Ken’s Blog

I finally got around to seeing Movie 43, the puerile and unsettling sketch format comedy that opened last year to nearly universal hatred and condemnation (it scored 4% on Rotten Tomatoes, out of a possible 100%).

One thing that makes this unique film intriguing is its cast, which includes Anna Faris, Bobby Cannavale, Chloë Grace Moretz, Dennis Quaid, Elizabeth Banks, Emma Stone, Greg Kinnear, Halle Berry, Hugh Jackman, Justin Long, Kate Bosworth, Kate Winslet, Kieran Culkin, Kristen Bell, Liev Schreiber, Naomi Watts, Richard Gere, Seann William Scott, Seth MacFarlane, Stephen Merchant and Uma Thurman, among others.

I found the movie to be deeply offensive, highly disturbing, and completely wonderful. On the surface it seems to be a study in tastelessness, pure and simple. But if you scratch that surface, it’s not simple at all.

The movie has as its real target our American concept of ourselves as a culture of freedom and personal empowerment. In nearly every sketch, the spotlight is turned to the lie behind that presumption. We are actually — like most cultures — highly constrained by rigidly defined social conventions.

Yet unlike, say, the British, in America we like to pretend that we do not have a culture of envy, of obsessive one-upmanship, of petty acquisitiveness, of defining ourselves against a rigorously defined norm. In short, we are hypocrites.

This film punctures those hypocrisies one at a time, with a knife that is simultaneously blunt and deadly sharp. Given the ugly and weirdly self-righteous “burn the witch” mania I witnessed in the last week or so against Brian Williams, it’s refreshing to see a movie pointing out what should be obvious: We are all liars, and we are all fools. Our culture demands it — no, requires it.

How could such a film not be universally hated?

Happy Valentine’s Day. 🙂

Today I’ve been happily designing creatures for an alternate universe, to be experienced by people in shared virtual reality. This world is populated by mysterious mechanical creatures — possibly vehicles or robots — that are eerily reminiscent of the exotic denizens of our own world’s Precambrian explosion.

It just seemed to me that it might be a good idea to mash-up the visual tropes of Steampunk and the Precambrian era, both of which speak to our collective fascination with time and alternate worlds.

Below is a screen capture of an animated creature I made today. I call her Diana.

My friend Ken Birdwell at Valve Software told me the other day about the results of an experiment in which they mapped their VR system to the Valve offices. In VR, you could be in the same room you were actually in.

Which seems kind of pointless until you add the power-ups. For example, they added a zooming feature. Using this, you could zoom out, and the entire building would shrink around you. Then you could zoom into some other part of the building. This was also the basic mode of travel in our Pad zoomable user interface, a paradigm which has in recent years been borrowed by certain on-line maps.

Ken told me that he thought this was a neat effect, but that he didn’t give it much thought until sometime after he had emerged from the VR experience. He was sitting across the table from a colleague later that day, and they were discussing something that was happening elsewhere in the building.

Ken says that without really thinking about it, he tried to zoom out, so he could then zoom into the place they were talking about. When this did not work, his very first thought was “Oh no, the room is broken”.

When I do a search on Google for, say, a painting of a girl with a book (search words: painting girl book), I get a lot of duplicates.

By “duplicates” I don’t mean the same photo, but rather different photos of the same painting.

Why is there no search mode that shows one representative photo of each unique subject? After all, people are rarely searching for a particular photograph of something. They are much more likely to be looking for a particular thing, rather than a particular image of that thing.

I don’t think this would be very difficult to implement. For many items, including paintings, answering the question “Do these two images represent the same thing?” seems well within today’s technology. It’s a task that, for example, David Lowe’s SIFT transform could easily handle.

In response to yesterday’s post, J. Peterson raised the interesting question of whether we will all start to travel to other places via Virtual Reality, rather than with our physical bodies.

Speaking as somebody who just flew back from the West Coast (and had my flight unexpectedly delayed till the next day due to weather), I can certainly sympathize with anyone who would like to figure out how to avoid air travel.

As it happens, on my flight out to Seattle I was sitting next to someone who had never tried VR. So I took out my GearVR and gave her a brief virtual tour of Venice. Sitting there in her airplane seat, she started looking all around as she traveled on a virtual gondola, at the beautiful buildings, the Piazza San Marco, the Grand Canal, and all the other wondrous sites of old Venezia.

It was kind of funny when you think about it: I was watching someone go on a virtual journey in the middle of a real one.

We then got into a discussion about whether VR will lead to more physical travel or less. I argued that it will lead to more travel, based on the following observation: If you think back to the 1960s, before our modern information revolution, there was significantly less air travel (per capita) than there is now. Travel on an jet plane was sort of a special thing.

Now it is part of everyday life for millions of people. I think the argument can be made that this change was at least partly caused by the information revolution. People are now much more connected to each other across great distances, and know far more about other places, and so we all have much greater reason to travel.

The government of the People’s Republic of China recently cracked down on the various internet back-channels that people had been using to get around governmental blocking of many web sites. Until quite recently, the government had looked the other way as people went about their business — sharing Google docs, watching Western TV shows, participating in chat rooms around the world.

But no longer, it seems. If your business in China had been depending on access to a shared Google doc, you may just be out of luck. Fortunately, this black-out only affects your on-line existence.

But in the hypothetical VR future we’ve been discussing, everything is on-line. Looking out at the world through your own eyes will require accessing the Cloud. Of course you are going to get a huge power-up from this access, and young people born into a world that gives such power to individuals will be unable to imagine having it any other way.

But it will also mean that a government that is trying to protect us from ourselves can simply make some things invisible. Even people can become invisible. If your actions or opinions make you too inconvenient, you might simply be “disappeared” — quite literally, nobody will be able to see you.

Entire buildings could similarly be disappeared from view.

Of course being invisible could also be a form of power. The government operative who wishes to pass by unnoticed can simply choose to go “off the grid”. That individual will be able to enter a room with perfect stealth — nobody will be aware of his or her presence.

Again, I’m not saying that these things will happen. I’m just saying that eventually they will become technologically feasible, which means we should probably be thinking about these issues now, rather than waiting until they are already upon us.

Continuing from yesterday … there are so many ways that things can go wrong if we all eventually move to a virtual world.

I am defining a “virtual world” as one in which everything we see (and, most likely, hear) is filtered through some electronic intermediary. This would be the case, for example, if everyone gets artificial retinal implants (I give that about thirty to forty years).

One consequence of this will be that it will become possible for someone tapping into the “cloud” to know not only what you are looking at, but your eye movements — even those subtle saccades your eyes make when something catches your attention or interest. With that sort of high quality data, it won’t be too hard to figure out an awful lot about what you might be thinking.

As I said yesterday, the fact that this will be possible doesn’t mean that it will happen. As we start to approach this level of technology, there will be societal forces pushing back, for many reasons. The possibility of total information is not the same as the fact of total information. Still, it’s something to keep in mind.

More tomorrow.

Yesterday Zoltan asked, sensibly enough, what are the potential dangers of virtual reality. This is a topic I’ve thought about a lot, but one that is difficult to discuss properly, because it is far too easy to sound alarmist.

After all, the possibility that something might happen is very different from the probability that it will happen. We see this in other spheres as well.

For example, in the U.S. a lot of people drive cars, and every one of those cars has the potential to become a lethal weapon. Yet only a small percentage of people end up around running anyone over.

What’s the connection? Well, imagine if we lived in a world where cars had not been invented. Then somebody says, “Imagine a future in which anybody could own a machine that they could easily use to kill other people.”

In a world where cars didn’t exist, such a possibility — presented as a hypothetical — might seem terrifying, since the distinction between “could kill other people” and “will kill other people” might not be so clear. Therefore the act of handing so much power for destruction to so many individuals could seem like an act of insanity.

So before I start talking about the potential dangers of virtual reality, I think I should make it clear that I don’t think all of these terrible things are actually going to happen. As new technologies emerge, societies have a tendency to readjust their customs and laws accordingly, and things don’t usually end up going completely to hell.

I saw the Valve VR demo again today, about seven months after I first tried it.

I had been worried that the experience would not hold up to my memory, that maybe I had talked myself into thinking it was better than it actually was.

Fortunately, that is not at all what happened. It not only held up, but it made me realize what the Valve VR demo achieves, which I have not seen yet in any other version of VR:

You don’t think that you are in virtual reality. You look around and things are just there, you reach for an object to pick it up, and it is exactly where you think it will be. Your sense of proprioception and your peripheral vision never fail you.

In other words — and unlike any VR demo I have yet seen — you are simply in reality, as rock solid as you would expect reality to be.

It just doesn’t necessarily need to be this reality.

When I do a project I often first create a character. I don’t exactly know what this character will look like, how he or she will think, or do, or believe, but once the character exists, all of those things become evident.

It’s as though I need a new pair of eyes to look through, and once I am seeing things through those eyes, I can see what they see.

I wonder how wide-spread is this way of working. Do many storytellers, songwriters, playwrights, animators, novelists, try first to find their characters, and then let everything flow out from those new identities?

For me it seems so much easier to work this way. There are so many important questions, insights, ways of seeing, that to me would be completely mysterious. But to the character I’ve created — once he or she has been found — everything is clear.