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The student innovation contest today at the UIST conference included many ingenious submissions. There were discerning desk drawers, dancing dracaena, disco dishwashers and many other diverse delights.

But my experience of the event was perhaps a little skewed by the fact that none of the snacks provided by the conference were anything I — or any of the other vegans present — would eat. So I ended up gravitating toward two projects in particular.

One of those projects was a modified toaster that could print custom patterns on a slice of bread, under computer control. The device could spell out messages, create images of cartoon characters, or print pretty much anything else you’d like to see on your breakfast toast.

The best part was that the students provided a handy jar of peanut butter. After you were done printing your custom slice of toast, you could spread peanut butter on it and walk away with a yummy snack. It was quite delicious.

The next project I visited used the kind of xyz stage you’d normally see in a 3D printer, repurposed to act as a jelly printer. Navigating as though playing a video game, you could steer a jelly-depositing “print head” over a slice of toast, painting on a pattern of your choice.

When you were all done with your jelly covered masterpiece, you could take the slice with you. I can happily report that it was very yummy. Between that and the previous demo, I ended up being happily fed.

Now if only those two groups of students could join forces, I’m sure they would take over the world.

Mark Bolas gave a brilliant and very provocative opening keynote today at the UIST 2014 conference. He posited that we may all end up in virtual reality in the long run, because, as the technology advances, VR will eventually subsume the capabilities of literal reality, and will eventually allow us to move far beyond it.

Obviously this is a high controversial statement. People who have spent their entire lives in relatively unmediated physical reality might be understandably unnerved by the prospect of such a radical shift in the perceptual paradigm. I’m pretty sure he was saying it precisely to be provocative — to get people talking and debating about the many issues surrounding such a possible future.

Mark is certainly qualified to fling down that particular gauntlet. Over the last several decades he has done far more than anyone else to advance the field of virtual reality, and he doesn’t seem to be slowing down.

Yet even if we posit, for the sake of argument, that his prediction is correct, there remains an interesting question: As we start to shift the apparent reality around us, freed from the constraints of the real world, what other constraints will still remain, imposed by our own brains?

There are many sorts of things that seem baked in to our otherwise highly protean human brain. For example, it is well established now that our brains have built in rules that constrain the possible grammars of natural languages.

It is also well known that human babies, quite soon after birth, will seek out two dots that are side by side, but will ignore two dots one above the other. This suggests an innate instinct to seek out a mother’s eyes.

How many other such constraints are built into our human brains? These constraints, whatever they may be, will create hard limits around the reality we may collectively experience in any shared future — even one that reality is entirely virtual.

The Spatial User Interaction workshop I am attending this weekend features many exciting new approaches to how people can interact with computers. Yet I’ve noticed an odd thing about some of these approaches.

They are cool, they are exciting, they are certainly thought provoking, but in some cases they just don’t work very well. Recognition of a user’s gestures is often error prone, or subject to noise, or ambiguous, or just too coarse for allow fine distinctions.

I’m beginning to think that there is some law of conservation at work here: The more radical is an idea for how people can interact with information, maybe the less likely that it will be truly useful.

I’m not saying that’s always the case, just that I see a pattern.

One example of this, which has become a bit of a joke among people in the user interfaces community, was the way the character played by Tom Cruise in the Stephen Spielberg film Minority Report held his arms up to direct things on the computer screen in front of him. The underlying ideas, which largely came from John Underkoffler, were indeed exciting.

Yet the way those ideas showed up in Spielberg’s direction, they didn’t really work on any practical level. What mere mortal could really hold their arms straight out in front of them for entire minutes at a time?

On the other hand, it looked very cool. 🙂

This morning I gave a keynote talk at the Spatial User Interaction workshop, in which I presented a kind of vision of the future. In the Q&A after the talk, people asked some really great and challenging questions.

In my answers to those questions, I realized that I kept returning to the same point: The most amazing thing about humans is our built in ability to communicate through natural language. Everything we do, build, create, comes out of that shared ability.

We so take it for granted that this superpower is “normal”, that we generally forget how astonishing it is.

To a sentient being that did not possess the ability to casually communicate their thoughts to each other, what we do every day, without even thinking about it, would seem like pure magic.

Consider not just our computer software, or our movies, books and plays, but the very clothing we wear and the buildings we inhabit, our bridges, roads, eyeglasses and coffee makers. These, and everything else we create, are basically outgrowths of our shared language instinct. Without it, none of these things would exist.

The fact that you are reading this right now and are immediately forming your own thoughts, theories and counter-theories in response, really is a marvel beyond compare.

Just didn’t want you to forget that. 🙂

Do not trust airplanes
One of those things took away
Someone dear to me

A stranger returned
Same of face, same of body
But not my true love

That last farewell kiss
Is as fresh now in my heart
As a new red rose

With a taste so sweet
And promise of a future
That was not to be

Do not trust airplanes
No, do not trust them. When they
Take your love away

The fire of a kiss,
Once so tender, leaves nothing
But a taste of ash

I’m going to be giving a presentation this Saturday. Much of it will be new, although I’ll be using elements from talks and demos I’ve given before.

I remain somewhat nonplussed by the mysterious alchemy that goes into preparing for one of these talks. On the one hand, the weeks leading up to it seem so busy, in an almost random way. I might spend hours — even days — on experiments that I end up throwing out, but then something that took only a few minutes ends up being exactly right.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I believe, part of me knows exactly what will happen, how the actual talk will unfold, where all the beats will land. But that part of me isn’t telling the rest of me. Perhaps he doesn’t want to spoil the surprise.

As the days and then hours tick closer to the presentation, I finally start to see where I was going all the time, and only then does it fully make sense.

I used to think I should be fully planning these things out, in advance, that I was somehow being lazy or remiss by letting the pieces fall into place in such an apparently haphazard way.

Now I know better.

When I was a child I came upon the speculative fiction novel “October the First is too late” by the great astrophysicist Fred Hoyle. It’s a strange and stimulating book, about time itself folding like a pretzel and possibly coming to an end, which wreaks havoc on reality — particularly human reality.

For some reason my memory of that book always reminds me of another treatment of time itself in popular fiction that felt as weird and wonderful: The character of Emit Flesti in Wim Wenders’ “Far Away So Close”, a character played so memorably by Willem Defoe.

Of course today is, in fact, October the first. On this day of the year, a part of my mind invariably flashes the thought that Hoyle got it wrong: Time itself has not in fact come to an end, since we have safely made it to October. Feel free to breathe a sigh of relief.

But maybe getting it wrong isn’t the worst of sins. When you think about Defoe’s character, you realize that Wim Wenders didn’t just get it wrong about time Itself. He got it backwards.

I had the good fortune to be invited to attend a retirement celebration this evening for Fran Brill, one of the great Sesame Street muppeteers. The sheer talent in the room was breathtaking. Many of my favorite muppet characters were there — Miss Piggy, Big Bird, Grover, Snuffleupagus and more — all cleverly disguised in their human form.

The evening prominently featured a whirlwind review of her body of work through the decades. There is something marvelous about seeing the result of many years of creativity, artfully conveyed through a single evening’s worth of representative samples.

We are only human, and in any given month or year we can accomplish only so much. But the result of decade after decade of dedicated talent, focus and effort can be astounding.

There are times when I feel that I’m not getting enough done, and I lose heart — but then I see something like this. It reminds me of the power of human energy over time, and I am newly energized.

The takeaway here: Find something you love, just put one foot in front of another, and keep going. In the long run, it’s all going to be wonderful.

At this week’s faculty meeting of our Media and Games Network (MAGNET), we did a recap of the gender related events at last week’s Oculus Connect meeting. And we decided that we need to take a more pro-active stand on the need for men and women to work together toward gender parity in our field.

MAGNET already does a fair bit in this direction. It hosts Girls who Code, Black Girls Code, and other events that help to encourage young women to enter fields that require facility with software engineering.

But now that is going to be an explicit part of our mission — on the masthead, if you will. After all, why should the United States of America be a backwater among the industrial nations, capable of attracting only 50% of its potential workforce to 21st Century jobs?

Interestingly, due to vacations, sabbaticals, conferences, and other events, none of our female MAGNET faculty were in town this week. All of the people pushing for this new direction today were men.

Today I saw a delightful sign outside a restaurant. To emphasize the rustic nature of the establishment, the sign maker had built each individual letter out of hand-whittled wooden sticks.

Clearly a lot of work had gone into the effort, and the result was worth it. Just looking at that sign made some part of me want to abandon my city slicker ways and live off the land, like our ancestors did once upon a time.

But then I looked at the sign again, and I realized that the text on the bottom line was the restaurant’s phone number. At first I hadn’t noticed this little bit of culture shock because we don’t generally think about phone numbers any more.

But there it was, if you cared to look: an iconic symbol of modernity, represented by little pieces of rough-hewn hand-whittled wood.

And I couldn’t help but wondering: Maybe someday soon we will see that same beautifully old-fashioned sign, but with the phone number replaced by a URL — lovingly carved in rustic little hand-whittled wooden letters.

Or maybe not a URL — maybe a hashtag.

Or maybe whatever is going to come after the hashtag. Your guess is as good as mine.