Month: December 2023

If you create a system that allows two people who are in different geographic locations to feel as though they’re in the same location, everybody is very impressed. “Wow,” they say, “you’ve given us the Jedi Council.”

But if you create a system that tells people that if they put on some special eyewear they will have an enhanced face-to-face conversation, the bar is much higher. They might well ask “Why do I need to put on some stupid headset when my buddy is right here three feet away from me?”

It’s a very good question, and it deserves a very good answer. I think the challenge of successful co-located XR will essentially come down to providing very good answers to that question.

Tonight, after all this time, I finally saw The Lion King on Broadway.

And I finally understand what all the fuss has been about.

Today I enrolled in a virtual exercise program. It was an app that I could download onto my VR headset.

When I started it up, I found myself in a very pleasant environment, and a very fit looking instructor appeared before me and started guiding me through physical exercises. After each exercise the instructor would tell me what a great job I was doing.

Except I wasn’t doing the exercises. I was just standing there taking the whole thing in.

So the illusion of presence was broken right from the start, because it immediately became obvious that the instructor was just a recording. Which isn’t necessarily a show stopper, but it is radically different from exercise with a real instructor.

I found myself wondering whether it would have been better, perhaps through the use of some advanced AI technology, if the virtual instructor had actually realized that I wasn’t doing the exercises and had responded appropriately. And I thought maybe not — maybe that would have just been creepy.

Sometimes it can be better when technology doesn’t try to do too much. 🙂

This evening I attended a reading of a new play. The arrangement was interesting in that we sat around in a big circle.

The performers sat at one end, and the audience rounded out the circle. Using only words and the power of their voices, the readers created an entire world for us, a world of imagination.

I could not help but think, as I pondered the empty space in the middle of the circle, how wonderful it would be if we were to use some sort of augmented reality to fill in that imaginary world. My mind began conjuring up fantastic visions that would not have been possible in traditional theater.

I cannot say whether that would be better than the experience of the reading that I attended this evening. It would certainly be different, and not too long from now it will become practical.

In Christmas seasons you cannot escape Christmas songs. So I decided to learn more about why we have them everywhere.

It turns out that the culprit is White Christmas by Irving Berlin, first introduced in 1941, a few weeks after the U.S. had entered World War II. It was a massive hit with people nervous about the war, and was also embraced by the troops overseas.

There had been Christmas songs before. But after the release of White Christmas, the theme of home and nostalgia suddenly became far more central to the holiday, and nostalgic Christmas songs quickly took over the market. And that’s the world we live in now.

It reminds me of what happened after the iPhone was released in July 2007. Before that, people didn’t even think about smartphones. Now, everybody you know has one.

I wonder how many other similar events there have been: Somebody introduces a new product, and it quickly creates a market didn’t exist before, a market which then dominates the culture.

There are mechanical things like engines and vacuum cleaners, and there are electronic things like TV sets and smartphones. And then there are the cross-over things which used to be purely mechanical but are becoming ever more digital, like clocks and ovens.

One thing that is interesting about the digital things is that behind everything digital there is running code. The behavior of these things (or at least aspects of these things) is not determined by gears and motors and pumps and valves, but rather by a program that somebody wrote.

We tend to think of the code that runs a refrigerator or an oven or a dimmable lighting fixture as hidden. We know it’s there, but we assume we cannot access it.

As extended reality starts to become a ubiquitous part of our lives, that may change. We may be able to “open up” an appliance virtually and change its behavior. A screen will pop up in the air, we will make changes to what we see on that screen, and the physical object in our home will then behave differently.

That all probably sounds very nerdy and a little scary. But the reality is that what is on those virtual screens will end up being friendly and accessible, because that will be part of how the people who sell those items will get you to buy them.

If you really want to dive deeper into the behavior of an appliance, there will be an option for that. Just like today you can pop open the trunk of your car and access all the components in there — but only if you want to.

Heisenberg was born today
In nineteen hundred one
And ever since, our Universe
Has been a lot more fun
What we thought was certainty
Turned out to be uncertain
As though a giant hand had come
And pulled aside a curtain
Revealing a much deeper world
Where everything’s in doubt
And much of what we thought we knew
Was all turned inside out
Heisenberg was born today
And everything’s now fuzzy
All ’cause Werner Heisenberg
Was born today — or was he?

In 1493, to make sure that Spain could lay claim to any lands discovered by Christopher Columbus, Pope Alexander VI issued the “Doctrine of Discovery.” It stated that any non-Christian land “discovered” by Christians belonged to the country of origin of the discoverer.

In the view of that doctrine, any non-Christians already living there were not really human. Therefore they didn’t have rights to own the land — any more than indigenous wolves or deer had such rights.

In 1823 the U.S. Supreme Court, in a decision written by Chief Justice John Marshall, used the Doctrine of Discovery as the legal basis of an important decision. It ruled that Native Americans have no right to own the land they were already on before the Christians came over from Europe and took over. They did indeed have the right to live there, but habitation does not imply ownership.

In 1988 the U.S. Supreme Court, in a decision written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, essentially affirmed this precedent. The court ruled that the U.S. Government has an absolute right of ownership of Federal Land. Native Americans are allowed to live on Federal Land, but they cannot contest any decision the U.S. Government makes about what to do with that land, no matter how much hardship that decision causes to the land’s Native American inhabitants.

This is an important and little talked about part of the legacy of the recently deceased Supreme Court Justice. Effectively, she affirmed that the 1493 decree of Pope Alexander VI is enshrined in United States Law.

In short: We Christians came over and took your land and now it’s ours. And you can’t have it back, ever. Why? Because this is a Christian nation — circulus in probando.

I have been reading the various articles that are discussing the life and work of the recently deceased supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Each article attempts to assess her judicial significance.

Curiously, nobody seems to have mentioned the one ruling of hers which perhaps had the most far-reaching impact, in terms of what it says about the very nature of our society.

I still need time to organize my thoughts about this, so more tomorrow.

Sometimes it feels as though software development is a process of enfolding. You start out with a fairly simple system, and then you think “Hey, what if I try to add this cool feature?”

So you build a demo of that feature using your system. But after you get it working, you realize that you want that capability to work everywhere within your system.

So you move it inward. Instead of a demo, it becomes a core capability, implemented in one of your system’s internal libraries.

What’s nice about this transition is that once something has become enfolded — made the transition from demo to core capability — it is then able to work together with all of your system’s other core capabilities. And that’s a lot more fun for everybody.