Ken's Blog

The Architecture Machine Group at MIT, which evolved in 1985 into the MIT Media Lab, was very concerned with issues of “virtual presence”. How can we use technology to help us feel that we are in the same place, even when we are not?

Soon, with the help of future reality technologies, we will be able to do the opposite. You will be able to walk through a crowded physical space, and if you like, perceive only those people who are nearest to you (the ones that you would physically bump into if you weren’t able to see each other).

In such an experience, people will by default seem to materialize only when they are nearby. Yet if there is one particular person in the large crowd that you are trying to find, that person can be made visible to you even when they are far away.

It can go the other way as well. People can choose to “go stealth”, and become invisible to anyone other than their nearest physical neighbors. Many permutations are possible.

In time, we might come to regard “virtual absence” as something so normal, that we will forget it was ever any other way.

Today I participated in a round-table discussion that touched on the culture of on-line virtual communities. At some point, one of the participants pointed out that in Second Life people have been known to maintain a rich parallel existence.

For example, she said, couples have gotten married in Second Life, and have even used that on-line virtual world to conduct illicit affairs. I found these two concepts both intriguing and puzzling, when considered together.

“If you marry someone in Second Life,” I asked her, “Does it still count as cheating if you only cheat on them in real life?”

When you ask most people what “stereoscopy” means, and you get any answer at all, they usually say something like showing a different image to your left eye and your right eye. But that’s not what it actually means.

When you break it down, “stereo” is from a Greek word for “solid”, and “scopy” is from a Greek word for “to see” or “to look”. So it’s not really about two eyes at all, but rather the idea of seeing solid things.

This explains why one of the more popular and original 3D printing technologies is called “stereolithography”. It’s a word that literally means “solid printing”, which is exactly what 3D printing is.

This distinction may seem subtle, but I think it is one that is going to become more and more important. A stereo movie is a particularly deficient form of “solid seeing”, because it pretty much forces you to keep your head in one place. Moving your head from side to side actually starts to destroy the illusion that you are seeing something solid.

But as we get closer and closer to future reality, synthetic objects will appear in consistent location even as we walk around in the world. When that becomes commonplace, the word “stereoscopy” may no longer be misunderstood. Rather, people will come to understand that it is not really about seeing things with two eyes, but rather seeing the synthetic visions we create as something solid, and accepting them as part of the world we share.

Only after getting to the airport today was I informed that my flight was canceled. Fortunately they were able to put me on a flight departing two hours later.

Which means I am writing this from within an unexpected bubble of time, hanging out in a mostly empty airport waiting area, just me and my laptop computer, a few scattered fellow travelers, and a large television on one wall set to CNN.

One you learn how to ignore the TV, it’s actually quite pleasant here. Everyone is having their own quiet time, although it is “quiet” here only in the metaphorical sense.

But I am counting my blessings. Bubbles of uninterrupted time can be hard to find. So when they unexpectedly come my way, I am grateful.

By the way, I have never met anybody who didn’t find the airplane waiting area TV set annoying. Does anyone actually like it? And if not, why is it there?

It is a haiku
And yet more than a haiku
It is a blog post

When people end up widely adopting self-driving cars, it is possible that cars will become anonymous. Rather than being objects of status and privilege, automobiles might evolve into a more granular version of buses. When you need a car, one will show up, but it won’t matter which car, any more than you currently care (in most cases) which car you are getting into when you take a taxi or Uber.

When the iPad first came out, I thought that would be the best way to think about it. Rather than being singular objects of status conscious owners, interactive tablets would be arguably be more useful if they were completely anonymous.

In this scenario, when you pick up any iPad, its camera looks at your face, retrieves your data from the Cloud, and then becomes, as long as you are holding it, “your” iPad. And this would happen for any digital tablet you pick up, for just as long as you are using it.

If you think of the growing data Cloud itself as the more “real” part of our shared digital ecosystem, then this makes perfect sense. After all, when you look out of any window in your house, you are looking into the same world outside. Reality itself doesn’t change based on which window you look out of.

But this way of looking at things goes against Apple’s revenue model, which is based on selling their hardware as a highly marked up object of status and privilege. Yet there is nothing that inherently dictates such a relationship between user and machine. One day the market might drive both the car and the digital tablet in the same practical direction: to become an interchangeable window into our shared digitally enhanced world, freely interchangeable with any other such window.

It is said that those
Whom the Gods wish to destroy
They first give budgets

Our little research group is in production. We are working on a forthcoming future reality performance in which we plan to combine a futuristic computer-generated soundscape, interpretive dance, and an immersive virtual reality world.

Today we received a visit from a colleague of one of our collaborators who works in a very different medium — Tibetan singing bowls. Rather than rely in the latest of computer-mediated technology, her art makes use of beautiful hand-blown glass bowls that produce deep and powerfully resonant tones as she rubs a special mallet around their rim.

As I listened to our visitor play these instruments, my analytic left brain was telling me “Oh, that’s just [blah blah, fill in boring physics explanation here].” But my intuitive right brain became filled with a growing sense of awe and wonder. As you feel these sounds all through your body, you cannot help but be profoundly moved.

We are looking at ways to combine the singing bowls with our forthcoming high-tech performance. Our hope is to merge and dissolve between the ancient Tibetan tones and the new sorts of sounds that we can generate via computer to be experienced in a virtual space.

I am not sure how it will all turn out, but at this point I feel very inspired.

it all seems like fun
and games, until somebody
loses a country

After an intense and wonderful day “prototyping the future” with my collaborators, I am left with an interesting question: Am I collaborating with these people because I want to develop new ideas for the future, or do I want to develop new ideas for the future because it lets me collaborate with these people?

Of course these two questions cannot be totally disentangled from each other. We are inspired by our collaborators, and that inspiration leads to new discoveries. In a sense we are parents, bringing forth our children into the world. Except that those children are wondrous new ideas.

Fortunately I do not need to answer this question. I am in a beautiful professional relationship with brilliant and exciting people, and together we will have many children. What more could one ever ask for?