Author: admin

Today we got the first ever close-up images of Pluto, as New Horizons began its fly by. But tomorrow will be the real show, when the spacecraft passes within 7,750 miles of the little planet, and will be able to take gorgeous high resolution photos.

I know that technically I’m supposed to say “dwarf planet”, but old habits die hard. I grew up with Pluto, so for most of my life it has been not only a full-fledged planet, but the planet of mystery — the last outpost of our solar system, the final major local way point Captain Kirk would have passed before heading toward the universe beyond.

Coincidentally, I just finally got around to seeing Mad Men, season 7 episode 7, which takes place on July 20, 1969, the day of the Moon Landing. Needless to say, the episode conveyed the thrill that people everywhere shared as the events of that day unfolded. The Moon wasn’t a planet either, but it was still a very big deal.

I am glad to see so many people transfixed by the images streaming back from New Horizons. Among people I know there is a genuine sense of excitement and wonder. This is indeed something historic, our first close-up look at the mysterious planet Pluto since it was first discovered in 1930.

And I am so glad they didn’t call it Goofy.

I think it would be hard for Hollywood to green light a straight-ahead movie about an optimistic future. In some alternate universe, where our culture still embraced optimism, Tomorrowland might have been that movie.

But Tomorrowland turned out to be a film that stayed on message for our more cynical times: That dreams of a better world are hopeless at best, destructive at worst. The best we can do is to reject silly naive optimism and accept that the world is a grim and unforgiving place, before our own misplaced utopianism manages to get us all killed.

So where do you go when a better and kinder tomorrow cannot be found anywhere in the world? That’s easy: You go inward. The mind itself is our last refuge, the one place where the incessant self-interested come-ons of our modern media machine cannot completely reach.

Which leads us to Inside Out. When society itself feels under siege, bereft of love and connection, there is still one society that can never really be torn apart, where you know you will always be loved: Your own self, a place that Marvin Minsky termed “The Sociey of Mind.”

Back in 1972, Woody Allen spun David Reuben’s book Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask into a fabulous parody that perfectly capture the zeitgeist of its time.

In one of the many skits that comprise that film, he pretty much invented the genre of “Aspects of the psyche represented as divergent characters looking out of a control room at reality.” But he meant the entire concept to be absurd.

Inside Out, in contrast, is not meant to be absurd — it’s meant to be received as a comedy, but a comedy based on a serious truth. And unlike anything Woody Allen would have produced in 1972, it most definitely wants to tug at our heart strings.

The film is saying that yes, we humans have great difficulty communicating with each other, let alone helping each other to a better tomorrow, but hey, that’s not really our fault. People are complicated, and it’s hard enough to focus on what’s going on inside our own heads. I think that might be a message for our times.

Back in 1960 John F. Kennedy talked about “The New Frontier.” He meant (to quote his words) “the uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.”

Those days seem long gone. Now we may have a Newer Frontier — the frontier of simply getting through the day, while trying, amid the cacophony of our iPhones and tweets and hashtags and posts and likes and texts and snapchats and whatnot, to find some meaning inside our own heads.

If you were born, say, in 1974, it would be logical for you to believe that our culture had always been suffused with cynicism. But to be a child in the 1960s was to be bathed in an aura of hope, and a sense — never again to be repeated in the ensuing half century — that technological progress and the creation of a better, kinder world were mutually compatible ideals.

Children in 1964 looked at the many flags of the United Nations and saw a promise of peace and unity. To that generation of young minds, the futuristic architecture in post-war comic books came to symbolize an ideal of universal well being and friendship among nations.

Strange as such a thought might seem in today’s world, the fantasy utopia suggested by the gleaming cityscapes of Jor-El’s planet Krypton were understood by children to be aspirational — a shorthand for our own inevitable march of progress.

Tomorrowland begins by dangling this iconography of a better tomorrow, hinting that the ideal the world had so long ago given up on might somehow still exist. Bird may be revising his own childhood memories here. He is just old enough, having been born in 1957, to have experienced first-hand the sense of optimism that had suffused the 1964 World’s Fair. Perhaps he was originally motivated to explore that vision.

But much of the audience for a major commercial Hollywood film in 2015 would never have experienced that sense of shared optimism. Most moviegoers today grew up in the shadow of Watergate, of our bombing of Cambodia, of tales of the peace movement having turned bitter and violent, of the cynicism that descended as our nation started turning inward to nurse its wounds.

I think the key phrase here is “turning inward”. More tomorrow.

Half a century ago, around the time of the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, where much of the action of Tomorrowland takes place, people in the U.S. really believed in the future. Our involvement in Vietnam had not yet escalated, Watergate was still years away, and Kennedy’s dictum to ‘Ask what you can do for your country’ was received not as jingoism, but rather as an invitation to pitch in and help.

Back then America had an unambiguous sense of itself as ‘the good guys’. Still flushed with the success of having helped to win World War II, and bathing in the domestic economic boom that followed, the U.S. felt that its place in the world was exemplified by the Marshall Plan.

Started during the Truman administration, the Marshall Plan provided low interest loans to European nations to help rebuild their economies after the war, while allowing each country to determine, for itself, how it would spend the money. Note how different this model was from the idea of a superpower imposing its political will on smaller client nations.

I think that this view by the U.S. of its place in the world set a high standard that seeped into other spheres. For example, Kennedy’s formation of the Peace Corps seemed like a logical extension of the same philosophy: We are not here to conquer the world, but to help the world. And I sincerely believe that this attitude of the time, that we are supposed to be kind to others helped give traction to the civil rights movement.

Of course the reality was far from the ideal. There was tremendous pushback against civil rights, the push for equal rights for women was still nascent, and by today’s standards the nation was rife with prejudice and intolerance.

But the will toward being a force for good was there, unsullied by cynical disillusionment, and that created a strong wind for change.

What does all this have to do with Tomorrowland?

We will get to that, appropriately enough, tomorrow.

Seeing Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland brought me back to an earlier, simpler time. But then it yanked me out of that time so hard that my mind nearly dislocated its shoulder.

Seeing TL brought into focus for me how fundamentally the psyche of our culture has shifted through the decades. This point was brought home again when I saw another film from one of Brad Bird’s colleagues.

On the surface, Pete Docter’s Inside Out couldn’t be more different from Tomorrowland. IO is animated, TL is live action. IO takes place in somebody’s head, whereas TL takes place — well, I’m not sure exactly where it takes place.

But I think they both speak to the same cultural trends, though in very different ways.

More tomorrow.

I just spent much of the day hanging out with a number of my personal heroes, people like Tom Furness, Jaron Lanier, Ken Salisbury, Mark Bolas, Andy van Dam, Henry Fuchs and Steve Feiner.

The names wouldn’t mean anything to you unless you have worked in VR for many years, but to me it’s kind of like getting to hang with Einstein.

I cannot help but notice that there are no women in this august company. I think it has a lot to do with the sociology of high technology through the decades.

I wonder, when somebody writes of a similar experience thirty years from now, what are the chances that Einstein will be a gal?

The Northwest is nice.
There’s a large ocean nearby
But on the wrong side.

(with apologies to T.S.E.)

We are the Holomen
We are the Rift men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Oh let’s meet over Google Glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to math’s other Kingdom
Remember us – if at all – not as lost
Virtual souls, but only
As the Holomen
The Rift men.

Today I was having a conversation with a student about the future uses of VR and related media. I felt a sort of intellectual tension in the discussion, as though we were talking about two separate topics.

Eventually I located the source of this tension. I was talking about the use of VR to understand the evolution of every day reality, and the student was more interested in the use of VR as a medium in and of itself, as part of the evolution of artistic expression. Of course we were both interested in both of those things. It was more a matter of emphasis.

By analogy: Thomas Edison may have been primarily motivated to see people moving on film because he wanted to capture ordinary life as it happened. Yet the brothers Lumière were primarily motivated to use cinema to advance the art of narrative story telling.

It’s not either/or — it’s a question of emphasis. The choices you make in building a medium are heavily influenced by the purposes that drive you. The good thing is that even when we don’t all have exactly the same vision or goal in mind, we can still contribute to and build on each others’ efforts.

This evening, under a beautiful New York summer sky, I took a walk with a friend along the Hudson river, starting from West Houston and proceeding down from there. When we got to Battery Park we stopped a while, just to sit and soak in the beautiful sight of Lady Liberty across the water.

I started thinking that if a friend happened to be standing under the Statue of Liberty, they would appear much too small to see clearly. But one day in the future, when people possess cyber-enhanced eye implants, they will be able to see that friend just by looking. Then they could zoom in to get a better look, and proceed to have a face to face conversation.

This may all sound like crazy science fiction. Yet two hundred years ago the “super power” of being able to talk to another person at a distance would have seemed just as crazy. Now we don’t even stop to think how amazing it is that we can casually chat with somebody thousands of miles away.

Which is why I am interested not in how amazing such experiences will be, but in how ordinary. Once every child grows up in a world where she can zoom in and have a face to face discussion with somebody who is clear across a room, or a stadium, or a river, the whole notion of personal space will shift.

After it becomes possible to have intermediate states between “in person” and “on the phone”, social norms will adjust accordingly. It’s hard to know what such an enhanced everyday reality will feel like. But with properly designed empirical research, perhaps using shared VR to simulate the experience, we just might get a glimpse.