Author: admin

Let us fast forward a bit to a time when those of us in the developed world are wearing our forthcoming variants of Google Glass. Bear with me here.

Rather than staring down at iPhones as we walk blithely into oncoming traffic, we will be looking forward, heads held high, while augmented reality displays give us power-up knowledge of the world around us, and unobtrusive bone-conductance microphones whisper messages that only we can hear.

In this brave new world, our personal video cameras will be recording every passing moment — buildings, stores, cars, passers-by — and helping us to interpret the many things that pass into our field of view.

Yet we will not be alone. For our fashionable head-mounted device will be connect to the internet, and the internet is connect to the world.

Somewhere far away, where the average wage is perhaps one hundredth our own, some brilliant individual — perhaps a young person of unbounded promise but with no real future — will be paid three dollars a day to interpret what we see, to whisper in our ear, to point out objects in our view, suggest paths we may take, opportunities for purchase, ways forward that we ourselves may never have thought of.

To this young person the opportunities will seem like a dream. For a wage far greater than anything she could have imagined, she will see sights beyond the dreams of anyone in her third world village. A glimpse into a fabulous world where everyone can afford a car, where a movie costs more than a month’s salary, and where universal education is guaranteed.

We, of course, will not quite be aware of this person’s existence. We will simply chalk it all up to the magic of technology. “How,” we might ask ourselves, “did my augmented reality device know to send me to this particular store on this particular day? It is truly marvelous what they can do with computers these days!”

I am a big fan of Ray and Charles Eames. In the world of design they were perhaps the ultimate power couple, originating one ingenious idea after another. The Eames Chair has deservedly become an icon of modernist design.

Similarly, their 1961 interactive museum exhibit Mathematica: A World of Numbers … and Beyond is the best advertisement for the sheer delight of mathematics this side of Vi Hart’s videos — and a very high bar for the Museum of Mathematics to strive for as it continues to mature.

The there is one thing for which they unfairly get too much credit. Just today a colleague referred to their iconic work Powers of 10, a lovely short film that first zooms out from human scale to the universe, and then zooms in to the atomic world (and which was subsequently released as the book “Powers of Ten” by Philip and Phylis Morrison).

I say they get too much credit because the entire concept for this film was borrowed from Cosmic View, a 1957 illustrated essay by Kees Boeke.

Not surprisingly Boeke was a pioneer in many other ways. For one thing, he originated the concept of a Sociocracy in education. You could look it up.

A person who programs in a low level computer assembly language might reasonably say to a person who uses a high level programming language: “It must be very difficult for you to use such a restrictive tool. There are so many things you can’t do!”

Interestingly, a person who programs in a high level programming language might also reasonably say to a person who programs in assembly language: “It must be very difficult for you to use such a restrictive tool. There are so many things you can’t do!”

Both statements are true, and there many analogous situations. The person who walks to work can see and do things that the person who drives cannot, and vice versa. The person of faith can be motivated in ways that the atheist cannot, and vice versa.

There is a tendency to see those with different world views as living in a more restricted version of our own world view. To a Christian, Jews might be defined by their lack of belief in Christ. To a straight person, gay people may be defined by their lack of heterosexual desire.

By thinking this way, we tend to miss the richness of the lives of others. If the meat eater sees a vegan as living in a restricted world, she will never realize the vast universe of taste experiences that the vegan takes for granted, of which the meat eater has no knowledge.

I wonder whether this awareness should be made a part of our education in childhood: The ability to understand that those other ways of looking at the world, different from our ours, are not merely nested boxes within our own world view.

They are other rooms, as large as our own, within the same spacious house.

Visiting Google today, and looking at a Google Glass device close up, I found myself pondering the future of social turn-taking.

Today that act of reading a text or tweet is a somewhat socially heavy operation. You need to look down at the mobile device you are holding in your hand, thereby breaking eye contact and social continuity with whomever you are talking to.

If you need to take the device out of your pocket, that is an even heavier gesture. The performance of this act itself implies “There is something more important than talking to you right now.” Even worse, your conversant has no reason to think you even know who the text or tweet was from. So the implication might be “Anything is more important than talking with you right now.”

But what if we were all wearing Google Glass or some similar device? A simple drift of the eyes up and to the right would allow us to read the contents of our incoming texts. Yet even this movement would probably be easily noticeable.

Suppose we wish to read our incoming texts without interrupting the social flow of the conversation, and without making the person we are with feel unimportant? Perhaps we will learn to devise ways to hide such telltale eye moments.

Tweets might become even more terse than they are now. A brief enough micro-tweet could be read in a very short amount of time. Still, making that particular eye movement while somebody else is talking would give the game away.

So we might end up becoming practiced at waiting until just the right moment in conversational turn-taking to read those incoming micro-tweets. Say, a moment when it is socially natural to move one’s eyes off to the side.

In this scenario, the simple act of looking into the display can serve as a trigger to the device: If our wearable display detects that we have looked at it, this can serve a signal for it to prepare the next micro-tweet.

I admit I’m troubled by the possibility that any of this might come about. Not only would it promote a form of social dishonesty, but it would also encourage an even more fine grained fragmentation of attention than we already have these days.

Then again, I suspect that to any child growing up in such a world, this will all just seem perfectly natural.

One theme that came up quite a bit during the Game Developer’s Conference, and that also came up today in conversations with various friends and colleagues, is the idea of making games that are good for people.

There is an entire field of games for health (an initiative that has been strongly supported by Michelle Obama to fight childhood obesity), and quite a few games designed to raise social or political awareness around various issues. At our Games for Learning Institute we’ve been working for years on figuring out how to make games that help kids learn better.

But can a game go further than this? Can we use them to become better people? Suppose all of those self-help books that currently line our nation’s book store shelves were gradually replaced by interactive game software that can truly customize for each individual user, and that person’s particular needs.

Could we end up with a powerful force for good? Can a game help you to become a kinder or more thoughtful person? To be more considerate in your relationships? To guide you toward raising your consciousness in a way that frees you to better appreciate the world around you, and to get the most out of each day of your life?

Today over lunch I got into a conversation with Vi Hart and Marc ten Bosch about 4D.

At one point I said that with the advent of really low cost virtual reality (the Oculus Rift retails for only $300), it looks like it is finally possible to do something I’ve long wanted to do — reach out and manipulate four dimensional objects with my own hands.

As some of you know, both Vi and Marc are very interested in the fourth dimension, and they’ve both done really interesting things with it.

Even if you get all of the graphics and haptics right, a potential problem when trying to convey a sense of manipulating 4D objects with your hands is that our bodies exist in a 3D world.

As I described my preferred way around this, it turned out that Vi had had pretty much the same idea, which is best described by asking: “How would a two dimensional creature in Flatland manipulate a three dimensional object?”

Assuming the 2D creature can’t escape the plane of Flatland, he/she can still push on whatever part of a 3D object happens to intersect that plane. And this allows some rich possibilities.

For example, a cube passing through Flatland will appear to its denizens as a polygon (see the image below). A Flatlander gripping this polygon could squeeze, applying forces entirely within the plane, to force the cube to move upward in the third dimension — or else relax that grip, to allow the cube to fall downward.

Similarly, the part of a 4D object that intersects our 3D world will appear to us as some 3D shape. We can squeeze on this 3D shape — entirely within our own 3D world — to move the 4D shape in four dimensions.

The nice thing about this approach is that everything we do to control the 4D object is done entirely within our own 3D world. This can make the whole thing a lot easier and more intuitive to learn. Especially for little kids, since it’s a good bet they will be able to learn this stuff a lot more easily than we grownups ever could.

This topic might seem arcane, but one day everybody might be sharing an augmented reality view of the world. At that point, being able to directly manipulate four dimensional objects could become a very practical skill.

After all, there’s a lot of room to put things in four dimensions. If we learn our way around 4D, we won’t need to worry about running out of places to put our virtual stuff. 🙂

Today I tried iFly indoor sky diving. Basically, a big fan blows air up from below at anywhere from 120 to 170 miles per hour, while you surf the updraft, suspended above a net at an altitude of anything from two feet to about thirty five feet.

I loved it! And it made an interesting comparison to real skydiving.

The real thing is much wilder during free fall — you don’t have control over temperature or wind speed, since you are literally falling through the sky after having dropped out of an airplane.

Compared to that, the iFly experience is a bit like skydiving in your living room. Which is not necessarily a bad thing.

While you are “flying”, there are people all around the glass enclosure watching you. I had a great time waving at them, giving the thumbs up, and occasionally making a funny face.

The wonderful science fiction short story “The Menace from Earth” by Robert Heinlein describes a similar enterprise on a moon colony. Only on the moon they are able to make the whole thing a lot bigger, having only have 1/6 earth gravity to contend with.

I would imagine the experience Heinlein describes, with lots of room to swoop and glide, would be a lot closer to real flying. I guess we’re not going to find out until moon colonies have recreational facilities.

After the iFly experience, I found myself thinking “wouldn’t it be great to have one of these for my very own!” Imagine “flying” in one of these while wearing a wireless Oculus Rift. Now that could make for one cool video game experience.

Alas, the price for even the smallest and least expensive “vertical wind tunnel” starts at about $250K, and goes up rapidly from there into the millions.

On the other hand, suppose I were to design one from scratch…

The Game Developer’s Conference has been surprising in a number of ways. I realize that talking about games has greatly evolved — it is no longer merely talking about games.

Discussions here have ranged from political advocacy to real life love stories to social interventions to philophical speculations to mathematical explorations to comedy routines to literary extrapolations.

Speaking of the latter, today Richard Evans and Emily Short presented their wonderful interaction fiction system Versu, which lets you converse with Jane Austen’s characters, and you can even mix them with characters from very different cultures and literary genres to see what will happen (imagine Mr. Collins at a dinner party with a character from “Office Space”).

At the end of their presentation, Richard (who was previously the A.I. designer for The SIMS), summed up the possibilities by asking: “Suppose Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Mr. Darcy and Queen Victoria were stuck in an elevator. What would they talk about?”

When he said this, I remember thinking to myself that the answer was obvious. They would all be saying: “That phone booth was a lot larger on the inside than it looked from the outside.”

San Francisco has a completely different rhythm from New York. Proportionally, many more people here take the bus, which is kind of intense, as buses tend to get very full (a bus is a lot smaller than a NY subway car).

Everyone here just tunes out the intensity and goes into their own world. It’s one of those things, I think, that people accept about living in the beautiful City by the Bay.

The bus drivers here are godlike beings, brusk but fair, dispensing justice as they go. They have no room for politeness, and won’t hesitate to face down someone who tries to get on without a MUNI pass, but they seem to really look out for their charges.

If you don’t have a pass (if, say, you are a clueless out-of-towner like me), you need to pay two bucks cash. Exact change, if you please.

Today I got to the bus stop downtown and realized, to my chagrin, that I had no singles. I figured I would just pay the driver a five, since my friends who were waiting for me had made dinner reservations.

When I got on the bus, I showed the driver my five dollar bill, told him I didn’t have any singles, and asked if I could just pay with this.

“Exact change,” he said impassively.

“Could I just give you this five and you can keep the change?” I asked hopefully.

He stared at me. “Why would you want to do that?”

I had no time to think of any answer but the truth. “Because I really need to get there.”

With a tired shrug, he waved me in. He wasn’t interested in taking my five. Apparently, the fact that I had offered it was payment enough.

I am at the annual Game Developer’s Conference. Today over lunch we were discussing the vast difference between acting in movies/television/theatre and “acting” in computer games.

There is an enormous push in many top first-person games for ever greater levels of realism. This is reflected in many talks at GDC, which focus on things like hair, clothing, subsurface scattering for skin, eye rendering, and all the other subtleties required to get real-time rendering ever closer to photo-realism.

Yet there seems to be an almost willful blindness within the field about the state of “acting” in these games. For example, my friend pointed out that there were many moments in the recent high budget “L.A. Noire” from Rockstar Games when both the camera and the virtual actors went totally still.

The psychological effect was essentially that the characters had gone dead. Something like this would simply never happen in a linear film with real people.

I pointed out that there was, in fact, one commercially successful first-person game in which there was, in fact, no bad acting.

My friends were quite interested to hear what game I could be thinking of.

“MYST!” I said.

Of course, this wasn’t such great news. After all, MYST came out twenty years ago.