Ken's Blog

I have a friend who loves to create cool optical contraptions with mirrors (and he is very good at it). Today I was telling him how watching him work gave me an idea for a story:

A man who loves to invent things with mirrors becomes sad that one day he will die. It isn’t that he fears death, but that he feels sad about all the great mirror inventions he will not get to make. One day he is visited by a supernatural being who offers him unending life. The man happily accepts the gift, only to find that he has been turned into a vampire (and we all know about vampires and mirrors).

It occurs to me that there could be an entire genre of ” tragically ironic story ideas”. If you like, you could go ahead and write the actual story (or play, or movie, or poem, or opera, or country song), but the idea itself could be considered a work all on its own.

I’m about to go on a five hour evening drive. I’ve rented the cool convertible, stocked up on water, charted my route, and prepared myself for some pleasant alone time on the open road, aiming to arrive at my friends’ house at just around midnight.

But there was one last thing to take care of. Being an old fashioned sort, I decided not to leave my musical experience up to Spotify or some similar service. Instead, I went out to the nearest retail emporium and looked for some music to listen to as I wend my way.

And in the course of doing so, I realized that I really like comfort music. Not exactly music that I already own, but things I already know I like. I’m willing to be a little bit adventurous. For example, I got myself a copy of the new Daft Punk album. I may end up not liking it, but from what I’ve heard, I am fully expecting to get lucky.

I wonder in what ways the situation — for example, a long evening drive in a convertible, as opposed to a marathon work session — influences the choice of music.

Are we really accurate, when left to our own devices, in choosing the right music for each occasion? I am sure there are algorithms out there which map mood and situation to music, selecting the “best” music for each situation.

In practice, I wonder which performs better — the listener who relies on his/her own instincts, or the algorithm that aims to know your varying musical tastes even better than you do?

There is something magical about objects that can transform, taking on multiple functional identities at different times.

The idea goes back to antiquity, but it has taken on a new kind of resonance in our modern technology-obsessed world. In 1948, four year old Bernadette Castro starred in commercials for her father’s convertible couches, incidentally becoming the most televised child in America.

I remember as a child having a toy that was themed from some then-popular TV spy show, which at the press of a button would magically transform between a camera and a gun. It didn’t actually function as either, which was probably a good thing, but I didn’t care. Just the idea of a magical transformation of form and function made me happy.

There are so many examples of this power in popular culture, from Q’s gadgets to George Jetson’s flying saucer / suitcase, and of course the man himself, Inspector Gadget.

Children today obsess over a certain eponymous toy/mega-movie franchise, but I don’t really like the whole rhetoric of “they can do this because they are space aliens”. I don’t want magically transformable objects just in my space aliens. I want them in my real life!!!

Is that asking too much?

There were several fascinating papers at the SIGGRAPH conference about using 3D printers, micro-scale textures and special inks to fabricate perfect replicas of real objects — including subtle yet important visual clues like slight transparency (as in milk or soap) and anisotropic reflection (as in cloth or satin).

The work was impressive, and the results were stunning. Yet they also called to mind Philip K. Dick’s wonderful novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”. In the fictional future of that book, it has become easy to replicate all sorts of things, including animals. In fact, some people keep android sheep as pets (hence the title).

As a consequence of nuclear war fallout radiation, actual animals have become scarce and very precious, and it is a sign of wealth and high social status to be able to have a real animal, as opposed to one of the plentiful and cheap perfect copies that technology has enabled.

I wonder whether we are heading down some sort of analogous path. As perfect replicas of more and more things become cheap and plentiful, have an original of anything may become a rare privilege.

One of the papers at the SIGGRAPH conference showed how you can replace the fancy expensive compound lens in a digital camera with a really cheap lens. Of course when you do this you get all sorts of optical aberrations — chromatic aberration, spherical aberration, field curvature, and so on.

But if you have a powerful enough computer, and you know exactly what sorts of errors your cheap lens is introducing into the image, then you can post-process the captured image to get an impressively good result.

I thought this paper was a great example of the progressive virtualization of our physical environment. More and more of the things we think of as being part of the physically built world around us are being augmented — and in some cases replaced — by virtual components.

From the ringing of your phone, (simulating the sound of a long-gone technology) to the electric motor that drives your steering wheel (haptically simulating the direct mechanical linkage of an earlier error), to similar innovations too numerous to mention, every year we make our physical environment just a little bit more virtual.

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Oddly enough, the very moment I finished writing the above, an old friend came over to say hello. He has a company called PaintScaping. They specialize in projecting digital make-believe content onto real world walls and other surfaces, matching the lighting, shadows, and 3D relief so perfectly that the resulting images seem like they are part of the physical world itself.

Maybe it’s a sign.

Like a number of people in my field, I have developed techniques that ended up being named for me (through no fault of my own).

The other night, just as people we gathering for the SIGGRAPH conference, I was introduced by friends to somebody who decided to make an impromptu joke of the occasion. “Your parents must have had a great sense of humor,” he said, “to name you after a well known technique in computer graphics.”

It could have been an awkward moment, but life is too short for awkward moments. “That’s nothing,” I replied, “You should meet my brother Fourier.”

As it happened I had dinner with my Mom last night. I wanted to tell her the story, but as I began I realized she would have no idea who “Fourier” was.

So I adapted the tale to the audience. Everything was the same until my reply at the end, which had now become: “That’s nothing. You should meet my brother Kleenex.”

I am happy to report that my Mom found the entire episode very funny.

Today at the SIGGRAPH conference I surprised an older colleague, by suddenly recalling an old memory that involved him, from when I was about eleven years old.

I had just joined the Boy Scouts. One Saturday our troup volunteered to help with paper recycling, which mainly involved loading many bundles of discarded newspapers and magazines into a big dumpster. Amid all of the trash, I happened upon a discarded issue of a magazine for electrical engineers (which of course I had never heard of). Curious, I started leafing through it.

In it I found the coolest article: an ingenious way of making computer graphics look fully three dimensional, as though objects were floating in space. No 3D glasses required.

I remember thinking, as I looked through the article, that this — using technology to make wondrous and magical things — was exactly what I wanted to do when I grew up.

I remember wanting to meet the person who did this work, but I did not meet the man himself until quite a few years later (when I was all grown up and doing computer graphics myself). By then the memory of that Saturday had receded to somewhere far in the back of my mind.

Until today, when I said hello to this colleague and suddenly the events of that long ago day came flooding back. I told him my story about finding that article, and how it was what first inspired me to want to do computer graphics.

He seemed a little taken aback, but very happy.

I’m very excited about the upcoming SIGGRAPH conference. But the emailed “Important Information For SIGGRAPH 2013 Attendees” has me a little non-plussed. Here is ther policy on cameras and recording:

No cameras or recording devices are permitted at SIGGRAPH 2013. Abuse of this policy will result in the loss of the individual’s registration credentials.

Now unless I am mistaken, essentially every SIGGRAPH attendee has a camera and recording device in their pocket at all times. Which means that about 25000 people — statistically 100% of attendees — are in continual violation of this policy.

What happens when they realize this, and take away the registration credentials of everyone? Should we then start our own conference?

A colleague of mine at Microsoft told me today about the recent send-off party for their director of research, who is being promoted. Because the guest of honor is a big fan of Star Trek, my colleague told me that they had decided to celebrate by watching the man’s favorite ST episode.

“City on the Edge of Forever,” I said.

My colleague just looked at me blankly. “Wait, how could you know that?” he asked. “Did somebody already tell you about about this?”

“No,” I said, “but it had to be ‘City on the Edge of Forever’.”

My colleague continued to look dubious, wondering whether I was putting him on by pretending to be clairvoyant.

So I tried to explain it. “Look,” I said, “I know roughly how old he is, so I know he would have been watching original Trek when he was around fifteen years old. I also know he’s a very intelligent guy, and that he still takes ST quite seriously almost half a century later. Which means that his favorite episode would have been the best one, the one that perfectly intertwines love, fate, loyalty, and speculative fiction on a metaphysical level.”

“Also,” I continued, as if that weren’t enough, “the one with an original script by Harlan Ellison.”

I’m not sure my colleague quite believed that I had worked all this out from first principles. But I am sure that it’s as obvious to some of you reading this as it was to me.

I am very impressed by our president’s recent short speech reflecting on the death of Trayvon Martin. The whole subject is such a political minefield, and of course he will be criticized in some quarters for saying anything at all. Yet everything he said was very true, and very sad, and these are truths that need to be heard.

I was especially impressed by the way he managed to convey the pain of systematic prejudice, the terrible truth of what so many in our society must endure every day — and that he managed to all that not with anger, but with clarity and understanding.

And even a note of hopefulness.