Ken's Blog

There was a time, not that long ago, when it was easier than it is now to make a movie at modest cost, and maybe even turn a profit. But those days appear to be gone.

Young people nowadays seem to have no qualms about watching pirated downloads of new releases. If you try to question their ethics, they can just shrug and say “it’s all freely available”.

Which may account for the precipitous rise in recent years of the Hollywood special effects blockbuster.

The economic logic of these big budget films is unassailable: The only way to lure young people into theaters is to create visuals that are so spectacular, they need to be seen on a giant screen.

The one remaining defense against the attitude of “all films want to be free” is to make a movie that can’t really be seen at home.

In the early 1950s, the idea of running commercials on free television broadcasts really hit its stride (although the first television ad in the U.S. actually dates back to 1941).

Now that content can be delivered asynchronously over the internet, the entire premise of broadcast television may be on its way out. Once people can watch a show whenever they want — and in particular, can skip over ads — subscription models, like the one employed by Netflix, may be the only commercially viable alternative.

Which in a way would be sad, because commercial television is a pure example of something difficult to achieve: A perfectly progressive tax.

When you watch television shows that are paid for by ads, you “pay” with your time. Whatever your time is worth, that’s essentially what it costs you to watch.

For example, somebody who is earning the current U.S. federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is paying approximately twelve cents to sit through a one minute TV ad.

In contrast, Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, who earned $77,000,000 in 2013, is essentially paying about $640 to watch that same one minute spot.

It makes sense that this perfect form of progressive taxation emerged with the rise of the middle class in the U.S. after World War II — a time when the American Dream was truly becoming a reality for a large percentage of the population.

Of course, we now live in much different times. These days, if you are born poor, the pretense that you have a fair shot at merit based success has become a grim and unfunny joke, at least in the United States. For millions of citizens, just the crippling cost of paying off loans to get a college education is placing that dream hopelessly out of reach.

How fitting that one of our most perfectly progressive forms of taxation seems to be heading for the dustbin of history.

Today I was on a transatlantic flight coming back home from Europe, and I got to talking with the pleasant young man sitting in the next seat. He told me that he is in the U.S. Army, stationed in Germany, and now traveling home for a brief leave.

A few minutes later we were joined in our row by a young woman, and we all got to chatting, as people do. She said she is originally from Hungary, had been working in Germany, and was going to spend a few months in New York.

At some point the soldier asked the young woman what she did for a living, and she explained that she is a professional model.

Whereupon I blurted out, with genuine enthusiasm, “Wow, cool, a soldier and a model. I get to sit next to two action figures!”

Fortunately, they both thought this was funny.

Thinking back on the discussion these last few days, I’m thinking that invention and impact are radically different things. You can be the person who first invented something, and yet your invention by itself may have very little impact. If your goal is to have impact, then you need to work on maximizing impact.

And I’ve come to realize that the discussion about who did what first, on a technical level, may be nearly irrelevant when discussing the adaption arc of the Oculus Rift. Their major accomplishment lay in how they led the conversation.

Various VR “solutions” have been around for quite a while, but until now nobody managed to convince the entire game development industry that a credible consumer level platform would be arriving within a year. And the way Oculus did this was particularly brilliant.

They not only made a highly plausible platform, but then they sold development kits for the same low price that a final product would cost. Keep in mind that if you only make a few thousand of anything, your per-unit costs are far greater than if you make millions of something — often by an order of magnitude or more.

So it looks as though they were subsidizing their dev-kits, spending capital from their investors to create the illusion that the product was already a mass-market item.

It worked spectacularly well. Thousands of game developers bought the dev-kits at low cost, and then collectively spent perhaps a billion dollars to build various games. So the idea that “this is the commodity platform of choice” became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

At least in this sort of commercial space (building a new platform), the key is not just to spend money. It’s to get lots of other people to spend their own money.

Thanks to everyone for your wonderfully thoughtful comments over the last few days in response to my posts about the Oculus Rift. I’ve really learned a lot from reading them.

Yesterday evening I got a very nice email from Palmer Luckey, who laid out for me the chronology of his involvement with this technology. It is now clear to me that, independent of whatever Mark Bolas had been doing, by the time they first met Palmer had already been thinking about achieving wide angle stereo VR by placing cheap plastic lenses in front of a single SmartPhone screen and de-warping the resulting distorted view.

Then, coincidentally, I had a long chat this morning with an old friend who spent several years as a venture capitalist, focusing on funding Silicon Valley tech start-ups. He had an interesting take on the whole thing.

My friend said that VCs don’t really care who came up with something first — as long as nobody is suing anybody for IP theft. VCs are focused only on execution. In other words, the most original idea in the world will fail in the marketplace if badly executed, whereas a very unoriginal idea can be wildly successful if brought to market well.

And so my thinking about this whole space has evolved in the last few days. It could be argued that, as proud as he is of having come up with the Oculus tech, Palmer’s real triumph has been of a different nature.

More tomorrow.

To expand on yesterday’s post, I don’t think the problem with Mark Bolas being written out of the Oculus Rift story was the fault of Palmer Luckey. Rather, it was the fault of us, collectively.

In the U.S. we tend to frame all such stories as a “Hero myth”. The first question we ask is often “who was the individual who did this?” The idea that a story can have multiple heroes (which in reality is generally the case) is often too complex to form a compelling national narrative.

So we say that Thomas Edison invented the incandescent lightbulb, that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, that James Clerk Maxwell invented Maxwell’s equations. None of these statements is really true, but they are all convenient myths that have satisfied somebody’s agenda, and that were much easier for people to keep in mind than the far messier and more complicated reality.

Mark Bolas, a professor at USC, an astonishingly prolific innovator, has invented or co-invented many things. One of those things was FOV2GO, an ingenious way to make a very inexpensive, very wide angle virtual reality display.

You start with two really inexpensive lenses, put a SmartPhone screen a few inches away, and wrap the whole thing in an inexpensive housing — which can even be cardboard. If you already have a SmartPhone, you can make one yourself for a few dollars in parts.

One of the students working on this project — Palmer Luckey — spun the basic idea out into a start-up company, Oculus Rift, which added an orientation tracker, more solid packaging and support software, and was recently purchased by Facebook for two billion dollars.

As you might have guessed, Mark is not now wealthy.

This week I’m at the FMX conference, and it seems that at nearly every session Palmer Luckey’s name comes up, but Mark Bolas is never mentioned.

I don’t want to take anything away from Palmer’s contribution. It takes a lot of work to make a successful commercial enterprise, including a level of financial investment, marketing and engineering that is simply not needed in an academic project.

So yes, I understand why Mark is not getting the financial payoff here. Still, in all the hype in the press and elsewhere, shouldn’t a primary inventor of the technology at least be mentioned?

Shouldn’t an inventor get at least a little credit for his own invention?

On a flight across the Atlantic today I decided to rewatch Mary Poppins. It is a film that I revisit often, but I had not seen it in several years.

As it happens, one of the talks I will be giving this week is on the future of interactive cinema. And I realized, watching this Walt Disney movie for children that is now exactly half a century old, that it has much to say for our time.

The vision of being able to paint a picture, and then simply jump into that image to visit a desired alternate reality, is one that still, after fifty years, speaks to the child within us.

The difference is that now we suspect that soon we may be able to make it a reality.

Richard’s comment on yesterday’s post really brought home for me the issue of how prepared our educational system leaves us for being able to bridge C.P. Snow’s Art/Science cultural divide. It would be interesting to design courseware specifically with this in mind.

I don’t think the problem is as acute in music as it is in other fields. Thanks to the influence of Max Mathews and other pioneers, the same students who learn musical history, theory and practice are also able to learn the history, theory and practice of procedural music and its associated technological arc. In fact, NYU’s own Music Technology program is one of those wonderful places where the divide between the two cultures has been all but obliterated.

But for other disciplines, such as the visual arts, the wall of mutual ignorance seems to remain as high as ever. Perhaps courses focusing on specific topics could be specifically designed to combat this mutual ignorance. Of course if we did manage to design such a curriculum, the problem would remain of getting universities to accept such trans-disciplinary courses as legitimate academic offerings.

I was in a room full of people who are deeply committed to knocking down C.P. Snow’s problem of The Two Cultures. To be sure, not everyone in the room was old enough or widely read enough to be familiar with Snow’s famous lecture.

Yet every single one of them would wholeheartedly agree, if asked, that we need to find a way to bridge the great divide between the Arts and the Sciences. Further, they would say that their own work is largely an attempt to bridge that very divide.

Yet a problem with all such efforts is that everyone inevitably comes in with some sort of bias, and the nature of your own bias is that you can’t see it. In this case, most of the participants are coming to the conversation from a strong background in the sciences.

This really hit home for me when somebody got up to speak — one of the rare individuals who has put in the effort required to be equally conversant in “Art-talk” and “Science-talk”. She started describing the work of Sol LeWitt, and then casually asked how many people were familiar with his work.

To my immense surprise and disappointment, almost nobody in the room knew who he was.

Trying to think of an analogy going the other way, I likened it in my mind to a group of artists intent on bridging the art/science divide in the use of procedural techniques, and none of them knowing the names “John von Neumann” or “Jim Blinn”.

And I was forced to admit to myself that it would be very difficult for me to convince my own computer science department to include a for-credit course about LeWitt or the other proceduralists.

Clearly something is very wrong here. But I’m not sure what to do about it.