Ken's Blog

When I was in LA my cousin told me that in order to discourage gangs, the local government had passed an interesting ordinance: People who were suspected of being gang members were not permitted to talk with each other in public.

I found the entire concept of this approach to law enforcement to be somewhat mind blowing. I understand the logic behind it — it could very well be an effective means to deter gang activity. Yet it also means that under the right circumstances, simply talking to your friend on the street is a crime.

I told my cousin that one way around this law would be for these individuals to become mimes. They could completely embrace the mime culture — white face paint, gloves, striped shirt with suspenders, maybe a little bowler hat.

I can already picture them, walking abreast, doing their slow motion power walk: Roving gangs of feral mimes.

The streets of Los Angeles would never be the same.

Today is my last day in LA. After a wonderful excursion to the always inspiring Museum of Jurassic Technology, I am spending a last lovely afternoon relaxing in the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles, just hanging with my cousin.

It is hard not to make mental comparisons with where I will be tomorrow — back home in the heart of Manhattan. The two locales are a study in contrasts.

Here, all is peaceful and calm. The sun is out every day, there is always a gentle breeze off the lake, and people walk with that slow unhurried gait of the truly relaxed.

In Manhattan, all is staccato and noise. People rush about, their very bodies seemingly compelled to be anywhere at all but where they happen to be at the moment.

Even the weather in NY is abrupt. If there is a nice summer’s day, you can be sure it will be followed by a raging storm, or a dramatic temperature dip in either direction, as though Somebody up there is flipping a coin.

I love both lifestyles, but I love one of them more. My cousin prefers the other one.

And there you have it. Fortunately, he’s always here in Silverlake, where we can hang out together on a perfect sunlit day and compare notes.

When Captain Kirk first flipped open his communicator in 1966, millions of people felt that they were witnessing a vision of the future. And not merely a fictional future, but one that might some day be possible in our own lives. They were right, but as usual there was much more to the story than just a cool gadget.

This week, while I have been attending the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference, I’ve stayed at my cousin’s house, which is about a fifteen to twenty minute car ride away from the conference site, depending on traffic. It’s a total win, because my cousin and I really enjoy hanging out, and we’ve had great conversations while I’ve been here.

This is the first year I haven’t stayed at some stupid impersonal conference hotel. And it was made possible by Captain Kirk’s communicator — the real life version, together with all the other things that became possible when that communicator entered real life.

Because the real life version of that communicator — the SmartPhone — isn’t just an isolated gadget. It’s connected to map programs, to text messaging, to methods for automated payment, to services such as Lyft. An entire economic ecosystem has grown up around the device that everyone has in their pocket or on the dashboard of their car.

Your driver no longer needs to have expert knowledge of her route. And you can quickly summon that driver from pretty much any location at any time. At the end of your ride, you no longer need to fumble for change.

Before all of these interconnected advances, it would have been completely impractical for me to stay with my cousin during this conference. My colleagues who stayed at an Airbnb this week — which is far less expensive than a hotel room — had a similar experience of freedom.

Over the course of the next decade, as we start to migrate to wearables, the changes to our economic ecosystem will be even more profound and far-reaching. Whatever happens, it probably won’t be good for hotels. But it might be very good for other services that will help us in our daily lives — including some we haven’t even begun to think of.

Listening to what people here at SIGGRAPH are excited about, I have noticed a trend: Younger people are completely caught up in the feeling that “Hey, we are living in the future!” But older people have a view that is, arguably, more interesting.

Researchers in their twenties and thirties are totally grooving and the amazing effects of Moore’s Law. Techniques that were considered hopelessly slow when they were students are now real-time and interactive. The difference feels magical and exhilarating.

But by the time researchers get into their sixties and seventies, they’ve been through quite a few of these magical transformations. They’ve already been doing active research for forty or fifty years. Their longer experience of the past gives them a lever to obtain a longer view of the future.

When faced with today’s blindingly fast computation times, high bandwidth data transmission rates and vast memory storage capacities (and all of the things those enable, such as Cloud computing, fast machine learning algorithms and photorealistic real-time rendering), they don’t think of these capabilities as an end in themselves.

Rather, they tend to ask “OK, what will things be like in another forty or fifty years?” And then they start to follow through with potential models of usage and possible societal implications, based on those projected future capabilities.

So maybe, if you want to get a good sense of the future, you just might want to ask somebody who has had a more comprehensive experience of the past.

The very first technical paper I saw this morning at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference was about a pair of glasses. But not just any glasses — future glasses.

One of the authors of the paper is an old friend and former colleague of mine. I was super excited to see him as one of the contributors to such an important paper.

The key innovation is to replace the usual optics usually employed for Virtual and Augmented Reality by a very cleverly designed holographic optical element — essentially, a custom-made hologram. The end result is something that looks like an ordinary pair of glasses, but with the high visual quality of the best VR headsets.

Sometime in the next few years this technology will be turned into a product. When it does, the impact will be as profound as were the impacts of the Web and the SmartPhone.

It’s great to be where
People really care about
Building the future

This evening at the SIGGRAPH conference I watched the Electronic Theater. That’s the big two hour film show at which the very best of the current year’s computer graphics is shown on a huge screen for an extremely appreciative audience of fellow CG practitioners.

The show was exceptionally good this year, not only on a technical level (it’s always technically excellent), but on the level of great storytelling. It’s a sign of the maturity of our field that the makers of CG films are well beyond focusing merely on the “gee whiz” factor of their medium.

Technical excellence has become a given, but it is now being used more and more in support of truly inventive stories, with compelling characters. Still, it takes an immense amount of effort to produce a high quality computer graphic film.

It is possible that one day, decades from now, the process will have become transformed far beyond the level of today’s production tools. Perhaps some future variety of machine-learning enhanced direct-brain interface will become the preferred means of production.

Maybe a future CG artist will merely need to form a clear mental image of the film she wishes to create. Fully automated neurologically attuned software will do the rest.

Imagine what those future artists would think of the cumbersome methods we currently use to realize our computer animated visions. They may well ask each other “What do you think motivated them to go through all that trouble?”

I wonder if they will understand when somebody tells them the reason: Because that was the easiest way to do it.

Today is the first day of the big annual SIGGRAPH conference, which this year is in LA. Our group has two interactive VR experiences this week, so it’s going to be a busy time (and hopefully fun too).

It always amazes me how these large empty conference spaces become transformed for such events. Below are two photos I took from my phone, one yesterday and one today.

I love how just a little bit of lighting and window dressing can change the entire feel of a space. Yesterday this hall was a construction zone. Today, it’s a wonderland where people experience the latest in VR coolness.

I was talking to a film scholar the other day about old movies. Appropriately enough, we were having this conversation at IndieCollect, where he and his colleagues scan and digitally preserve independent films for posterity. Many of those films are quite a few decades old.

Nowadays most movies are both shot and projected digitally. No more internegatives, flatbeds, chemical baths, no more sprocket holes, second reels or work prints. Most of process of getting from lens to screen is now done in software.

But in earlier days making a movie involved many different physical steps. Each of those steps had to be done properly or you were left with nothing. Capturing a good image onto your negative was an exacting process, and everything was highly dependent on good old fashioned chemistry and physics.

Even after the negative was in the can, there was still plenty of work to do. Pulling a good print from the negative through proper control of color and timing, then the laborious and exacting process of physically cutting your film on a flatbed, each of these steps required hours upon hours of dedicated and exacting physical work.

Contemplating the racks upon racks of old reels of film at IndieCollect, the tangible record of an immense amount of collective labor, my colleague turned to me and asked: “What do you think motivated them to go through all that trouble?”

To me it seemed like an easy question. “Because,” I said, “that was the easiest way to do it.”

Somewhere
In a world beyond time
Past Veronica Lake
Beyond the Isle of Lucy
A mournful squirrel is flying
In silence.