Ken’s Blog

I was talking with a friend this evening about the fact that so many stories are about a return to childhood. Well, not exactly.

It’s more like they are about an adult being reminded that he or she had wisdom in childhood that has been lost or misplaced through the years. It is notable that so many stories have had this theme.

The engine of such stories is often a childhood character — one whom the protagonist has cast aside in the interest of “growing up”. This childhood character always turns out to be a magical creature.

Two notable recent examples include “Mary Poppins Returns” and “Christopher Robin”. And the canonical story with this theme is, of course Peter Pan.

There is probably something very primal at work here. After all, deep inside I think we all realize that there was something very important that we used to know when we were children.

If only we could remember what it was.

Today I was sitting in on the final projects presentations of a virtual reality class. In the discussion afterward one of the students pointed out that there should be more examples of non-heteronormative VR.

I asked if that would be LGBTQVR. The student and everyone else laughed and nodded agreement. But then afterward I realized I was wrong, because I wasn’t being properly inclusive.

The more correct acronym, of course, is LGBTQXR.

Today was a general catch-up day for me. This weekend has created a valuable space between the random and peripatetic discoveries at last week’s conference and the intense focus I will need to get through the coming week of Spring semester finals.

So I spent a significant part of the day reading Shakespeare. This activity turns out to be a wonderful way to free the mind.

Just as a string of fugues by Bach will fill your head with countless melodies, the words of Shakespeare have the power to transport you far outside your normal path. The great beauty and inventiveness of language, the enormity of dramatic range, the sheer variety of voices, can all restore your faith in the possibilities of human genius.

We are living through a time when power seems to be in the hands of those who combine brutally aggression with embarrassing levels of stupidity. Now and then it is good to be reminded that we Humans, at our best, can be capable of so much more.

Sometimes it’s easier to make something than it is to explain what you made. You can implement a new algorithm in a dozen lines of code, but it might take many words and images to explain to somebody else how that code actually works.

It’s particularly difficult when your algorithm is about something in 3D space. Showing how something works in 3D doesn’t always work well on a 2D computer screen.

These days I like to imagine that we are already several years into the future. When we can all put on our lightweight augmented reality glasses, I will just be able to gesture with my hands to walk somebody through a visual explanation of a 3D algorithm.

The 3D diagrams I create will simply float in the air between us. We will be able to look around them just like any 3D object in our world, and we will be able to use our facial expression, hand gestures and body language while we discuss the concepts, just like we always do in face to face conversation.

I know that what I am describing is all still a little ways off, but I’ve already started creating my visual explanations with the assumption that this is how they will soon be seen. I think of it as good practice.

There is something educational about reentering your everyday life after having been away for a while. It stirs things up in a way that I think is entirely positive.

The quotidian has a way of disappearing before our eyes. Anything we do or see day in and day out becomes a sort of background blur.

But then you go away and come back, and suddenly you notice things. You realize how much you cherish the people you see every day. Little things that make your daily life joyful are no longer taken for granted.

But most of all you remember to appreciate having a place in this Universe. And that leads to the biggest reawakening of all: Every one of us is lucky simply to be here.

What you realize, in the end, is that the conference is not about the papers or research results. It’s not about the technical presentations, or the panels, or workshops, or even the keynote addresses by Very Important Persons.

No, the conference is about the people you meet, the lasting personal connections you make, the fellow human beings who will be your friends going forward in this life, wherever you or they may be on the planet.

It’s good to know that some things — arguably the most important things — are not at all subject to questions of technology. Would you want it any other way?

When something is so vast and various as the SIGCHI conference, every day contains more intellectual revelations than I can process. As I listen to these talks, I find my mind traveling into new and unexpected territories.

These last days I have been writing lists of projects I want to do, inspired by all that I have seen and heard here. I will never get the time to do half of them, but simply writing these thoughts down has been deeply satisfying.

The take-home for me is that the world of ideas is a vast and unending cornucopia. We simply need to keep our minds open.

In the words of my dear departed friend Lance Williams, the possibilities are “limited only by your imagination.”

Here at the SIGCHI 2019 conference in Glasgow there is a wondrous diversity of paper presentations. Perhaps the most surprising one I attended was during a session on original interfaces for multimedia games. For this paper, the presenter explained their game via a short video.

The video starts at the outset of the game, when the player swallows a little pill. This pill contains a temperature sensor and a tiny bluetooth transmitter. There is an app on the player’s smartphone that shows the current temperature of the pill.

The goal of the game is to maintain the pill at a target temperature. At first, when the pill is in the player’s stomach, the game is pretty easy. The player just needs to drink the proper amount of hot fluids. At this point the video shows people drinking coffee and hot soup.

But then, when the pill arrives at the player’s small intestine, the game becomes more challenging. In order to maintain the proper temperature, the player needs to exercise, which raises body temperature just the right amount.

At this point the video shows people running down hallways within office buildings, while checking their phones to see whether they have hit their target temperature.

The narration then helpfully explains that part of the fun of the game is that you don’t know exactly when it will end, although generally the game ends after somewhere between 24 and 36 hours.

At this point in the video, we just see a discreet shot of the door of a bathroom, and we hear a flushing sound.

I think this is a wonderful paper. For one thing, it totally gives me permission to submit my most outrageous ideas to SIGCHI 2020. After all, I’m pretty sure that nothing I come up with will top what I saw today.

You take a moment
The whole world stands still, while you
Draw a single breath

Even if you were Donald Dewar, the inaugural first minister of Scotland, and even if you were revered in your lifetime, and even if your countrymen have erect a nine foot tall statue in your honour at the top of Buchanan Street at Concert Hall, in the very heart of Glasgow,

even if all of that is true and more, it is also true that the world will continue to change around you to something you might not have recognized, and it is also true that down through the years birds will continue to stand atop your head.