Month: January 2020

Capabilities we take for granted today were once considered the realm of fantasy. Until about 145 years ago, you couldn’t have a conversation with somebody who was miles away.

Similarly, photography, movies, sound recording, the Web and other media technologies have created new kinds of human super power. What was once considered impossible soon becomes taken for granted.

Various new super powers will emerge when everybody starts wearing those forthcoming Smart Glasses. There are too many to enumerate here, but a few stand out.

You will always be able to identify people you are looking at (and possibly their mood), you will know where you are in traffic (whether walking or driving), you will be able to know just by looking whether that restaurant you like across town has a table for you and your date, or whether there are still good seats at that movie theater.

But I suspect the one I will appreciate the most is the zoom capability. Whatever you are looking at, if you want to see it more clearly, you will be able to simply zoom in for a closer look.

Now that’s what I call a super power!

In the future those virtual specs
Will enable some fancy effects
When everyone gets
All their virtual pets
I just want a baby T. Rex

Life can contain all sorts of nasty surprises and unwelcome turns of fortune. You never know when reality will throw an unpleasant curve ball in your direction.

Yet every once in a while, it’s good to stop, look around you, and simply take stock. Right now I am doing just that.

And I realize that I am actually pretty happy with what I see. Life, for all of its ups and downs, truly does contain many moments of simple joy.

Today I am remembering to honor those moments. And I am also remembering to embrace them with gratitude.

This certainly doesn’t mean that life is perfect. But maybe it doesn’t need to be.

Today I shared
A quick smile
With a complete stranger

The entire encounter
Lasted just a moment
Yet in that moment

Somehow
Against all odds
We became friends

When everyone is wearing SmartGlasses, many things will change. One of those things may be the way we negotiate personal space.

Right now my personal space in the physical world pretty much ends with my body. I can reach out my arms to shake somebody’s hand, or to pick up an object, but generally speaking, that’s about it.

Of course I could choose to pick up an object and throw it at you. But that would generally be an example of my invading your personal space.

But when everyone is wearing SmartGlasses, we will each likely have a visible and sometimes audible cloud of information hovering around us. Objects in the world will also have such clouds of information, depending on their purpose and on our relationship with them.

Where will these clouds of information go? Will they hover between us, over our heads, or float around our hands and fingers?

Whatever the scenario that ends up being widely adopted, the result will be a realignment of physical space. Much like the daemons in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, the virtual extensions of our physical selves will become an intrinsic part of our physical presence for one another.

When SmartPhones are replaced by SmartGlasses, we won’t need to hold up our phone to see augmented reality. It will just be there, all around us.

When we see a virtual object floating in the middle of a room, or hovering over the sidewalk, everyone else will be seeing it too. From a shared psychological, social and cultural perspective, that object won’t be augmented reality. It will just be reality.

Or will it?

What happens if the privilege of viewing some virtual objects comes at a price? Maybe certain virtual objects will be available only if you have the right subscription service.

Perhaps a social stratification will develop. Only the rich will be able to see the finer things in virtual life. The working classes will just need to settle for muddling by with drab imitations.

We may very well enter a new era of public/private art. Aesthetic experiences geared to the wealthy will be hiding in plain sight, available only to those who wear the right glasses.

But of course those expensive elite objects will not be completely invisible. What is the point of being privileged if the lower classes don’t know about it?

After all, airline passengers in economy class are forced to walk past the ritzy first class section to get to their tiny seats. Similarly, future content providers will provide ways to make sure everybody is aware that augmented reality is a place of economic disparity.

The poor may not ever know what the rich are looking at. But they sure as hell will know that the rich are watching something that they themselves can never see.

I think I confuse Amazon.

The only real way to know is by the adverts that keep popping up in my browser. I can tell which ones are connected to Amazon because I remember what I shopped for on-line at their site.

But the problem, from their perspective, is that I shop for both consumer stuff and work stuff. And the work stuff is a fairly eclectic set of one-time purchases of optical parts, electronic devices, connectors and fasteners, oddball furniture, empty eyeglass frames and other random objects both large and small.

So somewhere in a large data center, a server computer is probably whirring away, vainly running tests on my choices. An advanced machine learning algorithm is attempting to classify me, to figure out which parts of my economic soul Amazon can sell off to the highest bidder.

But the problem is that I have many economic souls. I am large, I consume multitudes.

I would like to think that maybe, just maybe, I am making that server computer run just a little bit hotter, as it tries in vain to make sense of my buying patterns. Alas, that means I am likely contributing to global warming, and therefore to the destruction of the rainforests.

Oh well. We may one day no longer have the Amazon, but we’ll always have Amazon.

Today I treated my nephew and his girlfriend to a day at the American Museum of Natural History. As always, the museum was awesome, but this time I was particularly struck by an exhibition about the Tyrannosaurus Rex.

There was a big screen where you could see and hear an animation of the T. Rex in its habitat. There were also many life sized casts of skeletons, as well as cool interactive exhibits where you could do things like create possible sounds for the roar of the mighty thunder lizard.

There was even a VR experience. But it was essentially just a puzzle game, where you could practice putting together the bones of the T. Rex skeleton.

I kept thinking that what this exhibition really needed was a room where we could all just slip on a VR headset and walk around freely together within a simulation of the upper Cretaceous Period, as though we were in the presence of an actual Tyrannosaurus Rex. In our lab we are developing the means to do just that sort of thing.

So it won’t be too long before you will be able to have that kind of experience in your own city or town. Coming soon, to a museum near you!

I am devastated by the loss of Syd Mead.

Perhaps you haven’t heard of him? I suppose I could insert pictures into this post. I could educate you, explain why our society’s visual imaginings of the future have been largely the work of one man.

But we live in the age of Google, of internet search. You are perfectly capable of learning about Syd Mead for yourself.

If you are one of those people who thinks seriously about the future, or about the possible outcomes of technological progress, then you will have encountered his work many times. You may even realize how pervasive his influence has been.

I suppose I could use this post as an instruction manual, but I won’t. Now that Mr. Mead has completed his time here, now that they have come to take him back, please go forth and discover his work for yourself.

And celebrate how much his visual genius has influenced the world you live in, and has imparted wings to your own imagination.

Just saw Greta Gerwig’s Little Women. I loved it!

Even more, I realized I was watching what might be the most radically feminist film I have ever seen coming out of mainstream Hollywood. I’ll explain.

The cast consisted mostly of beautiful actresses. Yet unlike just about any Hollywood film you have ever seen, there was not a single shot that objectified or sexualized any of those actresses. The traditional “male gaze” was simply absent.

But Gerwig’s film goes even further than that. Within this story that is being told from a female perspective, the camera makes a point, at every possible moment, of gleefully objectifying the attractive leading men in the cast.

That, my friends, is a brilliant act of subversively radical feminism. And to their credit, Gerwig and her producers managed to drop it down right smack in the middle of our obliviously patriarchal culture.