Author: admin

Today I’ve been watching the news
And I’m getting a case of the blues
Think I’ll just take a break
For a chocolate shake
I’m figuring what can I lose

Every day I open up my computer and post to this blog. And every day one of the first decisions to make is “what is the title of my post?”

Today I really noticed, for the first time, that in WordPress, the field which asks you to add the title is called “Enter title here”. Which actually sounds like a great title for a blog post.

So now I am happy. 🙂

When you talk on the phone with somebody, you definitely know that they are somewhere else. The entire point of a phone call is to bridge that gap of distance between you and someone who is elsewhere on the planet.

Zoom calls are like phone calls in that respect. When you talk to someone over Zoom, you never feel as though you are both in the same place.

The idea of “being in the same place” is built into how we use language. If I say “I talked with Fred today,” you don’t know whether Fred and I met in person or just talked on the phone.

But if I say “I had coffee with Fred today,” you know that Fred and I were together in the same place. The difference is fundamental.

So here’s a question: Will socially shared immersive technologies ever advance to the point where I can say “I had coffee with Fred today,” and it will seem perfectly normal to everyone — even if Fred and I are in two different places?

Of course Burning Man could not take place as usual this year. So in a very noble and heroic effort, the organizers of Burning Man took created a version of the festival in virtual reality — in particular, in AltSpace VR.

I tried VR Burning Man together with some friends, and I learned a lot. I could see the immense effort that went into it, and the artistry involved.

Yet there was something unsatisfying about the experience. And I don’t mean in comparison with an in-person version of the festival — of course a virtual festival can never replace a real festival.

I mean that various design choices were made that in retrospect didn’t work. The most notable was that there didn’t seem to be a way for our group of friends to travel together, the way one travels together in a car.

Sure, we could individually navigate our avatars to the same place. But if I saw something in the distance and wanted to teleport there, I could not take my friends with me. We’d all need to try to jump to the same spot, and hope for the best.

This is important because what really matters is not the cool things one sees, but the conversations with friends — the bonding that occurs when we go on an adventure together.

If you keep needing to interrupt the conversation just to get to the next thing, then what is the point of going together on an adventure? It would like going on a cross-country road trip with everyone driving in a separate car.

There are that things that I’d also like to see improved. But fixing that one would be a very good start.

With so many people working remotely, it is becoming more normal for colleagues to work across large distances. On a recent workday I found myself juggling meetings across five different time zones.

Suppose you are working at a company where most of your co-workers are clustered in a single time zone, but you are somewhere else in the world. For them it may be morning, whereas for you it is late afternoon or nighttime.

Until recently this would have marked you as an outlier — the one member of the team who is not showing up in person to the staff meeting. But now, in the age of COVID-19, everybody is working from home.

So it might make sense for you to virtually adjust your time zone. Right now that would be awkward, but with advances in AR and VR technology, it might become easier, and even commonplace.

People might choose to shift, during parts of their work week, into virtual time zones. During those times, the sun will rise and set when you find it convenient to do so.

This might be very good, or very bad. Or maybe both. 🙂

Yesterday we had a discussion about the relative benefits of realism and immersion. It was in the context of using technology for socially hanging out.

Suppose you are socially hanging out with somebody over a distance. Given the current level of technology it would be very difficult to achieve a high degree of visual realism of the other person while also giving you both the feeling of being physically immersed in the same room.

You can certainly achieve visual realism alone. All you need for that is a video camera and commercially available software such as Zoom.

You can also achieve the feeling of physical immersion. We did that with our Siggraph project The Outpost.

In that project, everyone definitely has the feeling of being in the same physical room. But that room is an alien planet, and everybody looks like a robot.

Personally, I find shared physical immersion to be far more compelling than visual realism. Given a choice I would generally choose immersion in a heartbeat.

But that choice assumes several things, including high frame rate, low network latency, correct head and hands positions, and shared spatial audio. Without those, the shared feeling of physical immersion tends to fail.

I wonder whether, as technology improves, we will end up adding ever greater visual realism to the experience of shared physical immersion. Or will we abandon visual realism entirely, in service of other goals?

I guess only time will tell.

Meetings today back-to-back
My pandemic schedule’s whack
Though travel is nil
It’s still such a pill
Well at least there is nothing to pack

Picking up on yesterday’s theme, let’s talk about some possible ramifications of future superpresence. It’s a tricky topic to discuss, because we are only now at the beginning of our collective journey toward such capabilities.

Nobody comes away from a Zoom meeting and thinks it was as good as an actual face-to-face meeting in person. There are so many things that are still deficient about the technology we have today.

But at some point there may be a cross-over moment, when the capabilities give us tools for social awareness and communication beyond what can be achieved in person. And then things might flip.

People might choose to take their meetings via remote superpresence, even if they have option for an in-person meeting. At some point, it might simply be better.

If that happens, then we will see a kind of reality reversal. To truly communicate with somebody on a deep level, we might collectively choose to use such technologies, rather than face-to-face interaction.

I don’t think such a thing will happen any time soon. But I’m not ruling out the possibility that one day we might get there.

It has long been a dream of many to effect truly successful transmission of presence. For example, that was one of the central research goals of the MIT media lab when it was first founded back in 1986.

I think we are finally getting to the point where, in the coming few years, we will be able to beam a quite reasonable representation of one person’s physical presence into another person’s physical space. That will be very exciting, but it will raise more questions than it answers.

After we have taken for granted that you and I can have what feels like a fully embodied face-to-face conversation over distance, what comes next? We will inevitably turn to adding features.

there are many things you can do when you are looking at someone’s virtual being, rather than speaking to them in the flesh. For example, you might be able to read their body temperature, know what they had for breakfast, or be aware of their favorite color.

On a technical level, anything that can be done through a combination of sensors, local computation and the power of the Cloud is fair game.

Such powers of superpresence can be used for either good or evil. In one bad scenario, they could be used to help enable a police state, and to take away values that we cherish, including privacy.

Yet those same capabilities could be used to help promote empathy and understanding. Perhaps we will have an enhanced ability to see that a person is becoming visibly angry not because they feel belligerent but because they feel fear and are in need of reassurance.

As with all new capabilities, superpresence will be subject to Kranzberg’s first law of technology.

There are so many ways that constructing software is like constructing a house. From a systems perspective they have a lot in common.

In both cases there are layers. The bottom layers are essential, yet essentially generic. You need a foundation, plumbing, electricity, proper management of heat and light.

At that level there are standards for everything, and if you deviate from those standards, you are going to run into trouble. Fortunately, at that basic level a lot of the rules have long ago been worked out by other people, so you don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

But as you go up from the lower layers to the upper layers, the design criteria change. You can experiment more, start to take risks, invent.

Now you are transitioning from the general to the more particular. You have an opportunity to make your individual statement.

I suspect that all systems of construction follow a similar pattern, whether in the field of songwriting, physics or philosophy. There are basic foundational rules that you need to observe, simply to have a space upon which to build.

After that, as you move up to the higher layers of design, you have the freedom to play. But first you have to make sure you have those basics in place. After all, it doesn’t matter how cool your house looks if it’s going to fall apart a week after somebody moves in.