Ken's Blog

Suppose I am a dancer or an actor, and I am charged with giving a performance for an audience. In today’s world, if I want complete freedom of movement, current production practice requires me to use my naked eyes to look at the physical world around me.

But soon production practice will change, due to recent and imminent advances in technology. Performers will be able to see whatever they wish in the physical space around their bodies, without any loss of freedom of movement.

As this happens, entirely new visual languages will develop, to be used by performers. Dancers will see choreographic steps, lines of principle flow, and other useful indications in the space around them, while actors will perceive virtual sets, animated characters, dialog prompts, sight line hints, and other production cues.

Directors will have entirely new, far more visual, ways to communicate with their cast, just as choreographers will have new powerful tools for expressing their vision to the dance troupe that will realize that vision.

It can be difficult to predict what these visual production languages will look like. But it is going to be exciting to watch them develop.

Time passed in a blur. The One, the large creature with the power to communicate, would come by from time to time to share greetings, and she found these moments pleasurable. She detected in his mind other stirrings, ways of thinking that she could not quite understand. This would require further study.

The other large creatures were a complete mystery to her, although she could see that they were of the same tribe as the One. They did not communicate in any way that she could detect, yet clearly there was some sort of interaction between them.

Often this interaction felt like conflict, as though the creatures were preparing for war against each other, and this troubled her. A tribe does not war against itself.

Yet somehow she knew that no matter what happened, the One would protect her. Meanwhile, he made sure that there was always food. The days drifted by, and she fed, and she grew, and she was content.

A Vancouver walk
With a new friend. A perfect
Way to spend a day.

I just saw a great talk about the neuro-physics of human eyes. One take-away was the remarkable difference between what we believe we are paying attention to, and the actual movements our eyes make.

One basic difference is that we tend to believe that our gaze is continuous, because our minds construct an illusion of continuous change of gaze. In fact, our eyes more often change their gaze by darting around in an extremely fast and discontinuous way, through extremely rapid saccade movements.

I wonder whether this generalizes. Perhaps our thoughts work the same way. Maybe our subjective experience of continuous thought is also a trick of perception.

Perhaps the reality, below our level of conscious perception, is that our thoughts actually proceed through a series of mental saccades, jumping in wildly and in divergent ways from moment to moment, with the illusion of continuous thought merely an illusory construct overlayed on top.

Proof by induction:

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that one day somebody invents a machine that lets people travel back in time. That will be a big day in history — the day that travel back in time finally becomes possible!

Here’s the problem: Precisely because it will be such a big moment in history, sooner or later people from the future are going to want to come back and visit that historic day. In fact, since people will be traveling to the same destination from all different eras in the future, that particular moment in history is going to become awfully crowded.

And not all of those visitors from the future will be as careful as they should be. One of them, inevitably, is going to do something that will interfere with the sequence of events that resulted in the invention of the time machine.

When this happens, the time machine will no longer have been invented on that day. That entire future timeline will cease to exist, curious time traveling tourists and all.

Which means that we will enter an alternate timeline. In this new timeline, travel will only be invented sometime later.

But in this new timeline, the same sequence of events will happen, only at a later date.

And so, alas, QED. Nobody will ever invent that time machine.

We spent nearly an entire year building our Holojam demo for this week’s big SIGGRAPH conference. Yet it wasn’t until after we actually showed it — and got feedback from a large number of people — that I finally understood the significance of what we had built.

By “significance” I don’t mean long-term significance. As researchers, we were thinking about that quite a lot. I’m talking here about immediate significance.

All sorts of people, including effects animators, film directors and scientists, started to tell us things they would now be able to do, after having experienced our shiny new toy.

So here we were, completely focused on how our research could possibly impact things in twenty or thirty years from now, and we somehow missed the fact that it is also very likely to impact things right now.

Isn’t there a saying that sometimes you can’t see the trees for the forest? If not, there really should be.

“Daniel, will you please come back to the table.”

Daniel did his best to ignore the insistent voice of his mother. He was concerned. The caterpillar had not moved for two days. He had done everything right, as far as he could tell. He’d changed her water, put in fresh leaves every day, all the things he was supposed to do, but with no results.

Yet today something seemed to be different. He was pretty sure she had moved, and that was good. He approached the small terrarium and peered inside.

And he could see, clearly, delightfully, that she was awake, and she seemed to be looking right at him. He suddenly felt the urge to say hello.

“Daniel Bradley, will you please come back to the dinner table!” He knew that note in his mother’s voice. He wouldn’t have much time.

“Hey there,” he said softly, looking down at the little creature. “How are you today?”

And as absurd as it was, he could feel a voice in his head, answering his question. “Hello Daniel,” it said, “I’m quite fine, thank you.”

Today I got into a debate with somebody who, like me, knows a lot and cares a lot about movies. The question on the table was: Which is the better written film from 1999: The Matrix or Galaxy Quest?

For me the answer is obvious. From the perspective of writing, Galaxy Quest is a far better film.

But not to the person I was talking to. Not only did he not agree with me, I think he thought I couldn’t be serious to even suggest such a thing.

The entire exchange was so intriguing that I called a good friend afterward to get a second opinion. My friend said “Of course Galaxy Quest is better written than The Matrix. It’s not even close.” So that was one vote in my camp.

On the other hand, The Matrix made vastly more box office than Galaxy Quest. So maybe it comes down to what you mean by “better written”.

Yesterday the LA Convention Center was empty. Nobody was here in the cavernous South Hall but we few hardy souls setting up our demos.

What a difference a day makes. Today the flood gates have been opened, and the juggernaut that is the annual ACM/SIGGRAPH conference has well and truly begun.

SIGGRAPH is by far the largest of the ACM’s many computer science conferences. At its largest, this conference will swell to several tens of thousands of participants.

It’s impossible to see everything here. The sheer number of parallel brilliant things to see is overwhelming in its depth and scope.

Our demo, which will run all day tomorrow at SIGGRAPH’s “VR Village”, has already been written about in various places, such as this on-line article:

http://uploadvr.com/holojam-shows-participants-slice-space-time/

Hopefully we will live up to the hype. 🙂

I’ve been struggling with the terms “Augmented Reality” and “Virtual Reality”. To me they don’t really describe where we might want to go, so much as particular technological approaches for getting there.

Imagine if we always named a novel after the method that was used to print it. The technological means of distribution is an essential component of a novel, but a novel is so much more than a particular printing technology.

That’s why I am leaning, in my own description of our long term research goals, toward the phrase “Future Reality”. I like it because it doesn’t actually contain any hints at all about what techniques we might use to get there. And therefore it doesn’t skew us too much toward one technological path or another.

The empirical experiments that I am mostly interested in are not about answering questions like “How do we make a lighter / lower power / higher resolution headset?”, or “What’s the best form of position tracking?” Those are indeed important questions, but to me they are the questions about printing technology, not about literature.

So our experiments center on putting people into experiences together — using technology that is now expensive, but that will at some point in the future become cheap and widely available — and asking questions about social interaction, play, learning, culture. All those messy but wonderful things that any communication technology is really all about, be it a stone tablet or a smart phone.