Ken's Blog

The Star Wars spinoff The Mandalorian is a great example of a new wave of cinematic production. All of the sets and backgrounds are done as computer graphics displayed onto a big screen behind the actors.

As the camera moves, the virtual set moves accordingly, creating the illusion of a coherent 3D world. The light from the virtual set spills onto the actors, creating a compelling illusion that the actors are situated in that world.

Right now this is all very expensive, which is generally the case for new production technologies. I wonder how long it will be before the equivalent of this capability will go down in cost to the point where it is accessible to consumers.

At some point, this sort of virtual world visualization will become available to the equivalent of today’s Zoom users and YouTube posters. It will just be taken for granted that if you have a computer or SmartPhone, you will be able to believably situate yourself into a world of your choosing, for all the world to see.

At some point it will no longer be possible to know whether somebody is actually in the environment you see on the screen. This will have all sorts of implications, both beneficial and harmful.

I, for one, hope it gets used by the Light side of the Force, not the Dark side.

Before the Super Bowl game yesterday, somebody said to me “Hoping for another win today for the great state of Kansas and, in fact, the entire USA.” Then we both laughed. Anybody in KS or MO would know exactly why.

Then, thinking about the source of that quote, we both took a moment to be grateful that we’re now in 2021 and not back in 2020. It’s hard to believe our nation just went through such a horrible and tragic experience. And on top of that, we also had COVID-19.

I wasn’t really into the whole Marvel Universe thing. I thought Deadpool was funny, I enjoyed the origin story of Spider-Man (pretty much every time they retold it), and I found Ant-Man totally charming. Then again, anything with Paul Rudd is totally charming.

But all of the big puffy “Tony Stark saves the Universe” stuff just seemed like a lot of noise about nothing. The whole super-powered vigilantes saving the world thing simply didn’t seem intelligent enough to be interesting.

I get that it’s meant to be a modern myth, and a lot of my students really got into it, but it didn’t quite work for me. Sooner or later you are just watching CGI characters in weird outfits flying around on the screen.

Then there is WandaVision. I LOVE that show. It is everything the rest of the Marvel Universe is not. It’s thoughtful, creative, layered, mysterious, subtle, historically literate, self-referential in a truly clever way, and fundamentally about the human condition — in a way the big splashy movies are not.

And Episode V contains one of my favorite moments in the entire history of television. It’s a moment I could watch endlessly. Should we just take it from the top?

There have been so many advances in media technology in recent years, but one thing I have wanted for a very long time, and which is still not easily available, is an animated t-shirt.

Sometimes I am just in the mood to broadcast a message to the world on whatever it is that I am wearing. If I could just have a t-shirt that would listen to my smartphone and show in print whatever message I type in, that would completely make my day.

I suppose we could do it with LED lights, but that isn’t all that much fun, I would want it to look like a printed t-shirt. Is that asking too much?

You wake up with a jolt
In your bed in your room
It is time that you bolt
To your meeting on Zoom

So you roll out of bed
And you stare at your screen
And the hair on your head
Is the worst that you’ve seen

But the meeting will start
In five seconds or less
There’s a pain in your heart
‘Cause you know you’re a mess

But you click on the link
As you gaze at your hair
“I look awful” you think
As you try to prepare

Though you’re totally wrecked
But wait — you rejoice —
There’s a way to connect
Using only your voice!

It will all be ok
And nobody will stare
Though today was a day
You woke up with Zoom hair

Today I happened to look at the clock and noticed it was 3:14. And my first thought was that this was a Pi moment.

By that I mean something very specific: At some point during that minute, the time was exactly 3:14:15.92653589793… In other words, at some infinitely tiny moment, the time on the clock was exactly Pi.

What’s the big deal? you might well ask. After all, isn’t that true of lots of other numbers? There is a moment when the time on the clock is exactly two, and another when it’s exactly the square root of ten.

But Pi is special. There is even a day of the year — March 14 — devoted to Pi, and a moment of that day — a little before four in the afternoon — when all the infinite digits of Pi line up on both the calendar and the clock.

I have lots of friends who celebrate Pi Day, and I think that’s wonderful. But hey, why should we have to wait?

Why enjoy Pi only one day a year when we can have Pi every day?

Today I will be teaching my first class of the semester. A whole new crop of students, a whole new adventure.

This is the second and a half class that I have taught online over Zoom. The fall class was entirely online, and the second half of last year’s spring class was as well.

It is an odd mix of bad and good. The bad is that it is much more difficult to get to know the students well and to get a sense of how they are doing without being able to “read the room”.

The good is that we definitely acquire certain superpowers online, which is particularly useful for a technical subject such as computer science. Live coding becomes really powerful when everybody is online, so it becomes more of a master class.

But I would still give all that up in a heartbeat to be able to teach in person again. I am very much looking forward to the day when we can do that.

When a group of people get together in a physical room, they start to talk to each other in a distinctive way. When you listen to the happy chatter of people in a room, you know right away that they are engaged in that most human of activities, enjoying each other’s company.

You never hear that kind of joyful noise in a Zoom call. Something essential is simply missing.

It seems to me that a useful measure of the effectiveness of remote virtual co-presence would be the presence of just this sort of happy chatter. We could probably develop an instrument, perhaps employing machine learning, that would recognize this distinctive style of human communication.

This suggests an interesting potential method of instrumenting research in this area: For any given proposed solution to virtual co-presence, measure the degree to which party talk spontaneously emerges. Based on that measurement, continually iterate the experimental design.

I really love the latest Pixar film Soul. It works on so many levels.

But am I the only one who has noticed how much it borrows from the 1984 movie All of Me? I could go on and on about the great number of similarities and parallels between the two films.

You might just want to rent All of Me

Yesterday I posted a tongue-in-cheek answer to the question “When will everybody embrace VR?” For better or verse, I argued that it will happen when we can all share a drink together in VR worlds.

Well, maybe it’s sort of like that, but maybe not exactly. Perhaps the important thing to share will be a meal, or a cup of coffee.

What these experiences all have in common is that they transcend the virtual and involve a real commitment with our physical selves. When we imbibe food or drink, we are involving our biological self, and thereby committing to our sensed reality.

I am not sure exactly what will be the threshold for all of us agreeing to believe in a shared world which is actually a technologically enabled consensual hallucination. But I suspect it will involve some level of commitment which is not just of the mind, but also of the body.