Ken's Blog

In Kansas City
As folks from Firesign Theater
Told us jazz stories

I greatly enjoyed the moment in Solo where Lando Calrissian gets his drink refilled by a hovering drone. “Wow,” I thought to myself, “that is a great idea. We could totally do that today — and we wouldn’t need to be in a galaxy long ago and far away!”

So I started thinking about the idea of a bar where the “bartenders” would be drones that came to your table to bring you a drink — or refresh the drink you have. What could be cooler?

But then I started seeing the difficulties. What happens if a robot drone bartender gets it wrong. What if it knocks over a drink or accidentally injurs a bar patron?

And how would those expensive drone bots fare in the presence of inebriated customers? Would they be able to avoid playful swats from overly enthusiastic drunken patrons?

As cool as it sounds, I’m not sure we have reached the stage of Moore’s Law where robot drone bartenders could really be a thing. Like many cool ideas, it may sound great on paper, but in real life it probably wouldn’t fly.

Today I am very excited to announce the beginning of a new daily blog. Unlike this one, the new blog will be a collaboration of all the members of our NYU Future Reality Lab.

Since there happen to be fourteen of us, each of us will write a post one day every two week. Each person will write about what cool things they are thinking about or working on (or both) as members of our lab.

Today I wrote the inaugural post. You can follow the daily evolution of our blog — and our lab’s research — by going to our lab’s website.

Enjoy!

This evening I went by myself to see Solo. All of my fellow Star Wars fanatics had already seen it, and the name itself suggested that a solitary experience might be apropos.

I found it to be an excellent action adventure film, and I liked the way it smoothly filled in the gaps in Han Solo’s history. Weirdly, though, he was definitely not the character that Harrison Ford played more than four decades ago.

This guy is simply too nice. Han Solo is one of modern pop culture’s best exemplars of that classic literary figure, the lovable rogue.

He is our era’s equivalent of Lord Byron, who was, as Lady Caroline Lamb famously quipped, “Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know.”

Back when Star Wars first came out, everybody fell in love with Han Solo precisely for that wild streak. For all his charm, there’s something dangerous about him, and that’s his real super power.

Kind of like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, come to think of it. Which is why I was vaguely disappointed when the movie ended and our hero never actually said the line I was secretly hoping to hear: “Chewie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

I’ve been mulling over the concept of “the magic coin”. In my thinking this is the sort of fantasy story where a stranger gives you a magic coin, and says “use it wisely”.

At first you don’t know what it’s for, or even if it’s all a joke. But then one day something happens and you realize that the coin is giving you a super power.

In order for this concept to really work, the super power cannot come for free. Every time you use the magic coin, there is a cost.

In really good versions of this, there would be something poetic about the relationship between your super power and the price you pay for using it. For example, the coin might let you repeat any day — and thereby fix any mistakes you had made on that day.

But then an appropriate price would be that you lose two days off the end of your life. It seems like a fair trade: one special day for two regular days.

So that is the basic set-up, the space in which to play. What is the super power? What is the price it will exact? Is the benefit of the former worth the cost of the latter?

I could imagine an anthology TV series, “The Magic Coin”. In every episode there is a different super power and a different corresponding price.

Each episode would be written by a different guest writer, and every writer would have a chance to create his or her unique vision. I don’t know about you, but I’d watch it.

After yesterday’s post, now I am starting to wonder about questions that touch on sequences of words with mathematical properties embedded in our English lexicon. For example, what is the longest run of words like the six words (Cave, Dave, Eave, Fave, Gave, Have) in yesterday’s post?

More specifically, what is the longest run of words created by marching the first letter up through the alphabet? Allowing slang and technical words makes it easier, as in: Bat Cat Dat Eat Fat Gat Hat. But that may be cheating.

If you make easier rules, as in “all words that vary in just their first letter”, then the space grows considerably larger. For example: Bar Car Ear Far Jar Mar Oar Par Tar War Yar.

Under that second set of rules, what is the largest set of words possible? Can somebody reading this figure that out?

Our lab is doing a major production for an audience in shared VR to premiere at the forthcoming SIGGRAPH conference (this Aug 12-16 in Vancouver, CA). The narrative is, in a sense, an origin story for virtual reality.

It takes place in Paleolithic times and tells a tale about the possible origins of cave paintings. The title is CAVE.

Today some of us were discussing what projects we might do after SIGGRAPH. What sorts of follow-on pieces might we produce, so that we can continue to learn about telling stories to large audiences in shared VR?

I suggested that we use a sort of Oulipo technique. All of our stories could be successive sequels, with narratives suggested by their titles.

In our first sequel, we find in our cave a lonely character named Dave, and the next story occurs in a place where Dave rescues a friendly bat. Then a story in which the bat learns what Dave likes, followed by one where the bat gives Dave a present, and finally a story about the wonderful result of that generosity.

The titles of these productions would be, respectively:

CAVE
DAVE
EAVE
FAVE
GAVE
HAVE

I think that would be quite enough. Besides, I somehow doubt everyone will agree with my plan. 🙂

When you open the Wi-Fi tab on your computer or phone in lower Manhattan, you get a long list of available Wi-Fi networks. Nearly all of those networks are private and password protected.

The fact that you can see them strikes me as vaguely odd. The whole system feels like a hold-over from an earlier technological age.

Imagine, as an analogy, if every time you went to a restaurant, the waiter brought you the menus of all nearby restaurants. Maybe this evening you and your date find yourselves at a nice little Italian bistro, and you are looking through all of the menus.

When the waiter arrives, you order the Chow Mein. “I’m sorry,” the waiter says, “but we don’t serve Chow Mein.”

“But then why is it on the menu?” you may well ask.

The waiter gives you a kindly but pitying look. “That’s not our menu. That’s the menu for Shanghai Cafe down the block.”

You are about to ask “Then why did you give me that other menu to look at?” when suddenly you notice that your date is staring at you, so you decide to hold your tongue. Clearly there is something here that you do not fully understand.

That’s sort of how I feel about that list of “available” Wi-Fi networks.

The best marketing lesson I ever learned was in the form of a little cartoon I once saw in a magazine. I can no longer remember exactly where I saw it, but the lesson has stuck with me all these years.

Today I drew the cartoon on a whiteboard, the way I remember it. I think the image speaks for itself.

Although I will say this. Somewhere, I suspect, the founder of Starbucks is smiling.

Today’s post is a commentary on yesterday’s post. You might say it is a post post commentary.

In my previous post I pointed out that a stereogram provides a taste of what virtual reality might be like. Yet it is not actually a form of virtual reality, as we generally understand that term today.

In a sense, a stereogram is a simulacrum of virtual reality. That makes it a virtual virtual reality.

Which reminds me of the way Amazon describes its Mechanical Turk system, a marketplace where real people simulate the work of computers. Amazon refers to this process as artificial artificial intelligence.

We can go further with this theme. Rosie M Banks was a fictional author who appeared in the books of P.G. Wodehouse. Rosie wrote romance novels with titles like Only a Factory Girl. Which makes Only a Factory Girl a fictional fictional book.

Speaking of fiction, in an imaginary story by Kurt Vonnegut’s beloved terrible science fiction author Kilgore Trout, there was a character named Albert Hardy. This would make Hardy a imaginary imaginary character.

Similarly, consider the tale of the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The Gryphon is an actual mythical creature, with a pedigree dating back to the ancient Greeks.

In contrast, his companion the Mock Turtle isn’t a real mythical creature at all. Carroll simply borrowed the words from mock turtle soup. So you could say that the Mock Turtle is a mythical mythical creature.

Speaking of exotic creatures, at some point scientists came to believe that the Brontosaurus had never really existed. According to prevalent scientific opinion, the mighty thunder lizard was just a variant of Apatosaurus.

Fortunately in the last few years the prevailing scientific consensus has evolved. The extinction of genus Brontosaurus is now extinct. The Brontosaurus, I am happy to report, is no longer an extinct extinct dinosaur.