Ken's Blog

To me the most exciting news today was the discovery of ancient Denisovans far from the single small region where they were first found. I am not sure why I find this news to be so thrilling, but I do.

Perhaps because it is a welcome respite from the ordinary. People seem to spend so much time these days either griping about the current state of the world or else escaping into artificial fantasy universes.

Yet here is a discovery that is magnificent in its sheer temporal scale — a new window into the vast prehistory of our shared human heritage. It is also a mystery.

For what were these people like? What kind of language did they speak? What were their views on love? What sorts of ideas ran through those very large brains of theirs?

We may never know the answers to these questions. Yet in the simple act of asking, we are lifted out of the quotidian, and we find our sense of wonder restored.

Today, the first day of May, is the day when workers are celebrated in much of the world. Except of course in the United States, where Labor Day started in the first place.

The Haymarket Affair in Chicago in 1886 had paradoxically opposite effects in the U.S. and abroad. The administration of president Grover Cleveland, who was deeply pro-business and anti-union, played down the political significance of that day by deliberately avoiding any reference to early May, settling on the first Monday in September for the American commemoration of Labor Day.

Meanwhile, workers in other countries used the Haymarket Affair as a rallying cry for workers’ rights. Which is why International Workers’ Day is celebrated today in more than eighty nations around the world.

Interestingly, in the last few days our current administration has decided that up to 75 million U.S. workers may no longer qualify for worker benefits. I wonder how many of those workers are going to vote to reelect this president, not ever realizing what has just happened to them.

Grover Cleveland would have been impressed.

The other day I did what may be one of the nerdiest things I have ever done. I ordered a custom black t-shirt.

But not just any custom black t-shirt. Printed on this black t-shirt, in a monospace white font, is the code for the new and improved version of my noise function.

The print consists of about a dozen lines of fairly dense GLSL shader code. The code itself won’t mean anything to someone who isn’t a graphics programmer. Yet as a work of aesthetic expression, I think it will work for anyone.

I don’t think I did this primarily as a fashion statement. Rather, I think it was a way for me to memorialize, for myself, a particular personal achievement.

Of course other people will see the t-shirt when I wear it, so in a way it is, by definition, a communication with the world. Yet what it is communicating on the outside is mainly a reflection of a particular feeling that I have on the inside.

Come to think of it, isn’t that what fashion is all about?

Something about a
Haiku, makes me wish the world
Could learn to be terse

Happily, today my brilliant Ph.D. student Connor DeFanti defended his dissertation. He is now officially Dr. DeFanti.

During his presentation Connor used a number of words that have well known meanings in the field of computer science. For example, at one point he used the word “binary”. At another point he used the word “handshaking”.

Computer scientists usually use the word “binary” to denote the “base two” number system, in which every digit is either zero or one. “Handshaking” is generally used to describe the software protocol that allows two computer programs to communicate with each other.

But since Connor’s thesis was about shared virtual reality, he had alternate meanings for both of these words. In the case of “binary”, he was referring to “non-binary” avatars. In other words, in our shared VR worlds, participants are not required to appear as — or identify as — male or female.

In the case of “handshaking” he was referring to the distinction between what is possible in shared virtual worlds in the same physical room and what is possible in shared virtual worlds with remotely located participants.

The distinction between the two can be neatly described as follows: When two people are in the same physical room, they can shake each other’s hand.

Of course they can also engage in lots of other interesting activities together that two people can’t do unless they are in the same room. But from a computer science perspective, those other activities are all really forms of handshaking, to a first approximation.

Well, people seem to really like CAVE. Today I read a very nice article about it on techradar.

Last night at a small party thrown by Bose, we got to spend a lot of time in deep philosophical conversation with Paul of Felix and Paul. I’ve been a fan of their pioneering VR work for years, so it was fascinating to meet him and to get his perspective on all this.

Then this morning, of course, I made sure to watch the new Felix and Paul VR piece Gymnasia, which is also showing at Tribeca. It was beautiful, as well as disturbing in all the right ways.

I think people are really starting to figure out this medium. And that is not is not so easy, because it requires a new visual language.

After all, after the Lumiere brothers started to popularize projected cinema¹, eight more years had to pass before someone finally created the very first movie close-up². So I guess we are not doing so badly.

1. In 1895
2. The Great Train Robbery, in 1903

Today is the beginning of the Tribeca Film Festival, where for the next ten days we are showing CAVE as part of its VR program. This is particular exciting because CAVE is the world’s first (and so far only) immersive narrative for a collocated room-scale audience. Or, to put it a different way, a movie that transports an entire audience onto the Holodeck.

It was fun and exciting showing CAVE at Siggraph last summer, but Tribeca is a different thing entirely. Siggraph is a technical conference, whereas Tribeca is a major film festival.

To put it bluntly, the New York Times film critic is not going to show up at Siggraph. Which means that now our work is no longer just part of a technical conversation. It is now part of the cultural conversation.

What CAVE is really asserting in that cultural conversation is that a narrative experienced in VR should not merely be “a movie for one person”. Rather, it should be an experience that many people can share together, with all of the the age old magic that happens when people gather together to be told a story.

There have been some really supportive articles written about us showing up at Tribeca with CAVE. Here is one of them.

With any luck, the cultural critics who attend the festival will understand what we are up to, and will receive our work kindly.

Today a good friend of mine proudly emailed me a photo of his new membership card. He has just joined the Democratic Socialists of America.

I, of course, immediately emailed him this (slightly altered) excerpt from Monty Python’s Life of Brian:

REG: We’re the Democratic Socialists of America. Listen. If you wanted to join the D.S.A. you’d have to really hate the Republicans.

BRIAN: I do!

REG: Oh, yeah? How much?

BRIAN: A lot!

REG: Right. You’re in. Listen. The only people we hate more than the Republicans are the fucking American Democratic Socialists.

P.F.J.: Yeah…

JUDITH: Splitters.

P.F.J.: Splitters…

FRANCIS: And the American Popular Democratic Socialists.

P.F.J.: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Splitters. Splitters…

LORETTA: And the Democratic Socialists of America.

P.F.J.: Yeah. Splitters. Splitters…

REG: What?

LORETTA: The Democratic Socialists of America. Splitters.

REG: We’re the Democratic Socialists of America!

LORETTA: Oh … I thought we were the Popular Democratic Socialists.

Today I was talking on the phone with a reporter about our lab’s research. She had clearly done her homework by looking up everything about me that she could find on the internet.

Which includes, for example, this blog. Now here is something you should understand: Unlike publications in my professional life, this blog is really all about my unrestricted personal musings on the state of the world.

So when the reporter, after discussing my personal profile, started talking about my blog, I was intrigued. Where was she going to go with it? What might she pick up on?

To my relief, she just observed that this blog is very funny. Which is pretty much all I would ask of anyone who manages to find their way here.

Every once in a while I weave my love of computer graphics into my teaching of computer graphics. I mean, it’s always there as subtext. But sometimes I make it the text.

In this week’s class I did that quite literally. You can read about it in my Future Reality Lab blog post.