Ken's Blog

The technology we currently use for our shared VR metaroom doesn’t let us know when people are blinking. So when we look at each other as avatars, we need to add our own procedural blinking. That helps a lot to make the avatars of other people look more natural.

Yesterday I implemented a mirroring capability, so that people in our metaroom can see their own avatar, as in a mirror reflection. Interestinglly, I realized that I should not have the mirror reflections blink, because when you look in a mirror in real life, you never ever see yourself blinking.

In fact, one subliminal clue as to “Is this me, or is this somebody else?” is whether the person you are looking at is blinking. If they are blinking, then they are somebody else. If they are not blinking, then you are looking at yourself in a mirror.

Mirror reflections have been around forever. So it’s odd to realize that before the advent of movies in the late 19th century, no human being in all of history had ever seen himself or herself blink.

It’s fascinating to me the way people enjoy experiences that make them work. Many people love a good crossword or jigsaw puzzle.

I personally wait all week for the New York Times Saturday crossword puzzle, because that’s the one that makes me work the most. The more difficult they make my life, the better I like it.

Why is this so? Why do some people love fiendishly difficult video games, while others love the challenge of mastering Liszt’s Campanella?

I think it comes down to a fundamental survival trait: We are drawn to activities that increase our skills or abilities.

Were that not the case, our primordial ancestors would have spent their entire lives just lazing around doing as little as possible. But if that were the case, our species would never have managed to survive, and you wouldn’t be reading this blog post.

So here’s a takeaway: If you want people to love your creation, then create something that requires them to put in some effort. It seems that what we like is what makes us work.

In recent posts I have been discussing the possibilities of creating virtual worlds that people can physically enter together. It would be as though there were a parallel universe, right next to this one, that you and your friends could step into and explore.

One of the interesting things about this sort of proposition is that there are very few limits. Unlike a theme park, such as world has no physical costs of construction or maintenance.

This means that over time, as we develop the right tools, such worlds might become extremely inexpensive to create. And that, in turn, means that we soon may see a day when anybody at all can create a custom world to their specifications, to visit and enjoy with their friends.

Which leads to the obvious question: If you had the power to create any world you wish, what world would you create?

As we were discussing our plans for the future at our lab yesterday, one very practical question came up. What I like about this question is that it helps to simplify and frame our goals, in a sort of pass/fail way.

In short, the question is this: What would it take for two people who are sitting physically across each other in a meeting, to both put on VR headsets and continue that in-person meeting in an alternate reality?

Note that a number of questions immediately arise in response to the above question. For example, would it be necessary for us to see each others’ facial expressions?

Or could there be benefits to moving into that alternate world that are so compelling that we wouldn’t miss that? Suppose, for example, we were so focused on the super power of whatever we could see and hear and do together that we are willing to forego some of the qualities of direct sensory experience.

There is a sort of analogy to the telephone. Well over a century ago, people were so happy to be able to communicate at a distance, that they had no trouble foregoing the power of being able to their conversant.

It’s hard to predict what shared super powers would be so compelling that we would be willing to forego seeing the literal face of a person with whom we are physically face to face. On the other hand, we are now used to super powers that only a generation ago would have been very difficult to explain.

Imagine, for example, trying to explain the usefulness of Google search to nearly anyone in 1992. It would be a rare individual indeed who would even have understood what you were talking about.

Today, as the very last meeting in 2019 of our Future Reality Lab, we held a brainstorming session. I led the group in front of a large whiteboard, and people tossed out ideas.

The goal was to figure out what our direction and focus should be in 2020. The goal was to work at a high level, rather than worrying the details.

I told them “Don’t think of this as something you do over coffee. Think of this as something you do over beer.” Although I suppose, having said that, I probably should have served beer. 🙂

My job was largely to keep things on a level of “yes, and” rather than “yet, but”. We didn’t consider any ideas to be bad ideas — they all went up on the whiteboard.

Yet everyone could tell when somebody came up with an idea that was particularly good. You could feel the energy in the room rising at those moments.

I decided to mentally bookmark those particular ideas to myself, so we could go back to them later, rather than calling them out on the whiteboard. After all, we didn’t want it to be a competition. You never know what is going to be the next great idea.

So now we have lots of raw material to work with. The hard part is going to be putting them into action.

Oh well. As a friend of mine once said about good ideas: “Conception is always easier than delivery.”

Today is the 353th day of the year. Which means that it is a palindrome — writing the digits forward is the same as writing them backward.

It would probably be relatively easy to count up the number of days in the year that are palindromes. And a good computer programmer might be able to write a program to answer the question faster than most people could count it up manually. Consider these as exercises for the reader. 🙂

This leads to a more general question: For any given number (in this case 365), how many palindromes are there in the numbers counting up to that number?

And that leads to other questions. For example, how quickly do palindrome numbers increase? Is the palindrome number of 1000 ten times larger than the palindrome number of 100?

These may seem like crazy questions. But you never know with math. Every once in a while, asking seemingly crazy mathematical questions leads to the discovery of something surprising and wonderful about the nature of the Universe.

I am writing this on a train heading to Newark airport to pick up a friend. Actually, I am dictating this on my Android phone.

When I am on a flight, I don’t really think about the fact that I am hurtling around the Earth at some incredible speed. The distances involved are simply too great for my poor human brain to encompass.

But on a train, I can actually see the trees and buildings and roads go by. I remain acutely aware that at every moment I am at a different location.

In my mind, I imagine the words in this blog post spilling out behind me. Together they form a trail that marks the precise location where each moment of thought occurred.

We are all leaving such trails behind us throughout our days, aren’t we? The stories of our lives spool out endlessly as interlocking trails, forming loops and knots and intricate patterns which tie us all together upon this Earth.

There are certain songs that I avoid listening to because they remind me of particularly painful breakups in my life. I don’t have this reaction to movies or books or paintings or poems or pretty much anything else.

But songs have a unique primal power, which distinguishes them from the other arts. The right combination of words and music seems to be able to reach us at some deep emotional level, cutting through all of our defenses and speaking to us where we live.

Why are songs like that? Is this connected to some sort of evolutionary adaptation? Perhaps 200,000 years ago, in the Paleolithic era, some early human heard another human singing, and mysteriously found herself beginning to cry.

This evening the wonderful students in my graduate computer graphics class showed their final class projects. The amazing work they produced exceeded my expectations, and then some.

I am deeply inspired by what happens when you give brilliant young people the tools they need to create something new. Especially when you also realize that the best way to support them is to stand back and get out of their way.

If you are curious, and want to read a bit more about it, feel free to drop in on our Future Reality Lab blog.

As I’ve said here before, I’m always looking for apt metaphors for the future that our lab’s research is enabling. There are so many metaphors to choose from: Faerian Drama, the Holodeck, The Matrix, the Jedi Council and many others beside.

The other day, as I described our research to a colleague, he said “What you are creating is The Magic Schoolbus!” And I realized he is right.

We are giving people a way to physically gather, and then be whisked off together on a guided tour of fantastical worlds. The possibilities are limited only (as my friend Lance Williams used to say) by the imagination.

This evening I watched an episode of The Magic Schoolbus, and it was completely delightful. I won’t tell you which episode I watched, but I can say that my favorite line was “We’re up Ralphie’s nose???”

Normally I would say that the future is nothing to sneeze at. But having just seen that classic episode, I’m not so sure.