Month: March 2022

It has been two years to the day since we entered the age of Zoom. On March 12th, 2020 I used Zoom for the first time ever, to teach a class. And it seems that we have been living and the world ever since.

Now I think nothing of having face to face conversations multiple times a week with colleagues who live in China. I don’t think I would have thought about as a thing before then.

The world has changed. It’s going to stay changed.

I’ve told this story before, but I realize that it is an important part of my origin story, and so worth pondering from multiple perspectives. When I was in Kindergarten I had a crush on a beautiful girl in my class. To my delight, the teacher sat us right next to each other.

But one day in that same class we got a new student, a girl who was a problem child. She would often have fits of temper, and if you were sitting next to her, she would steal your scissors.

At some point the teacher moved my seat next to hers. When I asked why, the teacher explained that it had to be me.

It seems that I was the only kid in the class who was nice to the troubled student, and who never got into fights with her. I guess, with the wisdom of hindsight, that this was a great compliment.

But I’m still sad that I didn’t get to sit next to that other girl.

Sometime this past week somebody asked me if I could help to make some simple animations for a project. I took that as a challenge to implement a “simplest possible” animated sketching program.

The basic idea in my head was that if an animated drawing program is a poem, this would be a haiku. I was hoping to provide something so simple to use that people might use it casually during conversation, the way they use a whiteboard.

A few days later, here is what I’ve got so far. It doesn’t have lots of fancy features, but that’s sort of the point.

I’ve been wondering about some of the legal edges of U.S. Trademark law. For example, can I start a video chat company called Mooz?

Would I get into trouble if I had a search engine company called Elgoog? What about a computer company called Elppa?

An on-line retailer called Nozama? Or a ride-share company called Rebu?

Would I be breaking any actual laws? Or would it all be kosher, because most people couldn’t possibly mistake the one for the other?

It would be good to know. Besides, I kind of like the name Mooz. 🙂

I’ve been doing the New York Times Spelling Bee. It’s a daily puzzle and it’s lots of fun.

Sometimes I manage to find all possible words. But that’s only on a good day.

The rules are always the same, but each day they change the configuration of letters. The result is that some days are fairly easy, and others are killer hard.

Based on the initial configuration of letters, every day has a particular maximum possible score. Which leads my mind to the following different puzzle:

Given the rules of Spelling Bee, what configuration of letters would produce the highest possible score?

It seems to me that this might be a challenging problem. My inclination would be to write a computer program to search through likely solutions.

But a likely solution is not a proof. A really interesting open challenge might be to prove that a particular configuration of letters produces the maximum possible score.

And that problem might be hard.

I love github. This wonderful version control software is a mainstay of our lab’s research. Basically, it lets us all work together on large software projects without getting in each others’ way.

When you use github you can branch off and work on your own stuff, and then merge your changes back into the main project, usually without any issues between you and all the other people who are doing the same thing.

But github requires a certain amount of setup. And sometimes my project is just too small for that, and I want to kind of fly under the radar.

For that I fall back on the simple DIY version control that I’ve been using forever. For very simple and small projects — the kind that take only a few days from soup to nuts — I have a practice of copying the entire project over every time I make significant progress.

So I end up with a whole sequence of copies of the same project, each a little more advanced than the one before it. This has the advantage that I can easily visit earlier versions, and even grab snippets of code from them to use in the latest version, all without missing a step.

This wouldn’t work at all if I were collaborating on something large with other people. But for those little skunkworks projects, it’s awesome.

I’ve been doing a general apartment cleaning, as I do periodically. If you’ve been through it, you know what it’s like.

You throw out lots and lots of things, and keep fewer things. I think it’s healthy for us to perform this ritual every once in a while. We change, and our stuff needs to change as well, in order to continue to be our stuff, rather than the stuff of some former version of us.

It can be tempting to focus on all of these objects that are suddenly no longer around. But that would be the wrong place to focus.

It’s not what you throw away that’s important. It’s what you keep.

There has been a lot of talk in recent times about human interaction moving into a kind of 3D cartoon on-line world. Sort of a combination of Snow Crash and Ready Player One.

But I’m not so sure that this is really what people want. We humans are in love with faces. Not imitations of faces, but the real thing.

We love movies, theater, TV shows. We hang out in restaurants and shopping malls and coffee shops. We love activities that involve looking at actual human faces.

Sure we also love cartoons, but they aren’t as central to our emotional well being. People love Toy Story, but they are obsessed with the worlds of Harry Potter and Star Wars.

When we seek out entertainment, actors with real faces seem to speak to us in some special primal way. And in these pandemic times, we generally don’t reach for the many available on-line cartoon worlds to connect with the people we care about.

Instead we use video chats like Zoom and Skype. We don’t want to see simulations of the people who are dear to us — we want to see the real thing.

There is a good chance that this will always be the case, because it has been baked into our brains through millennia of human evolution. We are emotionally hardwired to seek out real face to face communication, and I suspect we always will be.

At our NYU Future Reality Lab we’ve been working for a long time on a Web based VR project. Because it’s Web based, it also works on old fashioned computers with screens and keyboards.

Meanwhile, one thing that has radically changed in the last two years is that everybody talks through video chat — in particular Zoom. As you know, this is sadly due to the tragic COVID pandemic.

Recently I added a video chat capability to our lab’s VR software. It doesn’t work on VR headsets, but it’s just great on old fashioned computers with screens and keyboards.

Now I use it for all of my Zoom calls. Two years ago that would not have meant anything, but today — because the world has changed — it means everything.

Instead of static Zoom backgrounds, I have live computer graphics all around me in Zoom meetings. I can bring up interactive demos in conversations with colleagues.

Most of the underlying software was written with headset-based virtual reality in mind. But it turns out that it’s also just perfect for face-to-face online conversations.

The craziest part? None of this would not even be a thing, if it weren’t for this terrible pandemic.

I have long been fascinated by creatures that are made out of magical materials. A being that can change shape at well, that is made of some sort of elemental stuff, is just incredibly appealing.

There are many examples in literature of such beings. Dracula, of course, could change his shape in many ways. The T-1000 from Terminator 2 is a more recent example.

Then there is Slimer from Ghostbusters, and of course the various iterations of Flubber, from Fred MacMurray to Robin Williams. Not to mention Gumby, who in Art Clokey’s wondrous animations could get out of any scrape by morphing at will.

Through the years I’ve played around with various techniques to create such characters. Last year I did a series of experiments, highly influenced by Flubber, to try to capture the behavior of an infinitely morphable character made of some sort of magical substance.

You can see a snapshot of some of those experiments here.