Ken’s Blog

Proof by induction:

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that one day somebody invents a machine that lets people travel back in time. That will be a big day in history — the day that travel back in time finally becomes possible!

Here’s the problem: Precisely because it will be such a big moment in history, sooner or later people from the future are going to want to come back and visit that historic day. In fact, since people will be traveling to the same destination from all different eras in the future, that particular moment in history is going to become awfully crowded.

And not all of those visitors from the future will be as careful as they should be. One of them, inevitably, is going to do something that will interfere with the sequence of events that resulted in the invention of the time machine.

When this happens, the time machine will no longer have been invented on that day. That entire future timeline will cease to exist, curious time traveling tourists and all.

Which means that we will enter an alternate timeline. In this new timeline, travel will only be invented sometime later.

But in this new timeline, the same sequence of events will happen, only at a later date.

And so, alas, QED. Nobody will ever invent that time machine.

We spent nearly an entire year building our Holojam demo for this week’s big SIGGRAPH conference. Yet it wasn’t until after we actually showed it — and got feedback from a large number of people — that I finally understood the significance of what we had built.

By “significance” I don’t mean long-term significance. As researchers, we were thinking about that quite a lot. I’m talking here about immediate significance.

All sorts of people, including effects animators, film directors and scientists, started to tell us things they would now be able to do, after having experienced our shiny new toy.

So here we were, completely focused on how our research could possibly impact things in twenty or thirty years from now, and we somehow missed the fact that it is also very likely to impact things right now.

Isn’t there a saying that sometimes you can’t see the trees for the forest? If not, there really should be.

“Daniel, will you please come back to the table.”

Daniel did his best to ignore the insistent voice of his mother. He was concerned. The caterpillar had not moved for two days. He had done everything right, as far as he could tell. He’d changed her water, put in fresh leaves every day, all the things he was supposed to do, but with no results.

Yet today something seemed to be different. He was pretty sure she had moved, and that was good. He approached the small terrarium and peered inside.

And he could see, clearly, delightfully, that she was awake, and she seemed to be looking right at him. He suddenly felt the urge to say hello.

“Daniel Bradley, will you please come back to the dinner table!” He knew that note in his mother’s voice. He wouldn’t have much time.

“Hey there,” he said softly, looking down at the little creature. “How are you today?”

And as absurd as it was, he could feel a voice in his head, answering his question. “Hello Daniel,” it said, “I’m quite fine, thank you.”

Today I got into a debate with somebody who, like me, knows a lot and cares a lot about movies. The question on the table was: Which is the better written film from 1999: The Matrix or Galaxy Quest?

For me the answer is obvious. From the perspective of writing, Galaxy Quest is a far better film.

But not to the person I was talking to. Not only did he not agree with me, I think he thought I couldn’t be serious to even suggest such a thing.

The entire exchange was so intriguing that I called a good friend afterward to get a second opinion. My friend said “Of course Galaxy Quest is better written than The Matrix. It’s not even close.” So that was one vote in my camp.

On the other hand, The Matrix made vastly more box office than Galaxy Quest. So maybe it comes down to what you mean by “better written”.

Yesterday the LA Convention Center was empty. Nobody was here in the cavernous South Hall but we few hardy souls setting up our demos.

What a difference a day makes. Today the flood gates have been opened, and the juggernaut that is the annual ACM/SIGGRAPH conference has well and truly begun.

SIGGRAPH is by far the largest of the ACM’s many computer science conferences. At its largest, this conference will swell to several tens of thousands of participants.

It’s impossible to see everything here. The sheer number of parallel brilliant things to see is overwhelming in its depth and scope.

Our demo, which will run all day tomorrow at SIGGRAPH’s “VR Village”, has already been written about in various places, such as this on-line article:

http://uploadvr.com/holojam-shows-participants-slice-space-time/

Hopefully we will live up to the hype. 🙂

I’ve been struggling with the terms “Augmented Reality” and “Virtual Reality”. To me they don’t really describe where we might want to go, so much as particular technological approaches for getting there.

Imagine if we always named a novel after the method that was used to print it. The technological means of distribution is an essential component of a novel, but a novel is so much more than a particular printing technology.

That’s why I am leaning, in my own description of our long term research goals, toward the phrase “Future Reality”. I like it because it doesn’t actually contain any hints at all about what techniques we might use to get there. And therefore it doesn’t skew us too much toward one technological path or another.

The empirical experiments that I am mostly interested in are not about answering questions like “How do we make a lighter / lower power / higher resolution headset?”, or “What’s the best form of position tracking?” Those are indeed important questions, but to me they are the questions about printing technology, not about literature.

So our experiments center on putting people into experiences together — using technology that is now expensive, but that will at some point in the future become cheap and widely available — and asking questions about social interaction, play, learning, culture. All those messy but wonderful things that any communication technology is really all about, be it a stone tablet or a smart phone.

Somebody told me today that the SEC is now permitting crowd-fund contributors to receive stock ownership in return for their investments. This is a very different model from the traditional kickstarter campaign.

This sort of highly granular ownership participation opens the door to completely different ways of thinking about the money flow around things like novels, plays, independent films and other art projects. The person who puts down $20 now so that you can write your next book will own a small piece of the profits if your project is a success.

Those microinvestors will be motivated to start talking up the work to their friends, family and colleagues. Creating a buzz to build a successful market will turn into a highly distributed enterprise, greatly aided by modern forms of social media.

If this model of small scale enterprise works out, the long tail may be poised to become a lot more interesting.

The next thing she remembered, she was in a warm and protected place. There was food here, and sunlight.

In the distance shapes were moving, large and strangely colored. Curious, she moved toward them, but soon encountered some sort of invisible barrier. Although the barrier was not detectable at all to her dorsal ocelli, it felt hard and unyielding, and she knew there would be no more movement in this direction.

She was about to turn and explore the rest of the space, when she sensed one of the large shapes moving toward her from the far side of the barrier. She should have been frightened, ready to seek shelter, but some instinct told her that there was no danger from this being.

She felt a sense of massive bulk as it leaned forward, looming over her. And then, to her surprise, a pleasant shiver of recognition, as she sensed some sort of greeting. And it was definitely a friendly greeting. Perhaps this giant creature was one of her own kind?

She emitted a friendly greeting in return.

I was having a great discussion yesterday with a colleague on a wide range of topics, and the subject eventually came around to what motivates people to get things done. Of course the answer to this question is not simple. People are motivated by many things.

Sometimes people are driven by ambition, other times by passion or love of what they are doing.

But the one thing, we agreed, that always get people going, is the fear that something they love will be taken away from them. Maybe it’s their home, or their pride, or their place in their particular tribe. But fear of losing something near and dear can be a more potent motivator than just about anything else.

At that point I had a revelation. “Hillary Clinton was wrong,” I said.

My colleague asked what I meant.

“She once said ‘It takes a village.’ But the real motivation,” I explained, “comes when somebody is just about take away your village. So it would probably be more accurate to say ‘It takes a pillage.’

Think about this: Brilliant thinker/artist works with a large commercial production company. They create something amazing together. But the artist feels compromised by the result, and distances himself from the project.

This has happened so many times that it seems to be a sort of pattern, destined to repeat throughout history. Here are just a few examples of many.

Oskar Fischinger and Fantasia: One of the greatest abstract animators in the history of the medium, Fischinger was invited by Walt Disney to California to work on Fantasia, a project that was an outgrowth of conversations between Fischinger and conductor Leopold Stokowski. While the team at Disney Studios was exposed to Fischinger’s breathtaking visual ideas, and those ideas greatly influenced their thinking, he himself was sorely mistreated by the studio, and in mid-production ended up quitting in frustration and disgust.

The final result — mostly in the opening Toccata and Fugue — is only a pale and highly watered down echo of Fischinger’s full vision. Yet even in its compromised form, the beautiful abstract ideas hinted at in the Toccata and Fugure were powerful enough to convince me to enter the field of computer animation.

Harlan Ellison and Star Trek: The City On the Edge of Forever is widely acclaimed as the best episode of the first series. Yet so many changes were made to Harlan Ellison’s original script that he distanced himself from the production, and in fact wrote a book years later, describing in detail his falling out with Gene Roddenberry and the studio over the episode.

In particular, he objected to the plot twist, added in later rewrites, in which Edith Keeler’s pacifist activism leads to Hitler winning WWII. This was in 1967, and Ellison was highly vocal in his opposition to the war in Vietnam.

Interestingly, it was Ellison’s original screenplay, not the revised version shown on television, that won the coveted Writers Guild of America Award for best dramatic hour-long script that year. So he had the last laugh.

Alan Kay and TRON: Bonnie MacBird did the heavy lifting on the script for the original TRON (with co-creator Steven Lisberger contributing visual ideas and notes). One of the first things she did was interview top computer scientists, and she ended up finding Alan Kay (she named the character of Alan Bradley after him).

Alan was the originator of the concept of the “personal computer”, as well as the leader of the team at Xerox PARC which developed object oriented programming, graphical user interfaces, and many other ground breaking innovations that were eventually, um, “borrowed” by Apple Computer and Microsoft. He also originated the saying “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

Bonnie’s original script had many more ideas that tied the human drama together with ideas from computer science. Her version would have resulted in a much deeper and more thoughtful film. But Steven Lisberger insisted on shifting the focus to visuals and a sort of sci-fi pirate adventure. And after seeing his ideas become watered down, Alan distanced himself from the movie.

Visually, the film is still stunning, and enough of Alan’s ideas remain to make TRON a landmark in the depiction of virtual reality. And that’s not the only happy ending. One year after the movie came out, Bonnie and Alan fell in love and got married. And they’ve been happily married ever since.

How’s that for inventing the future!

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