Month: April 2024

I really love travel to wonderful places
So much good food and so many new faces
It expands my horizons, I learn many things
I treasure it for the great joy that it brings
But after I’ve traveled all over the map
Then it’s nice to home and just take a good nap

There are movies that give you what you expect from a movie, and then there are movies that move the needle, change the conversation, reinvent the whole idea of what a movie is or could be. The former are much more common than the latter, but to me the latter are much more exciting.

Some notable examples that come to mind are Psycho, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Poor Things, Synectoche NY, Stranger than Fiction, Twelve Monkeys, Brazil.

This is far from an exhaustive list, and I would be curious to hear other peoples’ favorite examples. Don’t get me wrong — I love a good RomCom or thriller as well as the next person — but there is something transcendent about going to the movie theater and being completely surprised by something that is nothing like anything you’ve ever seen before.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

I spent much of this week preparing for a demo. Today with much trepidation I showed the demo.

And miraculously, lo and behold, it worked. Everything worked, just as it should have.

One less thing to worry about. Now I can go prepare for the next demo.

This week I had a conversation with some colleagues about self-driving cars. I reiterated my long-standing opinion about the best way for the idea of self-driving cars to gain traction.

I said that somebody would need to decide to create a “self-driving car only” zone, perhaps in a small town somewhere. The key is to avoid mixing with human drivers.

If the only vehicles on the road are self-driving cars — without the need to account for the unpredictability of human drivers — then the whole thing essentially becomes a cooperative packet switching network. Such networks are well understood, and known to be safe and reliable.

“But what about traffic lights?” somebody asked. “Self-driving cars sometimes get those wrong.”

I pointed out that there would be no need for traffic lights. Cars would all be communicating with each other behind the scenes to cooperatively maintain the most efficient traffic flow.

Eventually I realized that the problem was the terminology. For many people, “self-driving car” is a trigger word.

So instead I think we can just use more appropriate and descriptive language. The future is not about self-driving cars. The future is about a small-vehicle public transportation system.

It’s said that all the world’s a stage
Well, one man’s work has been the rage
For about four hundred thirty years
And so today some birthday cheers
For that wondrous Englishman
Who gave us Lear and Caliban
Hamlet, Portia and Ophelia
Iago, Oberon, Cordelia
Macbeth and Puck and Tatiana
Never since the Pax Romana
Has one man’s star shone quite so bright
And filled the stage with such delight
There has never been another maven
Like the man who comes from Stratford on Avon

Given what is going on these days, this might be a good moment to point out that the entire point of a university is to be a place where people can discuss ideas, even if they disagree. Especially if they disagree.

So what does it mean when people prevent that from being possible? How is that not fascism?

Sometimes you just need to pause, and remember to be grateful.

Eventually (although not soon), we will be able to use a combination of visual, audio and haptic feedback to create a multi-sensory experience that feels just like reality. In a sense, the challenge here is to pass something akin to the Turing test.

The test would go something like this: If I am collaborating with two people, one of whom is sitting directly across a table from me and the other is 1000 miles away, can we create an experience of presence with sufficient fidelity so that I cannot tell which is which?

For example, if the person sitting directly across from me passes an object to me across the table, I should be able to see it, hear it slide across the table, and feel it as I take the object from my collaborator. I might also feel a slight resistance as the other person lets go of the object.

Can I replicate this experience with a person who is 1000 miles away by using multi-sensory passthrough? At what point does the combination of visual, audio and haptic passthrough sufficiently match the fidelity of physical co-presence so that I can no longer tell the difference?

I don’t know the answer. But I think that this would be a very worthy goal to strive for, and that research in this area would be very exciting.

Since we have talked about the concept of passthrough for two human senses — vision and hearing — it is logical to think about what other senses might be amenable to this paradigm. A logical candidate is touch.

One of the limitations of video and audio passthrough devices is the intangibility of the items they present us with. We can see and hear virtual objects, but we cannot touch them.

So perhaps we should be thinking in terms of “haptic passthrough”. In other words, by some technological means we should be able to touch virtual objects as though they are physical objects. In addition, we should be able to modify how real objects feel to the touch.

When combined with video and audio passthrough, the effects of this can be powerful. Taken together, all of these things constitute “multi-sensory passthrough”.

More tomorrow.