Widget Wednesday #1

I’ve decided that with the new year, I will try something new. Every Wednesday will be “Widget Wednesday”. So once a week I will post and discuss something I’ve created in computer graphics.

I’ll start off with something old. THIS DEMO is a partial rebuild in JavaScript of a Java applet I originally presented as a SIGGRAPH 97 Technical Sketch, which was then incorporated into a traveling museum exhibit by the American Museum of the Moving Image, and was eventually used by kids on the Spectrum to teach themselves how to read facial expressions.

The full demo showed how a real-time autonomous virtual character could express convincing emotions, without using repetitive prebuilt animations, by mixing facial expressions over time to simulate shifting moods and attitudes.

This partial rebuild mostly shows how a minimal number of elements of facial expression can start to generate a convincing impression of character and personality.

Virtually on-line

Suppose you wanted to take a complete vacation from being on-line, but you didn’t want people to know it. Say, for example, you wanted to sneak off for a week in the desert, away from all forms of electronic communication, just communing with nature.

Let’s say you were running an A.I. that could simulate your responses — on the order of “I’ll need to get back to you soon on that.” Something that would suggest that you had read people’s email/text/whatever, but not that you were off the grid.

How long could you get away with it, before people started to catch on?

Morning coding

For me there is something magical about the early hours of the morning. It’s a time when nobody else is awake, when emails and other bothersome things have not yet started to arrive.

I usually wake up with the Sun, and on a good day I get lots of programming done. It’s also the time of day when my mind is the most fresh, and anything seems possible.

Today I’ve already gotten several hours of productive programming done. I could stop now, and still feel a sense of accomplishment for the whole day.

In fact, I think I will do just that. 🙂

Doubly obscure

On this day of all days, which marks the passing of time in a more than usually dramatic way, I was reminded of how culture moves on in surprising ways.

Today I heard a song by Duran Duran, and I was reminded of when the source of their name was one of those deliciously obscure pop cultural factoids. Back when they were one of the biggest bands in the world, true fans knew that they had named themselves after the villain in the 1968 Roger Vadim sci/fi film Barbarella.

Now, among many people, the band Duran Duran itself is an obscure pop cultural factoid. So the full lineage of the term “Duran Duran” is doubly obscure.

There are lots of examples of such doubly obscure pop cultural references. A few might come to your mind while you are reading this. But I wonder whether there are any pop cultural references that are triply obscure .

Reality filter

Suppose there were a pair of glasses that you could put on to visually or sonically transform the world around you. Let’s also suppose that those glasses were as affordable as a smart phone.

What sorts of choices might people make, when taking advantage of those transformations? Would we turn the world around us into a theme park? Would we change the appearance or voices of people we’re talking to?

In principle, you could do anything with a reality filter. But in practice, certain choices will prove popular and others less so.

I suspect that people won’t choose any transformation of their perceived reality that would interfere with their own EQ (emotional intelligence quotient). It’s important to us, as social beings, to be able to “read” other people.

If anything, I suspect we will start to see apps that enhance your ability to figure out what is really going on with the people you are talking to. And that is going to have all sorts of implications for social interactions and acceptable cultural protocols.

Useful mistakes

As I do research, sometimes I get things right, and sometimes I get things wrong. It’s always gratifying when I get things right.

But when things go wrong, I sometimes learn more. Because I am forced to ask why did it go wrong?

And generally that gives me an insight that I didn’t have before. Hitting an unexpected wall forces me out of my comfort zone, which sometimes leads to new ways of thinking about the problem.

And that can be even more productive, in the long run, than getting it right would have been.

Fungible

There are some words that don’t really get noticed by many people, until something changes. Then they get noticed a lot.

One of the words that has recently gone through this transition is “fungible”. This is mainly because of the rise of the NFT, or “Non-Fungible Token”.

People are becoming more aware of the dangers of living in an increasingly virtual world. One of those dangers is that somebody else might control the rules of the world you live in. And then it is a world in which you are, essentially, fungible.

Hence the rise of Blockchain and NFTs. These are digital means of taking control of anything you value in the digital world, without needing to rely on a large profit-driven corporation.

So now we all get to use words like “fungible”, a cool word that used to be neglected. And that can’t be bad.

Biopics and reality

Biopics bear an uneasy relationship to the truth. On the one hand, they are based on real people, who actually lived. On the other hand, their primary goal is to entertain.

Because they are based on truth, biopics will inevitably give an impression of their subject which people will conflate with the real things. Yet because they are a intended as entertainment, they will invariably present a picture that is false in numerous ways.

So where does the creator’s responsibility lie here? Should truth be respected, or ignored, and to what degree?

I would argue that the most responsible course of action, given the inherent contradiction here, is to veer ostentatiously away from reality. Creating the illusion of being “faithful to truth” in a biopic is a recipe for ethical disaster.

For example, the 2014 biopic some years back of Alan Turing, The Imitation Game, seriously betrayed its subject. None of the science is accurate, and Turing’s contribution to the war effort, as well as the contributions of others, are grossly misrepresented.

For the most part I can live with the incredible number of historical inaccuracies in that film. It is, after all, a work of fiction. Caveat emptor.

But one fictional insertion drives me crazy. The filmmakers added a subplot in which Turing was blackmailed by a Russian agent, who threatened to expose Turing’s homosexuality, should he reveal the agent’s existence. In the movie, Turing does not report the agent.

That never happened, and nothing like it ever happened. Whatever the intention, the effect was to turn a real life hero into a traitor, and to continue, into our modern era, the ugly smear of “homosexuals are security risks”.

The veneer of “authenticity” of the presentation leads the viewer to think that care was taken to get the facts right. The net effect is a serious betrayal of an important historical figure.

On the other hand, the recent series Dickinson got it right, by making it obvious that the title character could not possibly be a faithful representation of the great poet.

By inserting completely impossible modern flourishes into the telling, the creators are cluing us in that we need to take everything with a grain of salt. Biopics are not reality, they are reminding us, but they can serve as inspiration, and can lead us to learn more, on our own, about the real thing.

That seems a lot more responsible to me.