Month: July 2015

Half a century ago, around the time of the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, where much of the action of Tomorrowland takes place, people in the U.S. really believed in the future. Our involvement in Vietnam had not yet escalated, Watergate was still years away, and Kennedy’s dictum to ‘Ask what you can do for your country’ was received not as jingoism, but rather as an invitation to pitch in and help.

Back then America had an unambiguous sense of itself as ‘the good guys’. Still flushed with the success of having helped to win World War II, and bathing in the domestic economic boom that followed, the U.S. felt that its place in the world was exemplified by the Marshall Plan.

Started during the Truman administration, the Marshall Plan provided low interest loans to European nations to help rebuild their economies after the war, while allowing each country to determine, for itself, how it would spend the money. Note how different this model was from the idea of a superpower imposing its political will on smaller client nations.

I think that this view by the U.S. of its place in the world set a high standard that seeped into other spheres. For example, Kennedy’s formation of the Peace Corps seemed like a logical extension of the same philosophy: We are not here to conquer the world, but to help the world. And I sincerely believe that this attitude of the time, that we are supposed to be kind to others helped give traction to the civil rights movement.

Of course the reality was far from the ideal. There was tremendous pushback against civil rights, the push for equal rights for women was still nascent, and by today’s standards the nation was rife with prejudice and intolerance.

But the will toward being a force for good was there, unsullied by cynical disillusionment, and that created a strong wind for change.

What does all this have to do with Tomorrowland?

We will get to that, appropriately enough, tomorrow.

Seeing Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland brought me back to an earlier, simpler time. But then it yanked me out of that time so hard that my mind nearly dislocated its shoulder.

Seeing TL brought into focus for me how fundamentally the psyche of our culture has shifted through the decades. This point was brought home again when I saw another film from one of Brad Bird’s colleagues.

On the surface, Pete Docter’s Inside Out couldn’t be more different from Tomorrowland. IO is animated, TL is live action. IO takes place in somebody’s head, whereas TL takes place — well, I’m not sure exactly where it takes place.

But I think they both speak to the same cultural trends, though in very different ways.

More tomorrow.

I just spent much of the day hanging out with a number of my personal heroes, people like Tom Furness, Jaron Lanier, Ken Salisbury, Mark Bolas, Andy van Dam, Henry Fuchs and Steve Feiner.

The names wouldn’t mean anything to you unless you have worked in VR for many years, but to me it’s kind of like getting to hang with Einstein.

I cannot help but notice that there are no women in this august company. I think it has a lot to do with the sociology of high technology through the decades.

I wonder, when somebody writes of a similar experience thirty years from now, what are the chances that Einstein will be a gal?

The Northwest is nice.
There’s a large ocean nearby
But on the wrong side.

(with apologies to T.S.E.)

We are the Holomen
We are the Rift men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Oh let’s meet over Google Glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to math’s other Kingdom
Remember us – if at all – not as lost
Virtual souls, but only
As the Holomen
The Rift men.

Today I was having a conversation with a student about the future uses of VR and related media. I felt a sort of intellectual tension in the discussion, as though we were talking about two separate topics.

Eventually I located the source of this tension. I was talking about the use of VR to understand the evolution of every day reality, and the student was more interested in the use of VR as a medium in and of itself, as part of the evolution of artistic expression. Of course we were both interested in both of those things. It was more a matter of emphasis.

By analogy: Thomas Edison may have been primarily motivated to see people moving on film because he wanted to capture ordinary life as it happened. Yet the brothers Lumière were primarily motivated to use cinema to advance the art of narrative story telling.

It’s not either/or — it’s a question of emphasis. The choices you make in building a medium are heavily influenced by the purposes that drive you. The good thing is that even when we don’t all have exactly the same vision or goal in mind, we can still contribute to and build on each others’ efforts.

This evening, under a beautiful New York summer sky, I took a walk with a friend along the Hudson river, starting from West Houston and proceeding down from there. When we got to Battery Park we stopped a while, just to sit and soak in the beautiful sight of Lady Liberty across the water.

I started thinking that if a friend happened to be standing under the Statue of Liberty, they would appear much too small to see clearly. But one day in the future, when people possess cyber-enhanced eye implants, they will be able to see that friend just by looking. Then they could zoom in to get a better look, and proceed to have a face to face conversation.

This may all sound like crazy science fiction. Yet two hundred years ago the “super power” of being able to talk to another person at a distance would have seemed just as crazy. Now we don’t even stop to think how amazing it is that we can casually chat with somebody thousands of miles away.

Which is why I am interested not in how amazing such experiences will be, but in how ordinary. Once every child grows up in a world where she can zoom in and have a face to face discussion with somebody who is clear across a room, or a stadium, or a river, the whole notion of personal space will shift.

After it becomes possible to have intermediate states between “in person” and “on the phone”, social norms will adjust accordingly. It’s hard to know what such an enhanced everyday reality will feel like. But with properly designed empirical research, perhaps using shared VR to simulate the experience, we just might get a glimpse.

Today I wanted to explain an idea I had for a mechanical linkage to a colleague. So I did what I often do: I wrote a little animated diagram in Javascript, posted it to as a web page, and sent him a link.

The animated diagram communicated the idea just fine, but there was one interesting thing about the process. When I think about how much time I spent, maybe 20 minutes of it was on making a working diagram. But then I spent another two hours or so polishing it up.

And here’s the interesting part: Almost none of that time was spent making a functional difference to the animated diagram itself. Most of the changes I made would be completely invisible to anybody looking at the diagram.

But internally, the changes were enormous. In place of that first messy, overlong, ad hoc jumble of code, I ended up with a much smaller, clearer and streamlined program.

I realized at some point that I was engaged in creating two different works. Of course there was the visible animated diagram that anybody would see if they followed the link to the web page.

Yet there was also a second creation behind that first one: A story in code, told as elegantly, succinctly and gracefully as I could tell it.

But who was the audience for this second work? Surely not just myself. If I knew for certain that I would be the only person who would ever look at that code, I would have left it in its early, messier incarnation, and moved on.

No, the audience was for that future collaborator out there, whoever or wherever they might be, who cares deeply not just that something works, but about the ideas that make it work — and where those thoughts might lead. It was important to me to leave a clear trail to follow, a map in thought, so that this person could pick up the trail and continue the journey, perhaps to places I might never think to go.

Today, when I looked at the title of yesterday’s post, “Futurepedia”, I realized that I had created a frankenword. “Frankenword” is, as many of you know, a modern colloquialism for a portmanteau — a new word formed from two or more existing words that have been mashed together.

And then I thought that maybe it might be cool to start a Wikipedia of frankenwords. That is, an on-line crowd-sourced encyclopedia devoted to words that are mash-ups of other words.

Of course part of the fun would come when contributors start to create their frankenwords, just so they can add them to the Frankepedia. Which would be just fine with me. The world needs more neologicians.

Then I started to think that what we really need is an on-line crowd sourced encyclopedia devoted to ideas that have been raised to their meta-level. Like the reasoning process in the previous paragraphs that took me from a “Futurepedia” to a “Frankepedia”.

We could call this a “Metapedia”. And I guess it would need to contain an entry on Metapedias.

As long as we are talking about the future, I wonder whether there is any reasonable way to create an interesting taxonomy of possible futures. The trivial statement on this subject might be: “Any future is possible, therefore all futures must be considered.”

But that’s not a very interesting view. Some possible futures are highly unlikely. In the next few years we will probably not invent time travel, the faster than light drive, or antigravity. I’m not saying these things are impossible. Just that, based on what we currently know, they are highly improbable.

But some other things, such as the likely effects of global warming, or the continuing influence of Moore’s Law on our daily life, are much more understandable. And these factors could be used to sketch out a sort of rough road map of possible futures.

Perhaps we need a kind of Wikipedia of the future. A set of reference pages that people can turn to, or add to, so that we can build a collective consensus as to what might be in store for us. And maybe even be able to do something about it.

Is that asking too much?