Ken’s Blog

Apple has finally started to let the rumors leak about its forthcoming AR glasses. The descriptions are vague, but they are clear enough.

The vision of AR is finally coming into focus. We can most likely expect a first product release in the first half of 2020 (a very apt choice of year).

For the first time, my colleagues who are not technologists, the ones who are artists and creators, are sitting up and taking note. Whenever Tim Apple (sorry, couldn’t resist) finally makes a move, it means something is coming down the pike that is actually relevant to consumers.

The writing is on the wall. But you will need those glasses to see it.

There is something so gloriously nerdy about pi day. Today people at our lab greet each other by saying “happy pi day!” and always with a big goofy smile on their faces.

Mathematics is very pure. It isn’t swayed by politics, religion or tribal preferences. It does not care a fig about your age, gender preference or ethnicity.

Math is simply that which is true. Not “true because we said so” or “true because it’s on the news channel I like”, but literally, absolutely, stone cold provably true.

And not just in this Universe, but in any possible Universe.

So when we greet each other on the fourteenth of March with the words “happy pi day”, we are affirming for each other something deep and powerful. It may seem nerdy to everyone else, but we are acknowledging our mutual connection with absolute truth.

It’s always interesting to see where they take the X-Men franchise. So many and varied super-abilities, so many origin stories and complicated personal relationships to wander through and explore.

There are many levels to this exploration. The casting alone is a kind of meta-game. Who is going to play the twenty-something Patrick Stewart, or Hugh Jackman?

But one rule that seems fairly consistent is what I call the “even younger” principle. Every time they make an X-Men prequel, we get to see an even younger version of our favorite characters.

As I watched the trailer for the latest “wow look, they are so young in this one” prequel, I found myself wondering whether there is some age line that they will never cross. At what point do they need to stop?

By maybe they don’t need to stop. As long as audiences keep coming, they can continue to make ever earlier prequels.

What about the X-Men as toddlers? Perhaps one day we will see the ultimate prequel: X-Men: the Terrible Twos.

It is said that the millennial generation consists of those who were born between 1981 and 1996. Of course that is merely one definition, but it seems to be a popular one.

By that reckoning, the World Wide Web, which was born thirty years ago on this day — the twelfth of March, in the year 1989 — falls squarely in the middle of the millennial generation. It would be fair to say that the Web is a millennial baby.

But has it truly really reached maturity? Perhaps these first thirty years have merely been a stage of incubation.

The Web may only truly come alive when everyone is experiencing it all the time through their wearables, as an integral part of the physical world. What was it that Yeats said, exactly a century ago?

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Mountainview to be born?”

When I think of classic films I tend to go fairly old-school. My thoughts run to Casablanca or The Third Man, or perhaps On the Waterfront.

Our lab recently decided to start a weekly movie night. We created a Slack channel where people could contribute suggestions for what to watch.

There were a number of interesting suggestions, but one in particular jumped out at me, mainly because of the wording:

the princess bride is classic

“Wait a minute,” I thought to myself, “that’s a good movie, but how is it classic?”

Except what I was actually doing was staring intently at the word “classic” and thinking to myself “I do not think that means what you think it means.”

And that’s when I realized he was right — it’s a classic.

Today we did a solid day of rehearsals for the collective VR theater experience that we will be showing at the SIGGRAPH conference in July. It was exciting to see talented actors applying their wonderful stage smarts and improvisational wit to characters who will be seen on an entirely virtual stage.

The characters in this particular piece will look human (more or less), but for future productions that does not need to be the case. For example, using this sort of technology, it would be possible to put on a stage musical where every character is a different species.

But what would that be? Would it be akin toe July Taymor’s stage production of “The Lion King”? Or would it be more like the Disney film of the same name that it was based on?

Or would it be something else entirely? I for one would quite enjoy a love duet sung by an octopus and a tarantula (when they realize they have so many things in common). But I’m not sure exactly what to call the medium itself. Is it animation, puppetry, theater, immersive cinema, or something else entirely?

The anatomically modern human (AMH) has been around, as far as anthropologists can tell, for about 190 million years. At least that’s the age of the earliest fossil evidence for people who were us, rather than Neanderthals or Denisovans.

One thing I’m curious about is whether we AMHs wore clothing right from the very beginning. Obviously we wore clothing in the colder climates, but what about in equatorial regions, where temperature was not an issue?

Did we always cover our private parts, in all regions of the world? The reason I find this interesting is that it touches on the question of culture versus heredity.

If every AMH tribe, right from the beginning, wore at least some variety of what we would now think think of as a loin cloth, then it’s a good bet that the urge to wear clothing is an instinct. This would put costumery in the same general category as, say, natural language or tribal cohesion.

We all do lots of things that are not instinctive. For example, we read books and ride in cars. Neither of those two activities is dictated by instinct.

But things that are instinctive — like the sex drive or the love of one’s own children — are in a different category. They are not cultural imperatives, but rather biological imperatives, passed down in our DNA.

Is fashion a biological imperative? I suspect that some anthropologist knows the answer.

I got into a disagreement with an old friend, without intending to. It was one of those weird situations where everything I said or did managed to make the situation worse. I felt as though I was carrying around a fire extinguisher filled with kerosene.

In a way it was like that wonderful Woody Allen short story The Gossage—Vardebedian Papers, in which the two characters find themselves inhabiting diverging realities. It’s very amusing when you read about it as fiction, but quite unsettling when you yourself are one of those characters.

On the other hand, I am finding that this experience has made me enormously appreciative of the relative normalcy of my other human connections. My Theory of Mind has moved into high gear, and I’m working much harder to understand the point of view of other people.

Which can’t be all bad.

If I were going to create a company about wordplay I would want to call it “Margana”. I like this word so much that I looked it up.

It turns out it’s the name of a genus of moths. It was also the name of a town in the vicinity of ancient Greece. Intriguingly, nobody alive today knows exactly where that town was.

The word has a few other associations as well. For example, Margana Wood was the 2017 Miss America contestant from Houston Texas who was asked to comment on our president’s assertion about the violent white supremacist rally in Charlotteville that there were “very fine people” on both sides of the protest.

She was given at most 20 seconds, and here is what she said:

“The white supremacist issue, it was very obvious that it was a terrorist attack. And I think that President Donald Trump should have made a statement earlier addressing the fact, and making sure all Americans feel safe in this country. That is the number one issue right now.”

Rather brilliant insight, in my opinion. Seems like something everyone can agree on, unless they are white supremacists or white supremacist sympathizers.

But the real reason I want my company about wordplay to be called “Margana” is sort of backward. I like the fact that it’s an anagram.

Well, it’s official. Our Future Reality Lab‘s multi-person VR narrative experience Cave is going to be part of the Immersive portion of the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival. Here is the description in the announcement on the Tribeca Film Festival website:

Cave is a coming-of-age story told through cutting edge Parallux technology, featuring a fully immersive holographic VR experience that can be shared by many audience members at once.

It’s a real privilege to be working with the amazing team of people who made this happen.