Ken’s Blog

In honor of the late great Burt Reynolds, the other day I rewatched the wonderful 1977 Hal Needham movie Smokey and the Bandit, which I had not seen for many years. I was quite young when I first saw it, and now I can better appreciate why it was one of Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite films.

The movie is chock full of coded cultural messages, and is surprisingly relevant to our age. It’s basically a triangle between three wildly divergent archetypical characters who play, respectively, the South, the North, and Authority.

Reynolds’s character is a particular idealized fantasy come to life — the proud and free (and always relaxed) authority-defying hero of the American South. Another, played by Sally Fields, is his cultural opposite: A tightly wound refugee from the Broadway theater scene up North. Where he loves Conway Twitty and monster truck rallies, she loves Elton John and Stephen Sondheim musicals.

The third character, played with delightful comic spin by the incomparable Jackie Gleason, represents buffoonish Authority. Sheriff Buford T Justice (awesome name!!) is so puffed up with self-importance, he has no idea he is completely ridiculous — and very, very funny.

What fascinates me about this triangle is that the avatars of the Urban North and the Rural South (Fields and Reynolds) are actually on the same side. They quickly join forces in opposition to Authority, and the movie makes it very clear just who are the good guys in this struggle.

It seems to me that this particular cultural triangle, and what it said about American culture in 1977, has implications for our current political situation. More tomorrow.

Technically I was working all day today, and that’s not supposed to be good. After all, today is a Saturday, half a weekend, a widely recognized day of rest.

I say “technically” because I came in to the lab this morning to work on something I really enjoy doing, and ended up staying the entire day. I didn’t come into work today because I had to, but because I wanted to. I was working, but I was also playing.

Maybe we need some other word, one not as laden with other meanings as “work”. Perhaps somebody could coin a new word to describe the act of working on one’s profession while also being in a continual state of utter bliss.

Some time in the future, people going out to the movies will slip on a comfortable lightweight pair of glasses. Through those glasses they will be able to have experiences far beyond the capability of today’s movies.

Stories will take place all around and between people, as though the entire audience has become transported to another world. The rectangular frame that we now associate with visual storytelling will come to seem quaint.

In such movie theaters there will be an otherwise unused room, way in the back, that contains all of the computers which actually run this experience. The room will be isolated for sound, so audience will not hear the whirring of the powerful cooling fans that keep all those GPUs from melting.

On the door of this room will be an arcane sign that nobody will understand. People will just assume it to be some sort of mysterious code for “the room containing the computers.”

Still, people on the staff of the movie theater may, from time to time, find themselves wondering why a room full of computers is labeled with a phrase that makes no sense at all. They will read the sign and scratch their heads at its mysterious message: “Projection Booth”

I was having a conversation with colleagues today about a topic that comes up quite often when Virtual Reality is discussed: Will VR connect us, or will it isolate us?

I think it’s an ill-formed question, because the underlying technology of Virtual Reality can be used in so many diverse ways. VR can be used to create experiences that put you on an uninhabited planet, but also to create experiences that thrust you into a sociable crowd of other VR users. Just like the printing/publishing technology that came before it, the medium is insufficient to define the message.

Speaking of which … That conversation today reminded me of a panel I was on last year. The topic was Virtual Reality, and its potential impact on society (for better or worse).

At one point somebody expressed concern that if people were to spend a lot of time in VR, they might become disconnected from reality. Experiencing completely imaginary realities within a VR headset might become a form of addiction. If so, that might grow into an epidemic that society would need to deal with.

A bit later in the conversation, panelists were talking about their cultural inspirations. One panelist described with enthusiasm how only that last weekend he had read through all of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ classic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.

When I heard this, I jumped in and said: “How awful. Spending an entire weekend immersed in a completely imaginary reality. Maybe we should do an intervention!”

my complicated
complex was duplicated
(but as a duplex)

Today was a good day in my life. I had a wonderful breakfast with my mom, I fixed a bug in my software that had been haunting me for days, and I started working with some great new students.

And yet it is the eleventh of September. How can it be a good day? I still recall, as though it was just yesterday, the unspeakable murder of thousands of my fellow New Yorkers. What does it mean when one has experienced the anniversary of such a horror as a “good day”?

One possible answer lies in what is meant by “good”. My day was filled with love and connection with a diverse group of people — of many ethnicities, many religions and countries of origin — all of whom enrich my life with their kindness and their ability to be open to the wondrous diversity of humankind.

We seem to be in a dark time these days, when crass opportunists rise to power by appealing to fear, tribalism and xenophobia. This kind of hateful and destructive view of the world is the sort of thinking that led to that tragic day seventeen years ago.

We can best defy such hate by working together, side by side, to bring wondrous things into existence. I cherish the people in our lab who are Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, and Null, and they cherish each other. Together we defy the forces of hate by working together to build a kinder and more beautiful world.

Today a representative from a leading VR hardware company was visiting our lab. There was a certain amount at stake, since we were hoping his company would make a significant equipment donation to our lab.

At one point he asked whether we were interested in eye tracking. “I’d like to say,” I replied, struggling to keep a straight face, “that we are looking at it.”

Part of me realized it was a risky thing to say. What if my silly humor only managed to convince this person not to take our lab seriously?

Fortunately he smiled, clearly appreciating the slightly nuttier turn in the conversation. “Well then,” he grinned, “what are your thoughts about new tactile interfaces?”

“I think,” I replied, “we can touch on that later.”

Recently I have noticed, as I walk around Manhattan’s crowded streets, that I have been trying out an alternate way of looking at the people around me. Rather than seeing each person simply as a individual human being, I’m finding myself focusing more on the space between those individuals — the conversational space.

Two people together, whether they are walking or talking or just hanging out, create a unique energy in the Universe that other humans are very good at perceiving. It’s as though there is another living being floating between them, invisible to the eye but quite visible to the soul.

This is all perfectly consistent with our shared evolutionary heritage. Our one and only true superpower is our extraordinary ability to communicate with each other. This superpower is so much an innate part of us that we simply take it for granted.

Yet nearly all human activity centers around this collective superpower. We define ourselves largely by how others perceive us, and make sense of the world around us through an implicit prism of shared understanding.

In the realm of the human, to be an “individual” is to be in relationship to the whole of humanity. For of what use is our individuality, unless we can share it with each other?

I recently finished bingeing the second season of The Good Place on Netflix (created by the brilliant and prolific Michael Schur). Happily, a forthcoming third season has been announced.

Usually I can give a simple reason why I like a TV series. Shows can be clever, or absurd, or laugh-out-loud funny, or emotionally engaging, or dark and disturbing, or daringly innovative and rule breaking, or philosophically challenging, or are able to teach you things you didn’t know.

The Good Place is all that and more. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a TV series hit so many bases at once.

The premise is simple. Essentially, it takes a certain well known existentialist play and refashions it as an absurdist comedy for the Millennial age.

But where it goes from there is wondrous. After having seen the first two seasons, I now find myself regarding the people around with greater appreciation, and with gratitude for our shared humanity. How many side-splittingly funny comedies can claim to have that effect?

While I wait for the third season, I may just go back and watch the first two again. 🙂

A colleague from industry told me today that Hollywood is all abuzz with the possibility of using Virtual and Mixed reality to tell stories where audiences can choose the ending. I think that will lead to a dead end.

I say this because I don’t think the problem with this approach is technological. In fact, the means to create “choose your own adventure” stories has existed for quite a long time.

There is a tradition stretching back through the centuries of story-games. I suspect such things have been tried in many cultures, and in many different ways.

It’s not that they are wrong, but rather that they seem to end up being marginal, culturally speaking. People love playing games, but “playing” is not the primary purpose of telling stories.

We tell each other stories in order to work through questions of shared culture and values. The fictional characters in stories, and the challenges we watch them face, represent issues that are meaningful and relevant to our particular tribe.

Loyalty, ethics, humor, prejudice, metaphysics and mortality, the tension between rational thought and primal emotion, these are the building blocks of narrative. As we watch characters work through such issues, we are being taken on a journey by proxy.

If you remove the proxy and instead ask the audience member to directly make those decisions, then the “characters” become reduced to game tokens.

If you are going to remove the agency — and therefore the power to teach — from story characters, you might as well embrace the fact that you are creating a game, not a story. And if you are going to do that, why maintain the pretense that you are “telling a story”?

A good game is difficult enough to design, without the constraint of pretending it is something else. A “choose your own adventure” experience should be designed, from the ground up, as a form of game, rather than being mislabeled as some sort of alternate version of the protagonist driven narrative.

Designers of such experiences really aught to understand the difference. Otherwise, they will continue to scratch their heads and wonder why interactive stories never really seem to work very well.