Ken's Blog

Google Cardboard came with my mom’s New York Times several weeks ago. I happened to be visiting this weekend, so I helped her set it up. Soon she was excitedly looking around virtual worlds.

Of course this is perfectly emblematic. VR is now at the point where your mom might be using it. It’s interesting to trace how we got to this point.

In early 2012 a team at USC led by Mark Bolas created the first versions of what we now know as Google Cardboard. They gave it away for free as a set of do-it-yourself instructions. Total cost of materials: a few bucks.

The following year, Alex Kauffmann and others at Google who were inspired by the work of Mark’s team wanted more people to know about this cool device, so they adapted it, rebranding it as Google Cardboard. I suspect they were motivated to work on something fun and goofy as a kind of counterweight to the hype that at the time was surrounding Google Glass.

Now my mom is experiencing virtual reality. Maybe your mom is too, using hardware so cheap that the New York Times can just give it away. This one give-away might very well be having a larger initial impact on wide-spread adoption of VR than everything else going on in the space put together.

One odd thing is that few people seem to know this history. I’ve been told that a number of executives at Google itself even believe that the technology for Cardboard originated entirely within Google itself!

Hopefully people will eventually read an article about it in the New York Times. Maybe with a nice VR supplement.

Every once in a while you have a really good day. A day when everything goes right, personally, professionally, emotionally.

Not a perfect day — there is actually no such thing as a perfect day — but a very very good day nonetheless. When the evening comes you feel balanced, centered, at peace, as though you’d spent the entire day walking through a field of four leaf clovers.

Today was such a day for me. I’m not expecting to have another one any time soon, although I would not complain if I did.

But I am going to mark this on my calendar, just a simple note to remind myself: Today I had a good day.

I am involved in a number of projects at NYU that exhibit a real sense of group energy. That is, they are the result not of the efforts of some one individual, but of a mysterious alchemy between a group of people.

Sure, every once in a while somebody comes up with a spectacular idea — or makes a spectacular mistake — but those events are not essential. What is indeed essential is the cumuluative effect of so many people getting something done by handing the baton back and forth.

I love the way, in certain circumstances, we are able to seamlessly assume a group identity, a sot of collective mind that is neither me nor you, but us. This kind of connection can be one of the most beautiful aspects of the human experience.

Someone told me today that New York City has lots of big server farms. When you first walk into the lobby of these buildings, they look like anyplace else. But then you go up the elevator, and the entire building is filled with rows and rows of compute servers and giant refrigeration units.

Which makes perfect sense, except that when I first heard her say the words “server farm”, my mind jumped to someplace else entirely. I got a sudden fleeting yet vivid image of a place where they grow waiters.

But not just waiters. Busboys, maître d’s, bartenders, barristas, cocktail waitresses and all the rest, neatly lined up in rows upon rows, carefully watered and tended to, gradually ripening until they are ready to be plucked and sent out to serve a waiting city.

I told my friend about this vision. “After all,” I said, “it’s not as though vast numbers of young people are thronging to Manhattan to wait on tables just because they want a career in acting.”

We discussed the importance of proper ripening. After all, you don’t want to send an unripe server out into the world. We’ve all had the experience of getting an unripe server. It isn’t pretty.

I wonder how many other phrases there are like this. If you have no idea what their real meaning is, you can come up with another meaning that is perfectly logical and plausible.

And maybe even accurate, in some alternate universe.

This evening I had an encounter with some art.

I was having dinner in a restaurant with a friend, when I became aware of a framed photograph on the wall, one of a row of framed photographs. But this one was different from the others.

It was casual yet intense, familiar yet eerily exotic, joyful yet strangely poignant. It was seemingly candid yet perfectly composed, utterly natural while being all about illusion, comfortably warm yet oddly offputting.

All through our dinner conversation, which was wonderful, part of my mind kept wandering back to this strangely compelling image. At the end of the meal I walked back to the rear of the restaurant, to check out the book listing the prices of all of the images for sale on the walls. My picture was priced at $200, framed.

Reader, I purchased it.

I then carried it through Washington Square Park, holding it carefully with one hand, my other hand clutching an umbrella to shield it from the perilous New York rain. At last I deposited it triumphantly, undamaged and dry as a bone, inside my apartment.

Now the picture still is sitting — I am tempted to say on the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door — and I am regarding it with bemused appreciation. I am not posting a photo of it here, because we need some private time to get to know each other, this picture and I.

Such are the ways of art.

I’m writing a computer graphics software package that I definitely want other people to use. And today I made an unusual decision in its design.

You see, there is one place where all of the standard packages ask users to specify an angle in degrees, so that a full circle is 360^o around. This seems reasonable enough on the face of it. After all, it’s the way most people think about a circle.

But in fact, when people do actual math in computer graphics, they always work in radians, so that a full circle is 2π around (just like they teach you in math class). Hence my dilemma.

Should I go with the same “friendly to most people” standard that the other packages use (degrees), or should I be consistent with the way computer graphics is actually done by people who do computer graphics (radians)?

Eventually, I decided that this is really a political question: When I invite people to use my package, what tribe am I asking them to align themselves with? Because there really are multiple tribes here.

There are the people who say “I just want to call a software package that does stuff for me, and I really don’t care to know how it works.” Then there are people who say “I am using this package as a starting point for what will be my own experiments and mathematical innovations in computer graphics.”

Since I teach computer graphics, I realized that I’m really designing this for that second tribe — my tribe. I want people to poke around inside my code, see how I am doing things, maybe come up with their own way of doing it better. I am making this software available not merely to provide a convenience but to invite a dialog.

In the end I am choosing radians. Which means that I am chosing sides, aligning myself with those people who really want to dive deep and learn all about computer graphics.

Because math, like everything else, is political.

Today I started thinking about what I might be doing at the age of one hundred. I have every intention of still being around then, teaching, doing research, and generally having a great time, although I cheerfully acknowledge that certain aspects of the situation are beyond my control, like getting hit by a bus before those self-driving vehicles take over.

Fortunately for me, I will arrive at that august age after a wave of baby boomers have already gotten there. And I am firmly convinced that such a huge group of self-interested Americans will contain enough extremely well connected, resource-rich and ingenious people to make a difference. These folks are not only going to want to avoid death, they are going to want to continue to enjoy life.

People used to say that thirty was the new twenty. Then they said that forty was the new thirty. Already people are saying that fifty is the new thirty. Not too long from now, I suspect they will be saying that eighty is the new forty. Relentless advances in medicine, food science, computation, miniaturization, wearables and technology in general are going to have a cumulative effect.

The concept of “life-style prosthetics” will become common. Assisted walking, muscle control, memory and navigation will be taken for granted. Technologies to improve eyesight and hearing, then eventually smell, taste and proprioception, will become first stylish and then eventually invisible.

Eventually we won’t even think about these prosthetic enhancements, any more than we now think about how our modern shoe-coddled feet can no longer walk barefoot across a hot desert.

It might be fun to think about what prosthetics that will help 100 year olds live vibrant and enjoyable lives might look like in a few decades or so. It might also be fun to eventually enjoy that experience first-hand.

If I can just manage to avoid getting hit by that bus.

Since before the start of Thanksgiving I have been steadily hunting down a pernicious bug in my software. Finally, only this evening, I found it and fixed it. My sense of triumph and relief is probably all out of proportion to the situation, but there it is.

Usually it doesn’t take so long to find a bug. After a little poking and prodding, most bugs pretty much announce their cause loud and clear. But this one was different.

This one lasted for days, threatening to grow into my very own great white whale. Its origin was elusive, its symptoms inexplicable. Try as I might to lay a trap for it, to grab it by its metaphorical throat, things would mysteriously shift, and I would be left holding air.

Of course we must try to resist the tendency to anthropomorphize inanimate things, to imbue our own software bugs with some sort of crafty sentience. But I suspect that’s the way the human mind is wired.

In the end I fixed it by using the tried and true method so elegantly expressed by Sherlock Holmes himself: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Kurt Russell Crowe in “Escape from L.A. Confidential”

Jennifer Jason Lee Marvin in “Last Exit to Black Rock”

Ru Paul Newman in “Cool Hand Lucy”

Ashley Judd Nelson in “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Breakfast Club”

Meg Ryan Gosling in “Addicted to Crazy Stupid Love”

Robert Patrick Stewart in “Terminator, the Next Generation”

Olivia Newton John Corbett in “My Big Fat Grease Wedding”

Wallace Shawn Astin in “My dinner with Frodo”

The world is very complicated, and often very sad. But spending time with family and friends on Thanksgiving can be such a beautiful respite from all that.

Sometimes it’s ok just to take a breath, to look around at the people you care about, and to be grateful.