Ken's Blog

Today I visited Yahoo New York, and gave a talk there. It was simultaneously broadcast to their other campus, so even though there were only about twenty of us in a little conference room, it might actually have been seen by about 150 people altogether.

Usually when I visit a company, I first give a talk and then meet with people. But this time they arranged it the other way, with my talk coming at the end of the visit.

Presumably this was because we were in NY, whereas the other campus is in California. Our afternoon lines up with their morning.

And that turned out to be a really great thing. As I spoke with different research groups, I kept modifying my talk, dropping a few slides here, adding some images there, to align with my emerging understanding of our common research interests.

By the time I gave the actual presentation, I was able to directly address very good questions that had come up in conversation only earlier that day. Which is really what everyone wanted out of the visit.

It’s so much better this way. There shouldn’t be a talk before everyone has had a chance to talk.

I just binged the third season of The Thrilling Adventures of Sabrina. It was dark, it was dystopian, it broke all sorts of rules for television that I hadn’t even known existed. All that, and it had great musical numbers.

It takes a certain courage and clarity of vision to pull off a show like this. And I must say, there is something wonderfully transgressive about a coming-of-age teen dramedy in which Lucifer — the Dark Lord himself — is just one more problematic family member.

But my favorite thing about season three, more than anything, was the way they ended it. No spoilers, but by the time you get to the finale, the writers have pretty much dragged you through hell. All of your worst fears have come true, and then some.

And then they do something rather unexpected. The vary last episode is a completely insane and rather Dada-ist homage to nothing other than The Wizard of Oz.

It is something that needs to be seen to be believed. I highly recommend it.

Today I tried Mattia Casalegno’s Aerobanquets experience. Essentially, you enter VR and experience fantastical worlds, while being treated to an actual gourmet meal.

The experience was far more powerful than I had expected it to be. Somebody pointed out a key point about Aerobanquets: While in another world, you are letting something from the physical world enter through your mouth.

Intellectually, you wouldn’t think that this would make so much of a difference. But in practice, the effect is profound.

Eating is a extremely physical and sensual act. We do it so often that we can tend to forget this.

But when you are in an experience where you are otherwise disconnected from your physical body, it becomes easier to appreciate how primal it is to ingest food. That is particularly true of carefully curated and brilliantly prepared gourmet food, which this was.

I also had a good conversation with Mattia about the possibilities. There are obvious next steps to take which relate directly to the work in our own Future Reality Lab.

For one thing, the experience I had today did not afford a truly shared experience for multiple people of eating in VR. All participants remained in their individual isolated virtual world.

Clearly a next step would be to create a good shared VR dining experience for two or more people. It looks as though there might be an exciting opportunity for collaboration!

I still remember the first time I was taken to a great museum when I was a child. I loved everything, but the realist sculptures in particular really spoke to me.

As I got older, I realized that this was because a great realist sculpture is like a well chosen single frame in a fantastical movie. You can see, just from that one moment, a great story on display. Sometimes the story is comic, and sometimes tragic, but always character is revealed.

This has gotten me thinking, now that VR makes more things possible, what would it be like to have sculpture be animated? I don’t mean acting out an entire narrative, but rather having the sculpture be able to move and breathe, and perhaps even respond to you.

Visiting a museum while wearing those forthcoming wearables, we might be able to see a different kind of sculpture. Form would still suggest movement, but in addition, movement would suggest form.

Rather than being a single frame of a fantastical movie, it would be several frames of that movie, forming an animated presence. I’m not even sure whether such a thing would continue to count as sculpture.

But I think it would be interesting to try.

I love that the date today is a palindrome. We have not had one of those for about nine hundred years. I am going to write this post as a palindrome in two languages — English and ancient Venusian. To celebrate that the date reads the same with sides reversed is hti wema sehts!

Daere ta deht ta htet ar bel ecotnai sunevt neic nad. Nahsil gneseg a ugnal, owtni emord nil a pasa tsop. Sih tet irwot gniog, mais raey derd nuhen intu o baro. Fesoht foe no dah, tone vah e wemord. Nila pasi yado, tet a deht tah tevoli!

There is a silver lining to the Republicans in the U.S. Senate voting to conduct an impeachment “trial” without calling any witnesses. The silver lining is that such an outrageous act is going to get a lot of people angry.

In November 2016 a lot of people were angry, so they went to the polls and registered a protest vote. Many people who weren’t angry stayed home. Ever since, we have been living with the tragic outcome.

But when one party in the Senate essentially votes to spit in the nation’s face, a lot of people get angry on the other side. And those people are more likely to get out and vote.

It’s actually not the presidential election that is most important in November 2020 — it’s all the Senate seats that are up for grabs. The Republicans are hanging on by only a very slender majority.

Something as insulting to our democratic system as “a trial without any witnesses” is going to get a lot of people very angry. And those people will be moved in the coming election to contribute time and money to get Democrats elected to the Senate.

If you’re one of those people who feels that anger, this is your chance. Find out which Republican-held Senate seats are vulnerable, and start preparing to contribute however you can to the campaigns of their challengers.

The synopsis for our Siggraph submission, due soon, must be 50 words. An interesting restriction.

Suppose all explanations had to be 50 words. How would that alter communication?

Would humanity express itself more clearly, rise to the occasion, become better? Or would we just blow each other up in frustration?

One of my favorite ways to emotionally bond with somebody is to just go out to a bar and share a beer. And maybe some fries and ketchup.

Then we just talk about whatever we are moved to talk about. Life, love, work, movies, relationships, whatever — it sort of doesn’t matter. There is something about just sitting across a table at a bar somewhere and shooting the breeze that brings people together.

One thing I’ve been wondering is whether this experience can be replicated for two people who are not physically co-present with each other. Assuming technology were advanced enough to support very high quality visual and auditory holographic telecommunication, would it work to share a beer with someone who was actually physically elsewhere?

I think it’s an important question for the following reason: Whatever the answer turns out to be, it will shine light on something fundamental about the connection between the human mind and the human body.

Suppose it turns out that true bonding over beer requires actual physical co-presence. In that case, I think we will have learned something fundamental about the limits of human telecommunication.

Those limits would not be about technology itself, but about something innate within ourselves, informed by millions of years of evolution. To wit: In order to truly bond with somebody on a deep emotional level, we must actually be in the presence of each other’s unique and vulnerable physical body.

Eventually, as technology permits, video pass-through wearables will become more powerful than optical see-through wearables. So instead of simply seeing ghostly computer images superimposed on reality, everything we see through our smart glasses will be first captured by cameras, then run through a computer, then displayed again in high resolution.

Which means that whatever we look at may be transformed in arbitrary ways — magnified, edge-sharpened, or otherwise altered. In particular, in the future our view of other peoples’ faces can be modifiable under software control.

Your face, as seen by other people, will therefore become like a sort of homepage, which you can customize to your heart’s content. When you go out in public, you will be able to choose the facial appearance you present to the world.

Of course some people might choose to simply take off their glasses when in public, but eventually this may become illegal. Such an antisocial act might come to be considered an invasion of privacy — akin to barging into a stall in a public restroom while somebody is using it.

In such a world, you will have freedom from the tyranny of appearance. No longer will you be judged by the shape of your nose or eyes, or by an awkwardly shaped chin.

When your appearance can be whatever you want, then you will be judged more by your character, by your social grace, and by the ethical choices that others see you make.

This will be a good thing.

Eventually, as wearables replace SmartPhones, we will develop new ways of looking things up. We will use some combination of voice, gaze and gesture to quickly and unobtrusively summon up any factoid or other item of interest.

Children who are born into the coming era of wearables won’t even think about this — they will simply do it intuitively. To those of us hold-overs from the pre-wearable era, the facility with which our children are able to look things up may seem miraculous.

Within a generation, it will be taken for granted that we can all unobtrusively summon up any knowledge while holding a conversation, without interrupting the flow of that conversation. The entire concept of not having knowledge at your fingertips will have gone the way of the dodo bird and the steam engine.

What effect will this have on society? Will we be better for it because we will all have more immediate access to vast amounts of knowledge? Or will we be worse off, because nobody will know what it means to put in thought and care to acquire that knowledge?