Ken's Blog

Ray tracing is a great way to render things in computer graphics if you want advanced features like cast shadows. Unfortunately most real world shapes are difficult to render in ray tracing.

But what if an entire world is created out of one simple type of shape, like a box? In that case, ray tracing becomes much easier.

In that spirit, I built a little scene of a ray traced room, with walls and floors and furniture and people, with everything made entirely out of boxes. You can move any object in the scene by dragging on it with your mouse.

You can also use the ← and → keys to rotate any object, and the ↑ and ↓ keys to tilt your view into the room. Check it out for yourself here.

The true birth of motion pictures did not begin with the invention of the movie camera and projector, but rather with the development of montage. Cinema as an art form began not with the first moving image, but with the first cut.

As Walter Murch teaches us, to quickly transition from one image to another mimics our internal experience of the world as a sequence of dreams. Reality is merely one of those dreams.

But a transition in dreams are not so much a cut as it is a sudden recontextualization. Currently there is no practical way for filmmakers to do that.

Yet AI assisted filmmaking will soon enable continuous transitions, in which one image dissolves quickly yet smoothly into an entirely different image. I wonder how this will impact the language of cinema.

With those new tools, will the nature of montage begin to change, to become even more explicitly like our experience of dreams? And if that happens, will future generations regard the movies of today the way we now regard those old silent movies of the pre-sound era?

I hope not.

There are days when everything happens, and then there are those days between the other days. For me, today is one of those days.

We tend to measure our lives by those times when something significant takes place. It might be a big personal success or failure, or attending a important event, or hearing about some momentous news on the world stage.

But those unassuming days between the other days are necessary too. They are the pause before the action, glue that keeps things connected, the inner stitching which holds together the fabric of our lives.

Today I would like to celebrate those inbetween days.

It seems terribly unfair that when we are stuck doing something we don’t enjoy, time seems to slow down. Yet when we are having fun, time seems to race by.

In a more sensible world, it would be the other way around. Why does time treat us so unfairly?

There are more than eight billion people on earth. Every one of them has an internal life, an entire world that exists only inside their head.

When we interact with one another, each of us only sees a sliver of that world. And even then, each of those worlds has been highly modulated in order to fit together with the social norms of our shared existence on this planet.

We have a general sense that the totality of the “experienced world” is vastly larger than the filtered down version that we all share in physical reality. But we only get to see the fullness of that vastness in glimpses, in the form of novels, memoirs and other ways that people have found to reveal their inner world.

I wonder — will advancing communication technology will make it ever more possible for us to truly visit each others’ internal world? Or will it just enable us to create the illusion that such visits are taking place?

The most effective way to introduce magic into narrative is with subtlety. For example, the flying carpets in One Hundred Years of Solitude are so effective because they are discussed casually, as though they are part of everyday life.

The same is true when you introduce a magical effect while giving a lecture. It doesn’t work to emphasize it, or do the equivalent of a child saying Ta da! when showing a conjuring trick.

If you want the magic to really have an impact, act as though it is perfectly ordinary, and something to be taken for granted. That is the way to invite your audience into a world where magic is real — which is where they really want to be.

Sometimes I put a lot of effort into a software package, only to realize later that I was aiming in the wrong direction. This is not always a failure.

That kind of experience often gives me useful insights about where I should have aimed in the first place. And then I have an opportunity to try again, refocusing into another direction.

I suspect that this process of iterating from “failure” is fairly common. People don’t like to talk about the things they tried that didn’t work, but those attempts often end up being productive in the long run.

When it comes to this sort of thing, I have my own little tongue-in-cheek mantra: You never learn from your successes.

Today I decided to turn my computer into a mirror.

Webcams are great, but they do what video cameras usually do — they show you the way others see you, rather than the way you see yourself in a mirror.

Because a mirror does a back-front image reversal, it feels like it does a left-right reversal. I wanted to capture that mirroring effect.

So I wrote a little web program to turn my computer screen into a mirror. It works best if you expand your browser to full screen.

From time to time I find myself traveling around the world, yet still having regular meetings at NYU. Of course this is only possible because of on-line tools like Zoom.

We all know that there is something missing when you are not meeting in person. But I wonder what might also be added to compensate.

Other than the convenience, what are the actual advantages of meeting remotely? I am curious to hear what others might think.

I’ve been creating a lot of formal presentations recently. Between course notes, grant proposals, and prepared talks at conferences and workshops, it seems that a lot of my day is spent assembling and polishing material to talk through for other people.

Which leads me to wonder which way the arrow of causality goes. Am I preparing all of these notes and presentations because I am trying to explain a plan, or do I have a plan because I need to present ond?

Maybe we need to explain ourselves in order to truly understand our own plans. Maybe the very act of needing to explain ourself to others is an integral part of how we know what we are doing to do next.

Happy Eclipse Day everyone!