Ken's Blog

A tech journalist recently wrote, after trying on the Apple Vision Pro, that he was worried we were all going to become obsessed with spatial computing. But he’s wrong.

In fact, it will be exactly the opposite. The more successful spatial computing becomes, the less we will think about it.

By analogy, you don’t spend much time thinking about your refrigerator or your closet. But you do find them very useful.

Recent issues around repatriation have gotten me thinking about the nature of museums. The museum is not just a place to look at art and cultural artifacts, but also a place to physically go with your family and friends.

Much as a movie theater or a restaurant is more than just about watching a film or eating, attending a museum is largely about sharing a sense of physical immersion with people that you care about while experience a sense of wonder.

So maybe even after art becomes progressively more virtual, museums may continue to be real places, and maybe that is important.

Movies are all about the image. In a film, an ogre had better look like an ogre, and a giant needs to be a lot bigger than everyone else.

But on the stage, none of that is true. If a play is written, directed and acted properly, everyone in the audience will accept that a person on stage is a giant, even if they are no bigger than anyone else on that stage.

This is a fundamental difference, and it is essential to the nature of these two media. And I have a feeling we are going to see something similar emerge between virtual reality and extended reality.

A story told in VR needs to possess visual fidelity. You can’t say somebody is a giant in VR and then show a normal sized person. But in XR, the visual vocabulary is more like that of live theater. Because people and characters in XR stories show up right here, in our own world, we can bend the rules of visual fidelity, and audiences will go with it.

In other words, VR is like film, and XR is like theater.

At some point A.I. will allow acting in a film to be post-processed with the appearance of any other actor. But beyond that, the software will be able to mimic the movements, speaking style and mannerisms of other actors, living or dead.

Of course there are serious copyright issues here. Which means that creators will push the limits of what constitutes outright copying.

Rather than having an performance be post-processed just in the style of, say, Humphrey Bogart, we might get 30% Bogey, 32% Cary Grant, 33% Brad Pitt, and perhaps a little Peter Sellers to round out the mix. There will be legal limits on how much your post-processed actor blend can draw from any given person, but as long as you don’t go over that limit, you will still be within your rights.

I am curious where this all will go. It would be fascinating, for example, to see a performance that appears to include aspects of both Clint Eastwood and Bette Davis. I, for one, would not want to go up against someone like that in a fight.

When I do my morning exercises in VR, I am acutely aware that my movements are being guided in a way that would not be visible to anyone watching me. And that has gotten me thinking.

When these clunky headsets get replaced by sleek glasses, dancers will be able to see choreographic guides during their performances. Actors will be able to see the marks they need to hit as they walk through a scene.

In fact, they will be able to see script prompts in a manner that is totally invisible to the audience. And that may lead to a new form of theater.

An actor will be able to jump into a performance without rehearsal. This won’t replace traditional theater, but rather will be a new art form

Improvising a scene by following XR prompts will be a new form of entertainment, intermediate between theater and game play

I think it will be fun — a kind of Karaoke of the future.

I often check the list of famous people and their birthdays on Wikipedia. I have noticed what may be a very disturbing trend.

Gradually, over time, the list of people who are older than me is getting shorter, while the list of people who are younger than me is getting longer.

Clearly something is going on here. Should I be worried?

I was devastated to read that Hinton Battle has passed away. I first saw him as Scarecrow in the original production of The Wiz on Broadway.

I had never seen anyone move like that. I have been a fan ever since.

When I heard the sad news today, I immediately went to YouTube to rewatch him in Once More, with Feeling. As always, his performance as the demon Sweets — which raised what was already the greatest episode of Buffy to a whole other level — took my breath away.

I am grateful to have had the privilege to witness such talent and such sheer joy in motion.

When you are in a movie theater, and you and everyone else is looking at the movie screen, nobody is arguing whether the screen is real. Of course it’s real, because everybody in the theater can see it.

If only one person could see the screen, there could be an argument that it is an hallucination. But if all the people in a room see something, then there is an unspoken consensus that it is real.

We are about to undergo a similar semantic transition as extended reality becomes universally adopted.

If I am the only person wearing a pair of XR glasses, then it could be said that I am experiencing a technology-induced hallucination. And if even only two people out of a crowd can see the same thing, it could still be argued that we are both sharing a common hallucination.

But what if everybody in the room is wearing XR specs and therefore sees and hears the same thing? Then that thing is part of reality, just like the screen in that movie theater.

What is real, in human terms, is whatever we all experience together.

Every once in a while I find out that people I know harbor conspiracy theories. These are often people who otherwise seem rational and sane.

But if you get them on certain topics, it’s like being dropped into the Upside Down from Stranger Things. Evidence, reasoning, cause and effect, Occam’s razor, all of those things fly out the window.

And there is not point trying to have a discussion with people about their conspiracy theories. If you start pointing out simple and obvious facts to them, they might just decide that you too are part of the conspiracy.

I remember being at a scientific conference not long after the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. One of the scientists there, an otherwise reasonable seeming person who was respected in his field, tried to convince the rest of us that the entire attack had been engineered by the Bush administration.

I remember thinking that Bush 43 wasn’t clever enough to do such a thing. And beyond that, I pondered the impossibility of everybody in that dysfunctional administration being able to keep something like that a secret.

But I soon realized that there was no point in continuing the discussion. It seemed that this man was not talking about a rational theory, but rather expounding something like a religious belief.

And I learned a long time ago that you don’t try to talk people out of their religious beliefs. No matter how crazy they are.

It’s delightful that Mozart, Lewis Carroll and Jerome Kern were all born on the same day of the year — January 27.

Imagine if the three of them had been able to collaborate! I wonder whether A.I. will eventually get to the point where we can play around with such “what if” scenarios, and produce a result that is actually good.