Ken's Blog

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I recently posted some experiments in creating geographic landscapes over the space of novels such as “The Great Gatsby” and “Pride and Prejudice”. Like any maps, these are potentially spaces upon which people can overlay shared commentaries, links, histories, or interesting routes and connections.

The game changes somewhat if the landscape is built from a play, such as, for example, Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”. In the case of theatre, we not only have the original written work, but also specific embodied performances. One can imagine a geographic landscape of the play as a map into a performance, and as a space for people to discuss aspects of that performance (or even from which to compare different productions).

I have a sense that this sort of shared landscape can have a richness that goes beyond what we can do with novels, since the liveness of theatrical performance adds depth and dimension to the discussion. It would be interesting to see whether we could apply an adaptation of my narrative geography to the problem of building a community of thought and commentary around an particular performance of a play.

We could also do the same with movies, yet somehow I find theatre more appealing for this process, because the connection is so much stronger and more essential between the original sequence of words in the script and the resulting performance.

When you hit the “Send” button on email, your thoughts have just sailed into the world. If you have something like Google “undo” installed, there is a short period of time when you can change your mind. But after that, it’s all over.

This is usually fine, but every once in a while we all find that we’ve sent out a badly worded email, or one which accidentally contains factual errors, or sometimes, (sigh) an email that we shouldn’t have sent at all.

It seems to me that the last moment to change our minds should not be moments after we’ve hit the “Send” button, but rather moments before the intended recipient has read our missive.

Yes, it’s true that shortly after we hit “Send” the underlying sendmail protocol has already delivered our first email, and soon our original message has been copied into a spoolfile somewhere in the recipient’s file system. But so what? Modern mail programs contain layers of functionality over this raw base level. Surely they could deal with an “edit earlier email” meta-email.

So why don’t email programs allow us to continue editing, up until the moment the message is actually open and read?

At some point technology will advance to the point where we will be able to see and hear distant friends and colleagues through augmented reality glasses, in a way that closely approximates the experience of sitting across a table from them.

At that point, perhaps a new kind of restaurant will emerge, one which caters to a clientele that enjoys sharing conversation over a good meal with distant friends, but seeks to avoid the time, expense and inconvenience of air travel. Perhaps at some point even the waiter will be virtual, appearing to serve food that is actually delivered to your plate by robot.

Remember feeling that buzz of sparkling conversation all around you, the last time you had a great time in a fine restaurant? Maybe, just as eBooks might replace paper and ink, the experience of going out to a restaurant might end up being something we will one day enjoy in the comfort of our own homes.

Over lunch today, the topic came up of how things that we take for granted as being limitations in the physical world gradually give way as technology advances.

My recent discussion about the horseless carriage and the eBook are just two examples of technologies gradually dissociating from their more physically bound forebears. Another notable example is the Web itself. Initial web interface metaphors were all based on pages of paper documents. We still use the word “page” when talking about the web, but the look and feel of such sites as YouTube and FaceBook are radically different from anything you’d see on paper.

Only ten years ago it was considered radical and risky when Valve Software built their “Steam” software for delivering PC games over the internet (rather than making people go to the store to buy something in a box). Now we simply take such things for granted.

The same thing has happened with music, with movies, and with just about every consumable information object. Actual physical embodiment is increasingly being consigned to the role of generic player of content (e.g. the iPad), rather than anything content specific.

I wonder whether this trend will extend to embodied social interaction. After all, once we are all wearing those A.R. glasses, you will be able to hang with your friends in the same apparent physical space, even share a “meal” at a restaurant, with no actual physical presence required.

And when the transition has happened, will we even notice?

I wrote yesterday’s post about cyber-cloaking while thinking about the recent article in the New York Times claiming that Google will soon be coming out with augmented reality glasses.

A.R. glasses are essentially a form of client/server technology. As you walk around in the world, you are the client, and a remote server that knows your location is downloading content into the wearable computer that drives your display glasses. In that sense wearable A.R. is not all that different from the client/server architecture we use every day when we browse the web.

Except that A.R. cloaking attacks could be a lot more interesting and scary. Imagine somebody being able to hack into your very perception of the world around you. For example, you and your friends are walking down the street together, all wearing the latest and greatest designer A.R. shades, checking out cool virtual sculptures, store displays, interactive movie ads. What you don’t know is that a clever cloaking attack is targeting just you, so that you only think you are seeing what everyone else is seeing.

I’ll leave it to you to imagine what such a perception attack could be used for. The possibilities, I’m afraid, are endless.

This morning I got an email from a friend who works at Google, saying that one of our NYU-related websites had been hacked. All the text had been replaced by ads for sexual enhancement products.

I went to our site, and emailed her back that everything was fine. Then she emailed me again to say that the problem was still showing up on her screen. For a while it was quite a mystery.

Eventually we figured out that our site had been hit what might be called an inside-out cloaking attack.

“Cloaking” in web parlance means making a harmful site look innocuous to search engines, so that people will click on an innocent seeming link in Bing or Google and then suddenly find themselves on the offending site.

It’s generally done by hacking into the server to add a script that checks who is visiting the site (by looking at the visitor’s IP address). If the visit is from the Bing or Google domains, the visitor sees innocent text. From anywhere else, the visitor sees something quite different.

Today’s attack was a kind of inside-out cloak. Our web site would seem just fine to almost anybody in the world, but if you happened to be from Google or Bing, you would find all those nasty ads. Which means that when Google’s software robots index the page, they get the version with the spam links. This makes the web ranking of those ad sites go up.

Fortunately, we were able to find and fix the problem because our site was visited today by an actual human at Google — a visitor with a far more discerning eye than any mere robot.

Yesterday’s post segues nicely into today’s. I am planning to give a talk in a few weeks at a company with which I share research interests. The title of the talk, which aims to provide a glimpse into the possible future of augmented reality, won’t be all that surprising to some of you who have been following this blog: “Beyond Princess Leia in a Beam of Light”.

My host and I both loved this title, but there was discussion among her colleagues about whether some of the younger people at the company would get it. I wasn’t all that worried. After all, some things are forever. Princess Leia in that beam of light is iconic, like Shakespeare, Bach, Sinatra, Marilyn. The Beatles. Right?

Well, this evening I found myself in front of a room of very smart and savvy master’s students, mostly in their early to mid twenties. A perfect opportunity to reassure myself that all was fine. I asked them whether the phrase “Princess Leia in a Beam of Light” raised any associations.

One student, very tentatively, said that he thought so, but he couldn’t be sure. None of the others had any idea what I was talking about.

Just to double check, I then asked them how many had seen “Star Wars”. Most raised their hands. I realize only now that when those students think of “Star Wars”, they might be thinking of something very different — something, perhaps, with Jar Jar Binks.

Sigh.

I have just been invited, unexpectedly, to the 21 Club here in Manhattan.

The place is legendary, and I’ve never been there before. Fortunately, they will let me in because, as it happens, I am over 21. 🙂

If anything extraordinary happens (like that time I ended up getting drunk with Matthew McConaughey in some Hollywood bar, while we smoked cubans and analyzed John Sayles movies), I will let you know.

Meanwhile, I need to go home and put on a proper jacket. Because without one of those they won’t let you in.

Even if you’re over 21.

Today’s post is a complete change of pace. I’ve been thinking about the extraordinary recent popularity of vampire narratives in popular culture. And it occurs to me that there is something very specific about the semiotics of the vampire: Symbolically, vampires are to sexual passion as humans are to friendship.

Think about it. Vampires are immortal, yet they can die in a moment. In fact, they instantly expire either the moment their heart is pierced, or the moment they are exposed to the light. This is a precise analogy to the power of romantic sexual passion. When you are in love, it is forever — you feel that your love transcends all space and time, even mortality itself. We are all capable of experiencing these powerful feelings toward otherwise total strangers.

Yet such passion can (and often does) end in an instant — the moment the bubble of illusion is burst, or the moment some outside truth brings in the harsh light of day. And then that all powerful, all consuming feeling, a feeling that pulses through our very blood, can simply vanish, as though it had never been.

Friendship is more like humans. Not transcendent, nor all-powerful, nor even immortal, yet very hard to kill. Unlike a lover, if you try to stab a friend through the heart, your friendship might very well survive the betrayal. Between friends, blood runs warm but rarely hot.

We are drawn to the vampiric power of sexual desire, to its promise of eternal flame, to that extraordinary heightening of all the senses which only passion can bring. Yet in the harsh light of dawn, when we awake from our fever dream, it is friendship that will still be there.