Ken's Blog

Today in my once-every-two-weeks blog post for the Future Reality Lab, I ended up quoting Voltaire (by way of Ben Parker), my hero Lance Williams, and Rene Magritte (well, sort of).

If you want to learn more, check out the post.

We are currently designing a social VR experience in which all the participants are aliens from another planet. But we also want participants to feel at home.

In other words, we want people to feel what it would be like to be a normal alien hanging out with their alien friends, as though it were no big deal. This raises all sorts of fun and interesting design challenges.

For example, we’re guessing at this point that it is necessary for each “alien” participant to have a clearly identifiable face with two eyes, because those qualities are fundamentally important to us in our social interactions. We probably also want them to have two recognizable hands to gesture with, even if those look like claws or fins or something else.

So let’s suppose that those two constraints are a given. What kinds of things can we continue to play with, to create a feeling of being at home together in an alternate alien world?

Obviously we will need to try out lots of ideas and just see what feels right. I keep going back to what my colleague Mike Woods said back in 2014: “Anybody who claims to know what will work in VR, without having tried it in VR, doesn’t know what they are talking about.”

Today I observed a play rehearsal. It was the first rehearsal of this production in which the actors were working “off book”. In other words, in this rehearsal they all needed to have their lines memorized, rather than looking at the script.

The director was excellent, and as I observed her at work, I learned a lot about process. Not only does a director need to have a clear overview of the arc of the play, but she needs to have an acute understanding of the tone of each scene, as well as the dramatic function of every moment in that scene.

It becomes clear when you watch a the process of a great director watching with a talented cast that much of a the meaning within a theatrical script is implicit. It is not until a good play is performed that all of its layers of meaning begin to reveal themselves.

And this presents a striking difference between a play and a movie. When you watch a film, all of the artistic choices have already been made. No matter how good a movie is, at the end of the day, there is only that one movie.

But a play can change dramatically between one production and the next. This variability opens up the possibility that the same play can convey many different meanings — even contradictory meanings.

In this way, theater is far more generative than cinema. Although it is the older art form, in some ways theater is far more radical, since a good play has the ability to continually reinvent itself, even across a span of centuries.

Today I had a really great conversation with a museum curator. We were talking about how virtual and augmented reality, and other emerging technologies, can be used by museums.

I realized at some point in our meeting that there could be a misconception that such emerging technologies compete with museums. That argument might go something like this: If people can just put on a VR headset and experience art, then why would they bother going to a museum?

It’s not a difficult misconception to dispel, when one considers the special relationship humans have with physical artifacts. Such artifacts clearly speak to us on a deep emotional level.

For example, a vast number of places on-line allow you to see an image of DaVinci’s Mona Lisa. You can see it at very high resolution and at extremely high quality.

Yet the Louvre in Paris is always jam packed with museum-goers thronging to see the real thing. I think this is because, on an instinctively level, we understand the importance of unique physicality. Possibly this is because we understand, on a profound level, that we ourselves have only one unique and precious physical identity.

More generally, as any form of communication technology moves from the realm of the exotic to the realm of the everyday, we tend to use it not as an end in itself, but rather in a utilitarian way that supports our larger goals.

For example, the Web is a technology that was considered exotic once upon a time — and even viewed by some as an alternative to the physical world. Yet now, in 2020, the Web is understood to simply be part of the human fabric of communication. In fact, the museum that I was visiting today relies on its Website to tell people how to visit the museum itself!

I dearly love the regional Amtrak train from New York to Boston. Right now I am typing this while riding that train.

You park yourself in the cafe car, get settled in and order a coffee. Then you can sit there and get work done while beautiful New England scenery rolls by for several blissful hours.

It’s basically a kind of a cozy mobile office. Except that at the end of a short work day you end up in Boston.

I highly recommend it.

Recently I’ve been practicing memorizing Puck’s closing speech from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s one of my favorite speeches, and I think that I now have it down.

Except of course when I am nervous. Unfortunately the thing that makes me nervous is reciting it in the presence of other people. Oh well.

One thing I’ve noticed is that the lines of Puck’s speech start with a lot of familiar words. In particular, the following words all appear at least once as the first word in a line:

If
Else
Now
And
While
That

If you’re a programmer, you will recognize that these are all keywords that are widely used in modern computer programming languages. So what does that mean? Are the lines in Shakespeare plays actually runnable as valid computer programs, if only we can find the right compiler?

Maybe our modern programming languages were influenced by the great Bard. Or maybe Mr. Shakespeare was the first computer programmer.

I am getting more and more comfortable creating things in our VR metaroom. As that continues, my views about my relationship with that other place are changing.

On a gut level, I am starting to feel as though the metaroom is simply an extension of the room I am in. It is feeling more and more like a part of the physical world. You just need special glasses to see that particular part of the world.

And that has gotten me thinking that the metaroom would be an interesting place for a daily blog. After all, it’s only because the Web is everywhere that my practice of blogging every day makes sense.

So why not blog in the metaroom, rather than on a two dimensional document? After all, anybody with the right VR or AR glasses can visit the metaroom from wherever they are, just like they now can visit the traditional Web.

And we are heading toward an era where a lot of people are going to have those glasses. I guess it’s nearly time to start vrogging.

I love dad jokes — the kind of joke that essentially relies on double meanings and language play. When I am with my young niece and nephew, I make them up pretty much all the time.

Today the two of them were visiting our lab, and on the way out my nephew noted how much fun it is to punch things in VR. So I made up a dad joke.

I said “Do you know why punching something in VR is so popular?”

“No, why?” they both asked.

“Because,” I explained, “it’s always a hit.”

Which is a perfectly appropriate joke to tell a nine year old and a thirteen year old. But then I noticed that I do the same thing with my grad students.

For example, this evening we were discussing physics simulations in VR. At one point I said “it’s ok to study differential calculus before learning about coefficients of friction, but you need to be careful.”

“Why?” they asked.

“Because,” I explained, “it’s a slippery slope.”

This was clearly a dad joke, but one that you might need to be a grad student to fully appreciate. Which suggests that there may be particular flavors of dad jokes that aren’t meant for little kids at all.

Perhaps there are dad jokes that only work if you tell them to, say, a personal injury lawyer, or a paleontologist, or a neurosurgeon. The jokes are still complete groaners, but in order to groan you need some advanced knowledge.

Maybe these should be called “learned dad jokes”.

Continuing our theme of fictional speculation about speculative fiction, suppose the Star Trek replicator were real. Let us say, for the sake of discussion, that we could copy absolutely anything, down to the atomic level.

There are all sorts of philosophical and ethical issues to unpack here. For example, if you could perfectly replicate a human being, ethical issues would abound beyond anything we have ever needed to deal with as a species.

So let’s take something simpler. Suppose you could perfectly replicate food.

Would everyone who eats meat be then able to classify themselves as an ethical vegan? After all, with the right replicator technology, you can precisely copy the taste and flavor and texture of any animal product, and then replicate that food item an infinite number of times.

This essentially removes from the equation the primary issue of ethical veganism: In order for an animal-sourced meal to show up on your plate, sentient beings have suffered and died.

Does the Star Trek replicator effectively take that issue off the table (so to speak)? Or are there other aspects of this question that my analysis is missing?

I had a conversation with one of the graduate students in our CS department. His group does very different research from ours, so like most people, he hasn’t had experience with virtual reality.

He told me that over the holiday break, he went to a friend’s house and tried VR for the first time. The experience was just a simple fighting game with abstract shapes. Yet even that, he reported, gave him a powerful sense of immersion that he had not expected.

He came away a believer. It’s too early in the technology, he said, and I agree with him. But it’s kind of like seeing a movie in the very early days of cinema. You can already see how eventually it will take over.

This student now believes in the future of VR because he experienced it for himself. In particular, he told me that it really required that first-hand experience to make him a believer.

It’s like what John Sebastian once said about music:

I’ll tell you about the magic, and it’ll free your soul
But it’s like trying to tell a stranger about rock and roll