Ken's Blog

I am writing this from a coffee shop. There is something deeply satisfying about getting work done in a coffee shop.

You are surrounded on all sides by strangers. There is a general buzz of people enjoying themselves, chatting away, bonding with each other. Yet nobody bothers you or interrupts your work.

The entire experience is very stimulating. Every once in a while you might hear, with one ear, a snipped of conversation from another table. And that might spark ideas and get your own mind flowing in new directions, like the grain of sand that starts the pearl growing.

Also, they have coffee. Let’s not forget about the coffee.

I wonder whether we could re-create this experience using future mixed reality technologies. How long might it be before a virtual coffee shop becomes a place that people really want to hang out?

There would also need to be coffee. Definitely coffee.

Our experience of time is non-linear. Sometimes hours can race by like minutes, while other times a minute can seem like an hour.

I wonder whether anyone has done a systematic study of what happens inside the human brain to create the illusion that time is going faster or slower. Are there measurable processes in the brain that correspond to these temporal illusions?

If anybody knows of such studies, I would love to find out!

When I create software prototypes, one of the big power-ups is the fact that I don’t need to address the general case. All I need to do at first is to show that what I am doing works for *some* cases.

Most people who understand what is going on will be able to see how things generalize. Meanwhile, I am avoiding doing a lot of unnecessary work.

This is important because a prototype is essentially an assertion that “it would be interesting to do something like this.” It’s not really a product, and it doesn’t really yet have user.

In fact, it’s kind of a way of fishing for potential users. In that sense, a prototype is essentially an advertisement.

If the prototype needed to be fully functional, and work for all cases, it might take ten times as long to implement. And at the end of that time, people might still say “nope, don’t need it.”

So it’s very important when creating a prototype to choose the right narrow set of cases that prove your point. Anything more, given the purpose of your prototype, would actually be counterproductive, and frankly a waste of time.

I’ve been thinking about the July 4th fireworks that many of us experienced the other day. Over the course of several hours, millions of people across the U.S. were setting off controlled explosions, usually with spectacularly loud results.

This yearly ritual is, in essence, an enormously large scale audience participation event. And there is something crazy about the entire enterprise, which I think is a large part of its appeal.

On that day of the year, people all across the country are literally playing with fire. As an activity it is more than a little dangerous, and in a moment things can go very wrong.

So why do so many people do it? Maybe it’s a reaction to the fact that we spend so much of our lives watching canned entertainment from a safe distance.

Perhaps on a deep level this is a chance for people to feel something beyond the usual safe and packaged experiences on offer. In some primal way, setting off July 4th fireworks fills a need that for most of the year people don’t even realize they have.

I often have the following disheartening experience: I am in the middle of a list of things I need to do, and at some point I get called away.

I then realize only later that I did not complete all the items on my to-do list. Alas, in some cases by then it might be too late to go back and do them.

Which leads me to one the more mundane but useful properties of future augmented reality: We will have the option to keep our to-do lists directly in our field of vision.

So if we are called away in the middle of doing a series of tasks, the queue of “tasks not yet done” doesn’t just disappear. Rather, it stays in a convenient visual location, so we can eventually bring our attention back around to it.

Sure, we could in principle do the same by jotting down notes-to-self on scraps of paper or entering them into a SmartPhone. But that would require an extra layer of focus and planning that most of us would never quite get round to.

I’m hopeful that a well designed heads-up reminder system just might do the trick. Imagine that — a cure for absentmindedness!

When I see the color orange, what am I actually seeing? Is it the same thing that you see when you look at something orange?

Or does every human being see something a bit different when we look at things that are orange, only we have learned by convention to all agree to call what we see “orange”?

How would we be able to empirically find out the answer to this question? Would such a thing be even theoretically possible?

I wonder whether anybody has worked on this.

Happy July 4th!

Today I was in a store devoted entirely to estate sales. Folks were happily walking up and down the aisles looking for bargains.

The experience felt odd, and at first I couldn’t figure out why. But eventually it occurred to me.

The entire existence of the store was predicated on the concept that you’re buying stuff that used to be owned by people who are no longer alive.

The phrase “estate sale” is a pleasant euphemism, but it glosses over a deeper truth. A truth that tells a far more compelling story.

On the other hand, I suspect the truth might not sell as well. People might not want to go to a store that was called “stuff previously owned by dead people.”

As we race toward the impending Siggraph conference deadline, I am in the middle of coding a demo/presentation. And it occurs to me, watching this process, that there are three distinct parts to any such endeavor.

One is the coding itself. You need to make the thing you are going to show, or there is nothing to talk about.

Another is good documentation. Your little software child will not live on if you don’t provide proper instructions for using it, explain how it works, and make sure to give people a way in.

The third is performance. You need to try it yourself lots of times, show it to other people, get their feedback, listen carefully to their feedback, and iterate like heck.

So “creating software” isn’t just a matter of creating software. It’s a matter of telling a good story and telling it right, listening carefully to how your audience receives that story, and then constantly going back in to make it better.

In that way, I guess it’s like a lot of other things.

I am currently creating user interfaces in both 2D (screens with mouse and keyboard) and 3D (VR headsets with gloves that track hand and finger motions). This is giving me an opportunity to compare and contrast.

Clearly the 3D space is far larger and richer. In essential ways it mimics the richness and freedom that we experience in reality as we move our bodies through physical space.

But the 2D paradigm has its own advantages. There is something to be said for “less is more”.

For certain applications, 2D seems ideal. Spreadsheets come to mind. There might be a better way to do spreadsheets in a full 3D room simulation, but I don’t think we would know for sure until a good designer comes along and shows us an example.

Even when we are fully immersed in a realistic 3D simulation, I wonder whether we will go full 3D.

After we are all in The Matrix, we might be surprised at the retro interfaces we end up with in there. Maybe we will still be using screens with computer mouse and keyboard.

I’ve been wondering how much our lives actually align with our plan for our lives. This question is relevant for both big things and little things.

The big things include stuff like “I am going to be married by the time I’m thirty”, or “I am going to get that Ph.D. I’ve been talking about!” Little things might include stuff like “I’m really going to clean out my closet by the end of this year.”

I suspect that when our life deviates from what we planned for it, selective amnesia can set in. We don’t like to think about the things we didn’t end up doing. After all, those things did not actually happen.

Would we be happier, in the long run, if we knew that there was going to be some kind of reckoning? What if we knew, when we made our plans, that we were going to be confronted with any difference between what we said and what we did?

Would that just cause anxiety, because every decision would take on greater weight? Or would it make us happier, because we’d be more likely to actually achieve our goals?

I have no idea what the answer is. But I’ve been wondering about it.