly tone deaf, given the horror and tragedy of the situation.

It was as though he was auditioning for the role of Lonesome Rhodes. Then again, he’s been doing that for years.

The events of the last week in Israel were horrific and tragic. Yet in the way that they revealed the true character of these U.S. presidential candidates, they may also very well swing the outcome of our own coming election.

This evening I started developing on the Quest 3 at home. Seeing virtual objects in my apartment, with decent video passthrough, was a revelation.

As I walked around my living room, I could see the things that I had created from all different directions. From a sensory perspective, this definitely kicked things up a notch.

I can easily imagine a time, not too long from now, when virtual things will simply live with us at home. We will take for granted that they are there, the way we take for granted that our couch or bookshelf is there.

And then the possibilities will be endless. It’s going to be a whole new ballgame.

Today I unpacked my new Met Quest 3, and started playing with it. It is even better than I had thought it would be, in every way.

Coincidentally, about an hour before the Quest 3 arrived, I was meeting with one of my students, and the topic of extended reality came up. I told him about something that I used to say in talks I gave about 20 years ago.

I would say back then that one day we would be able to seamlessly integrate CGI into our everyday lives. And I would add that whenever that day finally game, it would be the beginning of the age of computer graphics.

Welcome to the dawn of the age of computer graphics.

Today I was flying into LaGuardia airport, and on a whim I took out my smartphone and opened up Google maps. From that point until landing, I happily tracked all the locations that we were flying over, identifying many interesting places in the vicinity of New York City that I had never before thought about.

It was definitely an enriching experience. I only wonder why I had never thought to do it before.

I realize that in a few years the smartphone won’t be necessary. I will just be able to look out of the window of a plane while wearing my smart glasses, and the map, with the style and filters of my choosing, will be superimposed directly on reality itself.

Currently there is a general idea that either you are conversing with a human or else you are conversing with a chatBot that is faking being a human. But what will happen after that binary distinction no longer makes sense?

Eventually, people will use A.I. to augment their conversation in more granular ways. I may start a thought but then let my A.I., which has been trained on my writings and thought processes, fill out the details.

This is already happening to some extent. Students are using ChatGPT as a helper when writing essays. The resulting essay isn’t entirely written by either student or computer, but rather by a combination of the two.

At some point, when the technology is there to support it, this mode of operation will begin to work its way into even the most casual and spontaneous conversations. I wonder whether that will be a good thing or a bad thing.

I love it in movies and TV shows when something happens in a character’s dream, and then afterward shows up in the character’s real life. In fact, that happened in the most recent episode of Only Murders in the Building.

In a rational sense, of course this is impossible. Yet when we see it on the screen it seems to make perfect sense. Technically, such a moment is transforming what we had thought was a true-to-life fictional world into a fantasy fictional world.

But isn’t that the point? When we watch something on the screen, we are indeed receiving it the way we receive a dream. On a sensory level, the end result of the techniques of camerawork and editing is not like real life. It is like our dreams.

So when we see something impossible happen, such as a dream foreshadowing reality, we accept it, and we even celebrate this momentary escape from the strictures of real life.

Because after all, isn’t that why we go to the movies?

Pretty much everybody I know has a smart phone, and everybody I know has access to a Web browser. That has very important implications for how we think about and use smart phones and Web browsers. Ubiquity creates community.

Most people I know do not have a virtual reality headset, and even fewer have mixed reality headsets. So there isn’t that assumption of community between everyone.

I’ve been wondering what things might be like when everyone we know has a pair of mixed reality glasses, and we can make that assumption of community. At that point, I am guessing that there will be entirely new types of apps that everyone will use for such devices, much as most of us now use Google Maps on our phones.

But what will those apps be? Maybe we can start to think about that now.

To teach the principles of ray tracing with reflection and refraction in fragment shaders for my computer graphics students, I implemented a little scene of glass spheres bouncing off each other (click on the image below to try it).

It runs just fine on my MacBook Pro. But oddly, it has all sorts of artifacts when I try to run it on my Android Pixel Phone.

I wonder what is causing the difference.

There is currently an enormous disparity within the U.S. in the money spent per child on K-12 education. Some fortunate children get high quality books, computers and well paid teachers. Other children barely get workable bathrooms.

In a rational society, we would all understand that every child has a fundamental right to a high quality K-12 education. Whatever is needed to support that right would be viewed as a necessity, regardless of the economic circumstance of that child’s family.

Of course that would cost a lot of money, which would largely be paid by taxes. But in the long run, this would be the best investment we could make with our taxes. The benefits to our nation of a generation of children who can each become an effective engine of the economy would pay for itself many times over.

Unfortunately, we do not live in a rational society.