Ken's Blog

With apologies to Will Rogers, I just couldn’t resist the title of this post. 🙂

Today I’m mainly going to point you to the blog post I wrote for our Future Reality Lab. Today was a super exciting day at our lab: We surprised the students in my graduate computer graphics class by handing every one of them a shiny new toy: a brand new Oculus Quest that they can use for the rest of the semester.

In addition, we are going to show them how to create not just VR experiences, but “Metaroom” experiences, which I think are even cooler. If you want to learn more, you can read about it at my Future Reality Lab blog post.

Suppose the electric light bulb had not been invented yet. Which means that nobody had ever had any experience using a light bulb.

If you had asked people what they thought of such an invention, I imagine you would have gotten all sorts of vague and confused answers. For one thing, wasn’t this already a solved problem?

In the years before the invention of the light bulb, many cities had a well developed system for lighting via natural gas. There was a large infrastructure already in place to keep city streets light after the sun went down.

Yet after the light bulb had been invented, its many advantages seemed obvious. Not least of these advantages was the corresponding system of electrification.

Once electricity is running to every home, then it becomes possible to think about all sorts of electric appliances. As we now know, the cultural effect of having such appliances available in every home was utterly transformative.

What forthcoming technologies will be like the light bulb? Specifically, what inventions might seem pointless to us now in 2019, but will come to seem essential once they enter our future lives and manage to utterly transform our world?

I for one don’t want to just sit around and wait to find out. As Alan Kay said: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

I noticed that when I was away from the lab, I was getting an enormous amount of work done. Not the same kind of work as when I’m at NYU — different work.

I think the everyday environment of an office or lab encourages a certain kind of productivity, but discourages other kinds. Once you are away from the every day regime, you find yourself thinking differently. That different way of thinking can be channeled.

This last week, traveling around, I ended up creating things that I don’t think I would have had the bandwidth to create if I were in my every day routine. It was all very satisfying.

Maybe I should travel more. 🙂

A new month is an entire world to explore, a vista of possibilities. It spreads out before you invitingly, asking you in, tempting you to take a stroll, to look around the corner.

Today is the first day of the month, and somehow that provokes my sense of adventure. What will happen that I could not have predicted? What changes will there be in my life and in the lives of those I love?

These are exciting questions because they touch on some very real existential issues. A month can be viewed as a contained experiment in the power of free will.

In the course of a month, you can set out to create a change in your life, and then see actual results of that change. And unlike a year, a month is a short enough span of time to assess and — if needed — to rechart your course.

I am looking forward to exploring the existential possibilities, to playing in my shiny new 30 day research laboratory.

I was discussing VR today with some colleagues here at the SIBGRAPI conference in Rio de Janeiro. At some point the conversation turned to the representation of facial expression.

I said that I wasn’t so worried that lack of facial expression would hold up development of social VR. I mentioned the fact that more than 140 years ago people started communicating with each other as invisible avatars.

The fact that you can only hear someone’s voice on the telephone turned out not to be a show stopper. Consumers in the late 19th century didn’t run out of the room screaming because invisible people were talking to them. They simply accepted the nature of this new medium, and embraced it.

At that point in the conversation somebody pointed out that today is Halloween. On this day of the years people take to the streets en masse wearing fanciful costumes.

Many of those people wear masks which completely hide their facial expressions. That doesn’t seem to bother anybody — it’s all part of the fun.

Maybe the early years of VR-enhanced social experiments will feel a bit like Halloween. When people join the party, they will choose the mask that best fits their mood that day.

I suspect people won’t be bothered all that much if they can’t see each others’ facial expressions. They are much more likely to be bothered if they can’t share a beer.

Last night I mentioned to some colleagues here in Rio that I blog every day. One person at the table, who is in his 20s, looked up my blog on his phone, and then seemed unhappy that two days ago my blog post was very short. Apparently I was not playing by some rule he had formed in his head.

What I think he missed was that the very brevity of that post signaled its importance. To me the death of Robert Evans is enormously significant from a cultural perspective. My hope was that readers would look him up and find out why I had honored his passing.

Yet earlier in the conversation, this same person, who does professional research in VR, drew a blank when I mentioned the Star Trek Holodeck. Someone of his generation, he explained patiently, wouldn’t know about such an out of date cultural reference.

To me the two moments seem related. My extremely short post on Robert Evans was a pointed invitation to do research into an historically important figure in popular culture, a key to understanding how we get to where we are in 2019.

And of course the Star Trek Holodeck was central to the origin of our current interest in Virtual Reality. It was, in a very important sense, one of the tentpole moments in the cultural evolution of VR.

All of which makes me wonder — are the young people in Gen Z completely uninterested in history? If so, how can they hope to understand where they are going, without understanding the path to how we all got here?

Are we entering a time in history where young people will stop paying attention to Shakespeare because he’s just some old dead guy? Will Jane Austen, Amadeus Mozart and Mary Shelley come be considered irrelevant?

Are we becoming culturally stupid?

Today I gave a keynote at the combined Brazilian Computer Graphics, Computer Games and VR conferences in Rio de Janeiro. I used the occasion to give some predictions about the near future of shared immersive experiences, and to talk about how our lab is helping to make that future happen.

I realized afterward how incredibly useful it is for my own process to give such talks. When you need to convey to others what you are aiming for in your own work, you gain a better understanding yourself.

As I give such talks, I feel as though I am achieving, by successive approximations, a better understanding of my own mission. Also in this case the audience was extremely perceptive, and asked excellent and highly thoughtful questions about such topics as privacy, provenance and the digital divide.

I guess it’s true what they say: The best way to learn is to teach.

RIP Robert Evans, 1930 to 2019

Truly the end of an era.

Today I visited my friend Luiz at IMPA, which is in the Tijuca Forest in Rio de Janeiro, about an hour’s taxi ride from my hotel at Riocentro. After driving up a long winding mountain road the driver dropped me off.

The view was breathtakingly beautiful — it seemed to be a very popular spot for tourists. Also, just around the time the taxi drove away I realized I was in the wrong place.

My Google phone has no reception here in Brazil, and I had a moment of panic. But then I realized that tourists have phones, which meant I could try to rely on the kindness of strangers.

Fortunately I knew just enough Portuguese to explain my predicament. A kindly Brazilian tourist with a cellphone called my friend Luiz for me.

The two of them were still talking on the phone when, to my surprise, my taxi driver walked into view. He gave me a happy smile and a friendly wave.

I gestured the driver over, and explained to the astonished tourist with the phone that this was the very same taxi driver who had dropped me off not ten minutes earlier. Apparently the driver had decided to park his cab down the road so he could take some photos of the great view from the mountain.

The tourist promptly handed his phone to the taxi driver so Luiz could give the driver proper directions to IMPA (it would end up taking another hour to get there). I profusely thanked the kindly Brazilian tourist, and we were off.

The good news, as you can see from this photo I snapped with my phone, is that it really was a spectacular view.

Every relationship is a back and forth. If you are asked to give something that you simply cannot give, no matter how much you may want to, then everyone is in trouble.

Words to live by.