Month: April 2022

Who knows how long I’ve loved you
You know I love you still
Will I wait a lonely lifetime
If you want me to I will.

If you need to know more, check back here tomorrow.

These last few days I’ve been working on a jury review panel for a technical conference. I quickly lost count of how many submissions had the word “Metaverse” in the title.

In many cases, the submission didn’t even use VR. I think the authors just threw the word into the title because they figured reviewers would like it. But the committee was definitely not amused by seeing this word constantly tossed around like salad.

At some point, I got so frustrated with yet another gratuitous use of the word, that I finally said “They keep talking about the Metaverse, but I can’t see what any of this has to do with Neal Stephenson.”

At least that got a laugh from the other committee members.

There are some colleagues I’ve been working with for the last year or so. We’ve all been meeting on Zoom once every two weeks, and sometimes more often.

You could say we’ve gotten to know each other, and have built a kind of rapport. But my entire experience of them has been on-line.

Until today.

We had an in-person meeting for the first time since the start of our collaboration. And that was the moment when we realized — really realized — that we had never been in the same room together.

And I was struck, all over again, about how there is just something so delightful about being in the same physical space. It’s not a rational thing, it’s something you feel at a deep level.

The world might be moving toward blended reality, but I don’t think we will ever quite erase the difference between meeting on-line and being together in person. And I think that’s a good thing.

The little widget I showed yesterday lets you explore the lives of around 900 movie actors. You can scroll down to find any of those actors, but you can’t see them all at once.

That’s ok if you just want to roam around and explore. But what if you were dealing with time-critical data? Perhaps a medical emergency, or a terrorist threat?

In that case, every second would count. You would definitely not want to find yourself scrolling down a database while the seconds ticked away.

I’m wondering whether we could reduce that access time by putting the whole thing into Virtual Reality. What if you found yourself in what felt like a physical room, and you could just take a step this way or that way to access data?

Maybe you’d be able to get to any one of those 900 or so names in a single motion. Which means you could perform complex searches and cross-correlations on that data really fast.

And if it really mattered — if lives depended on it — that could make all the difference.

Speaking of people as data, as an exercise I took from Wikipedia a list of all the actors on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and turned it into an interactive program.

Specifically, I’m interested in exploring the lives of the actors in an historical context. So I reordered the list to be in chronological order, and made it so that you could click on any actor to do a Google search on him or her.

The implementation turned out to be a very short Javascript program. You can check it out here.

There is something odd about thinking of people as data. After all, each individual human being is a vast entity, and essentially infinite vessel of complexity and possibility.

But for purposes of the modern on-line economy, people are data records. We are born in this year, and die in that one. We have preferred shopping habits, viewing preferences, favorite places to vacation.

Somewhere in a computer database, we are each reduced to a neat set of categories and a list of weights and values. From the perspectives of Amazon, Facebook, Google and their ilk, this is who we are.

Yet in our hearts we know better. For we are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.

I don’t wear shoes when I am at home. And I often don’t have my wallet on me. But both of these things are mandatory the moment I leave home.

But I do use my SmartPhone at home. In fact, I suspect people would be surprised if they couldn’t reach me by phone and I were to explain “Sorry, I was at home.”

Which makes me wonder — will we wear those future mixed reality glasses while we are at home? Will they be more like shoes and wallets or will they be more like phones?

My best guess is that we will wear them all the time when we are walking around on the street or shopping in a store. In fact, in pretty much any public place.

But at home we will wear them only when we specifically want to communicate with the outside world. Otherwise we will take them off, so we can enjoy some precious moments of peace and quiet.

William Wordsworth may have said it best:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Imagine it is ten years in the future. You may still be carrying around something around the size and weight of an iPhone in your pocket, but you never look at it.

The thing in your pocket is only there to help provide power and wireless connectivity. Your entire interface is contained in your hands, your voice, and the lightweight pair of glasses that you generally wear while walking about in populated areas.

I’ve been pondering the following question: What will be the equivalent of a homepage?

When you open up your notebook computer or Web browser today, you see, by default, a set of choices of things to do. You can customize your desktop or homepage, so that things you do most often are right at your fingertips.

Your SmartPhone has a similar set-up. You place the things that you access most often conveniently on your home screen.

But your “home screen or “homepage” or “desktop”, or whatever it will be called, will not be on a screen. It will be wherever you want it to be in your field of vision.

And it may not be called up by tapping on a visual icon, but by something you say, or by a particular movement of your hands, or a particular place you look within your field of vision — or by some combination of all three.

This may all seem exotic right now. But there will come a day, for better or worse, when we will be amazed that anybody ever managed to get by without it.

I am scheduled to give a presentation this week, in which I would like to include some new demos. Theoretically I could go back and forth on my computer between the demos and some kind of standard presentation software, like PowerPoint or KeyNote.

But the weird thing is, it’s just a lot easier for me to write my own software that does everything I would want from PowerPoint or KeyNote, and insert that into my demo program. Which seems odd, because those are major tools used by just about everybody for giving presentations.

The difference, I think, is that I know how to program. And just a little bit of programming goes a very long way when you want to give a custom presentation. For one thing, you can easily to things that are just impossible using commercial tools.

If everybody could program, I wonder whether those standard presentation programs would even exist. Hmm.

I was going to not post anything today, as a kind of April fool’s prank. Or else insert some sort of obscure cultural reference, just to see if anybody would catch it.

But that seemed way too meta (with a lower-case ‘m’). Maybe I’ll just go watch the snow crash instead…