What I did yesterday

In response to my post yesterday about Magic Leap, J. Peterson makes a fair point. How can we trust extremely well funded companies that don’t make public statements about what they are up to?

But as it turns out, J. Peterson and I are not in the same position. Because I have now seen the Magic Leap demo.

And here is what I can say about it: It is clear to me from the demo I saw, and the conversations I had there, that they are very much on the right track. Not only that, but I also think they are making the correct business decision in keeping things under wraps until they are ready to go public.

So yes, I am giving Magic Leap a thumbs up — and I can’t yet tell you why. But I think you will end up agreeing with me, after they have gone public and you can see for yourself what they’ve been up to.

Ontological time machine

We are moving our lab this month, so last night I needed to pack my office into boxes. Due to various circumstances, I needed to do this in a single night.

I didn’t want to lose objects that might be precious, such as my birth certificate, or photos from the first time I went to Brazil. But not being a very organized person, I wasn’t sure where all those things were.

So it ended up becoming a struggle between time and space. It would have been fastest to simply shove everything into boxes, and push the problem down the road for future Ken to deal with.

But that would have resulted in a crazily large number of boxes, with no real understanding of what was in them. The birth certificate and the treasured photos from Braziil, among other things, would have remained vague cyphers, objects somewhere in a large and mysterious collection of boxes, still out of reach.

So I made some educated guesses. Some piles of paper were clearly not important, and I tossed those out summarily. Yet others looked like they contained treasures, and through these I carefully sifted.

Still other piles of paper were clearly part of what I think of as my “origin story” — the collection of drawings that I made that led to algorithms I’m proud of, or things I had written so long ago that they possess clear archeaological value for that reason alone.

These collections of papers I put into boxes wholesale, without trying to sift through them. I guess there are certain categories of objects that I simply think of as sacred

The entire experience, which lasted roughly twelve hours, felt like a journey through a time machine. Through these objects, which at various stages of my life I had touched, and had in turn touched me, I could see who I was a different times.

I remembered the joys and struggles, the friends now long gone, the relationships that defined me. On the one hand I was merely sifting through piles of paper.

On the other hand, I was sifting through my own life. And all the while I was asking myself a question: Which parts of that life do I cherish, and which parts will I throw away?

Pragmatic perspective

Today my mom called to wish me a happy new year. We commiserated together over what a terrible year 2016 has been.

On that general topic, I brought up the sad news about the recent passing of Debbie Reynolds, since she and my mom were pretty much contemporaries. And in return I learned some personal history that my mom had never told me until today.

It seems that my dad (who passed away some years back) always had a crush on Debbie Reynolds.

“Really??” I asked. “How much of a crush?”

My mom said that he used to tell her “You have only one rival.”

But my mother then told me that the rivalry had never really bothered her. As always, she had a very pragmatic perspective on the situation. “Fortunately,” she said, “Debbie was not available.”

Interactive projection in the theater

Today I saw the off-Broadway show Gorey. It was essentially an eccentric romp through the eccentric psyche of the artist/writer Edward Gorey.

The production employed projection to bring some of his creations to life. In one scene, Gorey interacted with an animated version of the main character from his story The Doubtful Guest.

Like most such theatrical moments, the projected images were animated beforehand. That pre-built animation was then projected onto a wall of the stage, while the actor precisely timed his movements to make it seem as though he and the animated character were having a moment together.

There was even a moment when “Gorey” fed an apple to the animated figure of the doubtful guest, an eerie recreation of the work of Windsor McCay, who had done the same thing in 1914 — feeding an apple to a projection of his animated character Gertie the Dinosaur within a live theatrical performance.

We spoke with the director and projection designer after the show, and were surprised to discover that they had never heard of either Windsor McCay or Gertie. Perhaps some ideas are just so good that they are destined to be invented over and over again.

Of course one of the great things about live theater is that it is never exactly the same twice. Unfortunately, interacting with a previously created animation removes much of that quality. The live performer must do everything at exactly the right moment, or the illusion is broken.

Having seen this show, I am now more motivated than ever to user our interactive Chalktalk animated drawing program in theatrical performance. Rather than “performing” with a previously created animation, it would be so much cooler to perform with an animated character that is truly responsive in the moment, and responsive to variations in the performance of the live actor. Every performance could then truly reflect the unique emotional interaction with that night’s particular live audience.

Windsor McCay had no choice but to interact with a character that does exactly the same thing every time. But now we have a choice. A century after Windsor McCay and Gertie, we might finally be ready to truly bring animated characters into the glorious world of live theater.

Dark matters

How strange that Carrie Fisher and Vera Rubin passed away on the same day. There is a karmic connection between them.

Carrie Fisher has long been a hero of mind, mostly because I have been a fan of her enormously witty and funny writing, and I am very saddened that she passed away too soon. Of course in the popular culture she is best known for embodying Princess Leia, a character she first played at the tender age of nineteen.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, that character devoted her life to battling the dark side of the Universe. Along the way, she showed the world that there is no problem too large if you have a ready wit, a fearless attitude and a blaster pistol.

Vera Rubin never quite entered the popular culture. But pretty much everyone is aware of her greatest accomplishment: In the 1980s her research provided the first strong empirical case that the Universe actually has a dark side.

Along the way she fought and overcame other sorts of dark forces. Alas, those forces were (and still are) considerably stupider and less glamorous than anything you can defeat with a blaster gun.

The pioneering work by Rubin and her colleagues has held up spectacularly well in recent decades. In fact, empirical measurements currently suggest that there is more than five times as much dark matter in the Universe as light matter.

Come to think of it, if you’ve devoted your life to fighting the dark side, those can seem like pretty daunting odds. It may be just as well that Leia Organa did not know about Vera Rubin’s research.

Binaural

I saw “The Encounter” this evening. This is a one-man show that relies heavily on binaural audio. Every seat in the theater has a pair of headphones, and the sensation while you are watching the show is that there is a rich sonic landscape all around you.

The effect is very powerful, and quite emotionally engaging. If you’ve never tried binaural audio before, just put on a pair of headphones (even cheap headphones will do) and listen to this classic:

Haircut

Seeing this show has gotten me much more focused on binaural audio for our own work in socially shared VR. Audio can convey a visceral emotional impact that can be far greater than the impact of visuals.

And this makes sense, in evolutionary terms. After all, 30,000 years ago, when predators were sneaking up on our ancestors, it was our ears, not our eyes, that warned us in time that something dangerous was behind us.

I look forward to incorporating binaural audio into the virtual worlds we are creating. I am sure it will greatly increase the emotional impact of those experiences. After all, where’s the fun in having a virtual saber-tooth tiger sneak up behind you, if it’s just a silent movie? 😉

New, but not too new

From time to time our lab research gets spun off into various start-up companies. We’ve done it a few times now, so we know the general terrain.

But one issue that never changes is the difference between what’s valuable in University research and what’s valuable in a start-up company. The values differ because each is optimizing for something different.

University research optimizes for a general sense of expanding knowledge. From that perspective, it doesn’t matter who makes money from that knowledge.

It doesn’t even matter if the knowledge won’t be of practical use to anyone for another twenty years. The important thing is the overall arc of long-lasting impact.

But start-up companies are first and foremost about bringing into the world something that is economically self-sustaining. And it has to be economically self-sustaining the relatively short term.

You need to create something useful fairly soon, but that in itself is not sufficient. You also need to make sure that the world knows to beat a path to your door.

In other words, you need to create something new, but not too new. If your idea is so far ahead of the curve that nobody else can understand why it’s important, then you’ll just run out of money before you manage to get your product or service out into the world.

It can be difficult for people from Academia to make the psychological transition from “great research idea” to “great start-up idea”. When you’ve been spending years optimizing for one value system, it can be hard to switch gears and optimize for a different value system. There are many ways to get it wrong.

Yet sometimes we manage to get it right. And when we do, it feels great. 🙂