Ken’s Blog

Today an old friend of mine, a computer graphics pioneer, showed me a project he has been working on, to help make this pandemic easier to take. Every day, for the last 31 days, he has made a pencil drawing of an object he can place on his desk.

One day he draws a stapler, the next a pair of scissors, or maybe a bottle of perfume, or a small animal figurine. Each is highly realistic, and each is beautiful.

I admire this push against the relentless digitalization of expression. Just picking up a pencil and sketching on paper seems like a wonderful path to escaping the tyranny of the computer.

And he seemed so happy to show me his drawings. The whole time he was beaming like a little kid.

Come to think of it, maybe I will put down this computer and make some drawings. 🙂

There are essentially two ways we might end up doing augmented reality with a future pair of AR glasses: Optical see-through and video pass-through. The first works a bit like Google Glass: Computer graphics are superimposed on the literal reality around you.

The second is a lot like today’s AR smartphone apps, and is sort of like watching the world around you on television: Two little video cameras capture what your left and right eye would normally see, computer graphics are superimposed, and when you look around, you end up seeing the resulting altered reality.

Optical see-through has the advantage that you literally see reality, just with virtual stuff superimposed on it. This is how Microsoft Hololens and Magic Leap do it.

Video pass-through has the advantage that you can transform the reality around you into literally anything at all, like the way smartphone AR apps can transform reality — except you will be able to do it just by looking with your eyes, rather than needing to peer into a little handheld screen.

I think that in the long run, the future will belong to video pass-through, because it is inherently far more powerful. In the short run it will suffer from lower resolution and other artifacts. But eventually, as technology advances, those artifacts will go away.

And that coming revolution just got a boost: Sometime next year, the forthcoming Oculus 2 VR headset will allow you to add video pass-through to the experiences you create. That will mark the real beginning of the revolution.

With R.B.G gone we have seen
That the fight for the court has grown mean
But after elections,
There will be more selections
Till the size of the bench is nineteen

our next president
should select our next justice
so said mcconnell

Going non-stop is very counterproductive. I am far more productive when I remember to take a break between tasks.

But I think it goes beyond that. In some ways I am most productive during those breaks. Those are the moments when I have time to think, and to figure out what I should really be doing and why.

Just today I can upon the below quote, which well describes this phenomenon. Words to live by:

“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.” – Anne Lemott

You may be wondering, what was that movie I was talking about the other day?

It was Twelve Monkeys.

🙂

Just this week both Apple and Facebook announced new initiatives for supporting health, exercise and wellness. In both cases, their offerings are consistent with a wired, non-collocated world.

In other words, two of the world’s largest consumer tech companies are throwing their considerable weight behind helping people to stay healthy in a way that allows for social distancing.

Are we seeing a sea change in the fitness industry? Yoga studios are going out of business, due to the harsh realities of the pandemic. Meanwhile, Pelaton and similar remote-exercise offerings have gotten a large boost for the same reason.

Now the largest players of all are stepping into the arena, aiming to create entire consumer ecosystems out of socially distanced fitness. When I see something that seismic, it makes me wonder — even after this terrible pandemic is over — whether things will ever truly go back to the way they were.

Google and Facebook are both companies that offer “free” services. Of course the services are not actually free — you pay for them by watching ads.

The actual paying customers here are advertisers. So in a sense, when you use Google or Facebook you are actually the product.

And yet the two companies are quite different, because the “you” who is the product is different. In the case of Facebook, “you” are a person who mainly wants to hang out, catch up with friends, maybe check out some silly posts.

In the case of Google, the “you” is a person who uses productivity tools. Web search, document sharing, appointment calendars, these are all the instruments of people who are trying to get something done.

Which means that Google and Facebook are offering their respective customers two very different products. Facebook offers to sell ads to people who are just hanging out. Google offers to sell ads to people who are trying to get something done.

I suppose this distinction is obvious on sight to anyone who sees it. But it’s still probably worth keeping in mind.

Various people in our lab attended the on-line Facebook Connect today. And I think the fundamental problem with it was the same as the problem I saw at Burning Man in AltSpace.

The entire system is set up to throw you in with complete strangers. There seems to be no accommodation for people who want to share the experience.

Perhaps there is such an accommodation, and I couldn’t find it. But one would think that would be the first consideration in any shared social media experience in VR.

Given that you don’t have the normal cues for vetting people, all of the issues of finding yourself in a group of strangers are magnified. I don’t think that is a fundamental problem with VR, but I do think it is something that needs to be addressed very well and up front.

We don’t give up on automobiles because they are potentially dangerous. Instead, we develop regulations and require people to wear seatbelts.

So where are the seatbelts for socially shared VR?

It has been so long that I have been to a movie in a real movie theater that I am starting to get nostalgic. And that makes me think back on my favorite moments in movie theaters.

I think my all time favorite such moment happened some years ago when I went to a movie theater in Manhattan to see a movie with my friend Athomas. The moment happened not during the movie, but immediately afterward.

Usually when you go to a movie, the audience leaves right after the credits. People stream out to the lobby, and from there they exit the building and go on with their lives.

But that didn’t happen with this movie. Instead, everybody in the audience went to the lobby and then stayed there to debate with their friends about what they had just seen.

Everyone was so immersed in the questions raised by the film that they didn’t want to let the experience go. For a good ten minutes, that lobby turned into an intense debate forum.

That, my friends, is the one and only time I have ever experienced anything like that. And I have seen hundreds of movies.

You might very well ask what film provoked such a unique and astonishing response. In a day or two I will tell you.

But first I’ll give you a chance to guess.