Ken's Blog

I’ve always wanted to be one of those people who gets their poem printed in The New Yorker magazine. And now at last, in a sort of unusual way, I have.

There is an article in the latest issue of The New Yorker by Patty Marx, entitled Taking Virtual Reality for a Test Drive. Near the end I am cited.

The entire citation consists of printing a poem that I once wrote on this blog about virtual reality, in the form of a haiku. I hereby reprint said poem, in its entirety:

when technology
shifts reality, will we
know the world has changed?

I think my poem points out a very valid truth. I could add that it is a timely truth, but in fact this particular truth has been equally timely over the entirety of human history.

In any case, I am pleased and honored to finally have a poem printed in The New Yorker. Thank you Patty!!!!

One of the difficult issues we wrestle with at our lab is the line between VR and not VR. If people are co-located, as they generally are in our work, is that still VR? Or is it actually an extreme version of mixed reality (MR)?

I don’t think it’s a very interesting question, as an intrinsic analysis of what we are doing. But in terms of how we capture people’s imagination, getting the terminology right could be very important.

If you want to change the world for the better, people need to understand what you are actually doing. It can be hard to get people on board if they think you are doing something else.

Today in my graduate computer graphics class things went really right. Our demo of a shared VR metaroom at the start of class worked well, and I think it really inspired the students.

Then the students got up to discuss their own wonderful and varied VR metaroom ideas, and that really inspired me. We spent most of the class going over the various student project ideas, and learning from one another.

Today I wrote a blog post about much of this on our Future Reality Lab blog. It goes into a bit more detail about the possibilities of VR metarooms. You can read about that HERE.

This morning we saw “Frozen 2”. It was a beautiful movie, and lots of fun.

Throughout the film I found myself wondering what it would be like to walk around in that world. I am thinking that this will be what Toon VR will be like in, say, five years from now.

I love the idea that eventually we will be walking around in such worlds together, as a social experience. I hope to see you there. 🙂

I’ve been writing a toon shader for my little virtual reality world. Toon shading a way of rendering things so they look like they are in a cartoon or comic book. The objects in your scene have solid colors and black outlines, as though an artist drew things with a pen and then filled in the colors.

It’s a funny thought, being fully immersed in a world that is clearly not real. In a way it seems like a contradiction. How can things be fully real all around us, yet clearly not real at all?

Rather than a contradiction, I think it’s actually a super power. When things are literally real, they can limit our minds. We are prone to simply see them as they are. But when things start to deviate from the physically plausible, we are given permission to fill in the gaps, to let our minds roam, to use our imaginations.

It’s the same super power that we get from animation. Except with Toon VR, a whole other world of artistic possibility opens up before us.

I just saw “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”, It’s the best movie I’ve seen in a really long time. I highly recommend it.

I am quite certain that I will going for seconds. I want to see it at least once more again while it is still in the theaters. It is way too good to wait for streaming.

Also, it provided a real opportunity for me to use my newfound skill of being able to count seconds accurately. I knew that would come in handy at some point!

A knowledgeable friend was explaining to me recently about the history of grape wines in America. Like many things, it’s a little bit complicated.

Grapes indigenous to Europe are better for wine, but they can’t really grow here, because they are vulnerable to a disease that kills the vines. Grapes indigenous to America are immune to that disease, but they didn’t produce the kind of wine that people liked.

Eventually growers figured out to import grapes from Europe and graft them onto American vines. American wine that we drink today is made this way.

At this point in the explanation, I interjected “So it’s like Hispanic people.”

My friend looked confused, so I explained. “European imports grafted onto actual American stock.”

“Yes,” she said, “that’s it exactly.”

I think I told a Thanksgiving joke.

The day before Thanksgiving is always strange for me these days because I find myself reflecting on the odd contradictions between what I learned in school about Thanksgiving and America’s origins, and what I now know about our nation’s dark history.

Like many nations, ours is a problematic one. We have beautiful aspirational ideals of freedom and equality, yet we emerged out of an historical soup of both genocide and a particularly brutal form of slavery.

Is it possible to reconcile such extreme historical sins with the abstract promises of equality and freedom for all? I suppose this is the problem that faces much of the world, since many of the nations that exist today were forged out of conquest and subjugation of other peoples.

Compounding this is the fact that for most people a collective amnesia about these inconvenient facts is a fundamental part of how they get through the day, the month and the year.

On the other hand, tomorrow will be a time I get to hang out with family and play with my wonderful nieces and nephews.

For that, I should remember to give thanks.

Have you ever read a novel that was so epic, you couldn’t decide whether you liked it until a long time later? I just saw “The Irishman”, and it is having that effect on me.

So much happens in those three and a half hours, that my mind is awhirl with far too much information. It’s going to take me a long time to figure out exactly what I just saw.

And then, perhaps, I will be able to figure out whether I like it.

I know that some of my students like very structured assignments, because then they know exactly what to expect. But as this semester has gone on, and we’ve covered the basic stuff, I’ve been gradually loosening the structure.

At this point in the class I am putting them into groups and having them come up with their own ideas. There is always some trepidation on the part of students when you try something like this.

But after they have the experience of talking ideas over with each other and brainstorming, they get past that and become very excited and enthusiastic, and very very creative.

It’s definitely a case of less is more. Or perhaps more accurately, more is more.