Brain-Computer Interface

In my present tenure as a Visiting Researcher at the Institute for the Future I’ve been posting a lot of Signals pertinent to Brain-Computer Interface over at the Signtific open source research site. My Signals are listed under the tag “ProgrammableEverything”.

Check ‘em out if you’re interested in the fascinating & accelerating field of BCI. Also feel free to add your own Signals you see in the world or are engaging in your professional research.

Cheers!

Reflections on Thailand

[Extensive photo album here.]

Japan crossed with Mexico. Hack, mash, and lash everything together. Very hot and thick, humid and prone to short heavy rains. Bangkok is larger than expected, with a higher skyline. Slum-like in many ways but comfortable. Dirty, aged, grafitti’d, tagged, polluted, smelly, hungry, buggy, feral. Friendly, smiley, reverent, strong, spiritualized, watery, creative, delicious, surviving with tenacity. Temples & tenements, luxury hotels and megamalls. Insane traffic and transport. Little regard for lanes or right of way. Swarms of motorbikes, vespas. Cheap and dangerous tuk tuk 3-wheelers. Families piled onto scooters, kids asleep, baggage strapped on. Traffic flow like a logjam, shifting metal slabs moving within inches of each other, victory goes to the bold in a cloud of exhaust. The mighty Chao Phraya cutting its way through Bangkok and out to the coast, it’s headlands in the foothills below Burma. These are river people, with traffic on the waterways as busy and chaotic as the streets. The river is deep, a 1/4 mile wide, running green & tan, dirty and littered with commercial & vegetal detritus. After the rains clumps of fallen jungle float on its surface, carried down from farms and foothill tributaries. Black & yellow birds land on leafy branches half submerged to dine on nuts and berries. Water taxis from hotel to Sky Train. Fantastic monorail, the SRT, its cement track a modern work of civil engineering adding to the Tokyo vibe of downtown Bangkok.

Tangled mess of black utility cable slashing horizontal lines across most everything, tied in to huge transformers, burnt metal grills pumping amperage for the teeming metropolis of 6 million. The twisted infrastructure grows organically like a banyan, stretching out axonal to connect and communicate. Most buildings are old haggard tenements, their facades stained with a dark grey wash like grease and ash drawn out of the thick air. Structures that seem abandoned, uninhabitable, are strung with drying laundry drawn perpendicular to the necessarily ubiquitous swamp coolers lining the sides of each floor. Broken concrete fields under freeway overpasses offer football grounds lined by graffiti mural walls under chainlink divisions.

Downtown, luxury malls with Louis Vuitton and Burberry fronted by large altars of golden Buddha’s and Ganesha’s, black marble elephants flecked with gold, yellow floral garlands and incense offered by shoppers to their immaterial gods. A sign at Wat Phrao Keo in broken Thaiglish sagely, if not inadvertently, warns visitors to “Beware of your valuable possessions”. Technology, commerce, wealth, and western aesthetics have moved in with the economic development afforded here as in every other large city by the realities of globalized communication and trade.

Down crowded alleyways lined with merchant stalls and open air ad hoc kitchens, thick with pedestrians, cars, tuk tuks, and manic motorcyclists weaving through the narrow channels, over rooftop patios caged against some unseen menace, rise countless golden and white and glittery temple spires. Buddhist Wats take residence everywhere, themselves seemingly hacked into the dense fabric of the city, rising like aspirational fruiting bodies of ancient mycelial webs. Wat Arum, Wat Pho, Wat Phra Keo & the Grand Palace, and innumerable others. Religion & myth is woven throughout the populace. Every building has it’s own adjacent spirit house offering residence to the disincarnate lest they move into your own home. City walls are tacked with incense holders between stores. Banyans breaking through the sidewalks are wrapped with rainbow sashes honoring their freakish holy treeness. Every taxi has a statue on the dash or mala hanging from the rearview or Buddhist stencil on the headboard or any combination of the aforementioned. A 3-day Buddhist holiday shut down all government and banking.

The current Thai king is the longest reigning monarch of the modern age, holding office since 1950. Thailand was the only East-Asian country to resist British colonialism, sparing its autonomy by ceding a few bits of territory along the Burmese & Malay borders. Indeed there are long running conflicts with the Burmese, and Buddhist Thailand is in the midst of an insurgency along the Malaysian border from an advancing Islamic populace. The cabinet of the prime minister and the military have provided ongoing political theater as each vie back and forth for the seat of power. Most transfers of power, even in the case of multiple coups, have been bloodless. The Thai people themselves seem to have little interest in these power games, preferring a life of pragmatic spirituality while maintaining a deep abiding love and respect for the king. The two possibly mortal social offenses in Thai society are speaking ill of the Buddha and speaking ill of the king.

Farming is honored. Rubber trees and palms cover most southern land, providing two of the country’s largest exports. The Thai peninsula includes all the most breathtaking exotic tropical beach locations you could imagine, including the stunning Railay Bay – famed for the movie The Beach. Beautiful light blue waters, ridiculously warm and salty, stretched for ages across the gulf. Koh Samui running on Full Moon inertia, tourist trinkets, and scattered luxury resorts sheltered from the hustle. Low inland jungles bring minimal shade to island shanties in seemingly impossible poverty. Yet they survive & persist and move through generations like the rest of us. Koh Phangan also still milking their internationally notorious Full Moon Rave scene, adding a Half Moon party to underwrite the Euro draw. Even away from the main strips the beach scenes has a fun accidental Burning Man vibe, a shoreline esplanade of shanty bars and sound systems. Expats all over the place. Seems easy to get lost for months, years, decades in some seaside shack eating fruit and fish in a poor man’s paradise. Impossible walls of insects whip up into sudden frenzy, a cacophonous wail of screamapillars, giant cicadas that still don’t seem anywhere near big enough to make such a pitch. Monkey troops swing across canopies carpeting tall rock slabs jutting from the water. A rock climber’s joy, sheer faces hung with dripping stalactites and pocked with rope tie-ins. These tall rocks are scattered by the hundreds – thousands? – across the Gulf of Thailand and Andaman Sea. A boater’s paradise. You could spend months exploring thin beaches stretched around the edges of countless small jungle rock islands.

In the South, each night was attended by thunderstorm, often over sea or above the island peaks. Big black charcoal canvas lumbering across, flicker flashed with lightning bursts every few moments, often too distant to hear the thunderclap, then a sudden ear-shattering rend of ozone right above. When the heavy rains hit they come quickly and with ferocity. Never seen rain like it. So thick that it occluded line of sight to 20 meters or so, hiding everything beyond in watery showers. From the steep island peaks water rushes down in sudden rivers cutting through beach sands, pushing tan clouds out into the bay, a shimmering clear layer of fresh water forcing the saline back out over the ocean’s surface. Giant raindrops agitate the bugs forcing them to take flight in peppery swarms. Small opportunistic swift-like birds take to the skies darting and arching, turning and diving to pluck the insects mid-air in some ancient deeply programmed ballet of the food chain. Life goes on. It must. When rains come often and fiercely you can’t just drop your business. This was especially so in Bangkok whose streets are lined with tirelessly deployed open markets bare to the sky save for a small canvas over each. In 20 or 30 minutes the rain will likely pass so there’s no point in worrying much about the interlude.

While the deep south is struggling with a mounting Islamic insurgency, and the peninsula is attending the construction of more new mosques, the buddhist majority continues to permeate life with the spirit of their patron, accompanied by a host of Garuda and Nagas and a menagerie of mythic beasties syncretized from India and China. If Thai Buddhist Bangkok is feral and lashed and relentlessly modded in ghetto slapdash, the Bangkok Chinatown is 10x more so compressed into tighter alleyways, with more people and motorcylces (Vespas apparently seek Chinatown to live out their golden years), hung with impossibly more spaghetti cables, and festooned with walls of neon Mandarin signage casting a little too much light onto freakish displays of animal carcass and presumably inedible seafood and giant transparent sacks of fried pork product and stall after stall of fashionable Versace & Loius Vuitton knock-offs. Imagine threading your way down a dark, narrow alley lined with flea market stalls and no-health-code/no-insurance open air cart kitchens, filled with people pressing in all directions through dense heat and smell and rot, then send a motorcycle down the alley every few moments to do battle with cross-traffic carts and tuk tuks. Now imagine the alley is a whole network labyrinth covering multiple blocks between several-story tenaments streaked with black soot and stain and hung with drying clothes and black cables. This is why we western pansies stay in the nice hotel with A/C and a pool.

The final capper to the trip was in Bangkok the night before our departure. After the evening rains subsided, my partner and I went down to the pool for a night swim, around 9pm. Refreshing and fun we frolicked and generally soaked up the remaining moments of our stay. Then, in the poolside darkness moving low between the lounge chairs, I saw a large reptilian form lumbering along. “Dude, there’s a fricken alligator coming towards the pool!” I exclaimed excitedly. As it marched into the light we realized it was actually a monitor lizard – Varanus salvator, to be precise – about 5-6ft long with a fattened belly like it just ate a dog or possibly a small European child. “If that thing gets in the water, we get out immediately” I said with some urgency. I knew it could swim and see underwater much better than we could. No reason to tangle with a 6ft thunderlizard in a foreign country with questionable health care. Sure enough the beast slipped into the pool and sidled along the swim-up bar. We hopped out, laughing nervously, and I approached the lizard from a careful distance. Grabbing the pool attendant I motioned towards the monster. “That’s bad”, he said in a way that suggested that, bad as it may be, it wasn’t unusual. And so he casually splashed the creature with water nudging it along until it climbed out of the pool slowly, begrudgingly, made it’s way back into the riverside brush. It was easily the biggest lizard I’d ever seen in the wild.

The final day we were denied pool access during a particularly solid rain. When it’s always 90+ degrees & 90+% humidity, swimming in the rain is quite nice. But no, we were not allowed. “Why?” I protested. “Lightning” retorted the attendant. Fair enough, I thought. Then, in a casual but cautionary aside, the attendant reflected, “We had an accident last year”. This is the Bangkok Riverside Marriott, a fancy if not dated family hotel. Apparently buried somewhere deep in the boilerplate legalese fine print of our hotel contract is the clause, “Marriott Properties takes no liability in the event of any hotel guest or visitor getting suddenly struck by lightning and then slowly eaten by ferocious monitor lizards”.

Notes From Metaverse University 2009 – The State of Virtual Worlds

I attended the Friday session of Metaverse University 2009 at Stanford last week. Here are some of my observations:

Themes: interoperability, open source, simulations, visualizations, breaking down the walls, and being stuck with Second Life. Little emphasis on chat and social networking, per se. Much more emphasis on architectures & component solutions.

Trends from Virtual Worlds Roadmap: simulation & training, health care, augmented tourism, mixed-reality museums, live sporting events in VW’s, virtual meetings.

Overview:
While the hype over virtual worlds has faded, many serious researchers continue to do fascinating work in the territory. Monetization of a good VW strategy is still needed but this goal seems to have receded into the future for many of the speakers, as well as many of the enterprise-scale companies investigating these spaces who seem less interested in making money (either through direct development and monetization or by riding the public hypetrain) and more interested in gaining efficiencies and trimming overhead (teleconferencing, remote collaboration).

Google (O3D), Intel (Cable Beach), Sun Microsystems (Project Wonderland), Samsung (Virtual Worlds Roadmap), and Nokia (supporting REalXtend) were all present, as well as many Stanford researchers, including the folks building Sirikata. Many are working to extend the OpenSim fork of the Second Life platform. None of them seem to be working towards direct productization (though Google wants O3D to be the in-browser standard for 3D content) but each were working to advance the platform and explore future possibilities.

With monetization off the table and money drying up, researchers are moving to embrace open source solutions (OpenSim, ScienceSim, Ogre3D) and pushing for open standards (OpenId, OAuth, XMPP) and flexible API’s. Almost everyone mentioned a desire to move away from the proprietary walled-garden approach towards an integrative one that looks to the success of social network strategies. While celebrating open source development of Second Life forks, almost everyone bemoaned being stuck on the platform, often underscoring the feeling with a groan that “there’s nothing else”.

Authoring was rarely addressed with content instead being re-purposed from upstream solutions, eg using 3DSMax & Maya content to build world content. Collada was uniformly mentioned as the exchange format. Most developers still want to shoehorn other modalities (eg PowerPoint, web browsing, document collab, etc) into the VW space. Some examples inadvertantly showed the clunkiness of current solutions. I asked why a technology like PowerPoint is any better in 3D than in 2D, eliciting a long pause from the presenter. There’s still a lot of ambition on the part of developers but not always a ton of common sense.

However, IBM’s manager of service design and service systems research, Susan Stucky, gave me the most reasonable answer I’ve heard yet about why it’s important to move 2D modalities into 3D. She said that for collaborative telepresence it was very helpful to have access to everything you would normally have access to in a meeting. Speaking with her at the break, she told me how IBM has found that the greatest use of their Second Life investment has come from the ability to bring employees and clients from around the world together into a collaborative space. They’ve held conferences, run meetings, and explored simulations of project management strategies. For her, the ROI was gained by telepresence & simulations.

And for me, I had a breakthrough speaking with Susan. One of the most compelling yet least-obvious values of collaboration in virtual worlds is the sense of embodiment conveyed by the presence of the avatar. Identity, social cohesion, team building, and friendship arise more naturally when those engaged are perceived as physically present. Self-awareness and the projection of self onto others is still quite bound to our physical bodies. Perhaps combining the embodiment of avatars with in-world access to knowledge & productivity tools represents a more effective modality for non-local collaboration. I’m not sure how this compares to video teleconferencing but I feel there’s a lot of depth to be explored in how virtual embodiment reinforces social cohesion & collaboration (attn: PhD candidates).

Other notables: Henry Lowood (Stanford Curator of History of Science, Media, & Genetics) speaking on The Ultimate Archive: building virtual museums of virtual world platforms inside virtual worlds (eg a virtual museum with a room that lets you play the first Doom level as it was originally). He noted both “perfect capture” (all the data can be archived) and “perfect loss” (experiences, emotions, and deleted content cannot be captured) in VW archiving. Sheldon Brown (Center for Research in Computing in the Arts, UCSD) showed his mind-bending work Scalable City and called for procedurally deriving world assets and behaviorally deriving world experiences.

Analysis:
Virtual Worlds have lost funding and are presently in the Valley of Hype. Effective monetization strategies have yet to reveal themselves. However, there is value to the enterprise in leveraging virtual worlds for telepresence and collaboration, simulation & training. The VW community is moving the R&D towards openness: open source components, open standards, interoperability, and engaging with the platforms and principles of social networks to enhance connectivity and move away from the Walled Garden. The most interesting work with virtual worlds continues to be in the deeper realms of behavior, psychology, telepresence, and simulations. Graphically, everyone is apparently stuck in Second Life. A smart, well-funded private investor would build a platform with the competitive graphics capabilities (surface mesh, brep, kinematics, HLSL, etc), a powerful and scalable object model that can push to XML/RDF/RSS, a powerful simulation engine with an expressive visualization/analytics front-end, a REST/JSON API capable of talking to agents, tools, and other VW’s (as well as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, SMS, Playstation Network, XBox Network, etc), integrate ActiveX embedding of 2D tools (Office apps, browsers, etc), enable a content marketplace built around highly expressive and personalizable avatars and fetish objects, and cultivate a 3rd part service ecosystem supporting all of the above.

Is this so hard? ;)

Las Vegas Tweet Round-Up

I stayed in Las Vegas for a few nights this week to see Jane’s Addiction at The Pearl. A large part of me loathes much of what Vegas is (and by “Vegas” I’m mainly referring to The Strip and its satellites – no offense to the folks who live in the city) yet I can’t help but be mesmerized and amazed at the sheer scale of fantasy on sale there in the wasteland of the Nevada high desert. It is by all accounts an impossible mirage, timeless and ephemeral, drawing in the seekers, fleecing them, and sending them back home like it never existed. Inevitably, it seems it will fall back into the desert as Lake Meade dries up and the drought deepens, leaving behind skeletons of a once mighty empire. Caesar’s Palace may retain it’s name but Nero is the ruler of today’s Vegas.

Anyway, here are my tweets from the trip, in chronological order:

- Heading off to Sin City for glittering nights & saltine days before it all dries up & blows away. #NIN/JA2009 New Aeon Rat Pack 8:55 AM May 17th
- Have successfully played my role as cattle/combatant/customer in SanJoseAirport security theater. Now matriculated to cargo. 10:22 AM May 17th
- Tarmac running to the jetwash mirage of Las Vegas. 12:06 PM May 17th
- Vegas directs its formidable will at constantly maintaining the illusion of plenty. Super Size everything while the desert bides its time… 4:41 PM May 17th
- Vegas, in a nutshell: http://twitpic.com/5ew00 10:21 PM May 17th
- everything about this city is designed to separate me from my money. call me the mark. 12:29 AM May 18th
- Vegas commodifies dreams and the easy score, selling back crumbs at criminal markups, preying on mammon & ruin. 12:02 PM May 18th
- A sign of my age: hoping to trade my #NIN/JA floor tickets for seats. 1:13 PM May 18th
- Little fluffy clouds march relentlessly across the ancient Nevada desert as spacemen floating high above tweet us thermospheric thoughts. 1:45 PM May 18th
- As growth stalls, Vegas withdraws into the strip to focus on sustaining the mirage. The illusion thrives at the expense of the sprawl. 2:35 PM May 18th
- Recent NPR story spoke of tracts of abandoned LV tenaments haunted by erratic chirpings: the sound of fire detectors with dying batteries. 2:40 PM May 18th
- About 2M people inhabit Las Vegas. Nellis AFB brought federal stimulus; the mob & Howard Hughes built The Strip. 5:19 PM May 18th
- Deserts are like seas, vast & deep. In this The Strip is a glowing lure above the gaping maw of a dark desert angler. 5:25 PM May 18th
- You think you’re about to score a nice meal but really you are the prey about to feed something much larger. 5:26 PM May 18th
- got tix sorted. now heading to The Pearl for NIN/JA with @jingleyfish & friends. w00t! 7:28 PM May 18th
- Goddamn i love Jane’s Addiction 12:31 AM May 19th
- crawling the vegas strip with the good dr 1:17 AM May 19th
- new dreams waking with the sun on the fiery vegas strip, raging towards another night 5:49 AM May 19th
- ack. marinating in ambient cigarette smoke on the casino floor. 4:31 PM May 19th
- your trowelled-on cake facade masks the withering age of dessicated bones, too long standing on sore heels to hawk & bark a distant fantasy 4:37 PM May 19th
- Ruminating w/ @jingleyfish about the resource usage profile of the Vegas strip. How much does this desert fantasy consume? Is it a threat? 5:52 PM May 19th
- To paraphrase the bubbling hatery, is Vegas a “cankar needing to be excised”? Carbon tax would likely crush phallic wavings of Wynn et al. 5:56 PM May 19th
- sleepless pineal cascade, flush with endogenous indole, wondering if im really still stuck in this airport 7:27 PM May 19th
- on the ground rolling back to santa cruz. crowd-induced stabby mysanthropy subsiding. actual sleep nigh iminent. 10:24 PM May 19th

Julian Bleeker – Design Fiction: A Short Talk on Design, Science, Fact, and Fiction. [Etech09 Notes]

My raw notes from Julian Bleeker’s talk at E-Tech 2009 – Design Fiction: A Short Talk on Design, Science, Fact, and Fiction. [This is a topic near & dear to my heart. Compelling narrative writes the future.]

“To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete” Bucky Fuller. “Future is here it’s just not evenly distributed” W. Gibson. Near Future Lab and Nokia. Convergence between design, science, fact & fiction. Ways to meaningfully shape the future. Science, fact & fiction are all knotted up. Eg moments from films, eg Minority Report. How did minority report as a film become a meme around advanced speculative interface? Google search on “Minority Report” returns a muddling between the film and real experiments.

Imaginary worlds become instantiated in the real world. Becomes an index that helps cohere imagination around a desire to realize the speculative fiction. Expectations of what realized tech should do typically reference the prevailing fictional representation. Eg GSpeak – company looking at gestural interfaces, started by the guy that informed tech of Minority Report. Moved from fictional authority to real authority.

Stories Matter More Than Features, Specs & Engineering. The framing of a new idea helps transmit it and engage people to act on it or bring it to realization. Compelling fiction makes the effect of the tech transparent and easily understood. Eg don’t need to spend any time talking about the gestural interface in Minority Report – it explains itself. Eg Jurassic Park leading to Time cover about Dinosaurs. Conflating fact and fiction to look forward. Diegetic Prototype, “diegesis” the moment of the narrative – David A. Kirby. “Diegetic prototypes have a major rhetorical advantage over true prototypes”. Stories matter when designing the future.

Science Fiction Can Do Things Science Fact Cannot. A hybrid of the two can do more than either alone. Science fiction is much better at circulating scientific knowledge than real science. The narrative is compelling, the delivery is humanized. Expands the realm of possible futures. eg Star Trek, How William Shatner Changed the World; Star Fleet Technical Manual. Eg Death Star over San Francisco. Eg Dark Knight.

Entanglements between fact & fiction. Finding productive ways to allow the crossover. Highlighting the concern over ubicomp & surveillance. Eg Listening Post (Hansen & Rubin) displays conversations on the network. EG 2001 Filming the Future. Kubrik & Arthur C. Clark worked with scientists and ET researchers to better inform the narrative presentation. Conflict of what is imagined and what comes to pass. Possible challenges, pitfalls, and failures.

Why Muddle Design, Science, Fact, & Fiction? It’s valuable to explain, to imagine, to materialize ideas, and speculate about different kinds of worlds. How might the world transform itself and address the challenges that face us today? Using narrative to inform what might come to pass. Think of PKDick as a System Administrator. There are insights to be had when reading Bruce Sterling as Software Documentation.

Helps to Think of Science Fiction Props as Conclusion to Today’s Engineering Prototypes. What is the world like, what are their daily routines, and how are these things affected by the speculative tech? http://cli.gs/designfictionessay (failure is important so dystopias are valuable to show us what not to do, rethink and reflect on the proposition).

E-Tech 2009 Twitter Round-up

Here’s a selection of my tweets from the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference this past week. These are the ones I think grab the juicy nuggets from the speaker’s presentations. [In temporal order with the earliest (ie Monday eve) listed first.]

Tim O’Reilly: “We have greatness but have wasted it on so much. ”
We have an unprecedented opportunity to build a digital commonwealth. #etech
Work on something that matters to you more than money. This is a robust strategy. #etech
Niall Kennedy: Energy Star rating for web apps? Thinking of clouds & programming like tuning a car for better gas mileage. #etech
Cloud computing: no reasonable expectation of privacy when data is not in your hands. Not protected by 4th amendment. #etech
Alex Steffen: Problems with water supply are based in part on our lack of beavers. #etech
Social media for human rights. http://hub.witness.org #etech
Gavin Starks – Your Energy Identity & Why You Should Care. see http://amee.com #etech
Maureen Mclugh – Consider that technology may be evolving in ways that are not particularly interested in us. #etech
Becker, Muller: We have under-estimated the costs and over-estimated the value of our economy. #etech
Becker, Muller: We assume economic trade must be the primary framing of value in our lives. Why? #etech
Design Patterns for PostConsumerism: Free; Repair Culture; Reputation Scaled; Loanership Society; Virtual Production. #etech
NYT: emerging platforms, text reflow, multitouch, flexy displays, smart content, sms story updates, sensors, GPS localized content. #etech
Jeremy Faludi: Buildings & transport have the largest impact on climate change. Biggest bang for the buck in re-design. #etech
Jeremy Faludi – Biggest contributor to species extinction & habitat loss is encroachment & byproducts from agriculture. #etech
Jeremy Faludi – Best strategies to vastly reduce overpopulation: access to birth control & family planning, empowerment of women. #etech
Tom Raftery: Grid 1.0 can’t manage excess power from renewables. Solution: electric cars as distributed storage. #etech
Considering the impact of pluging AMEE (@agentGav) data in ERP systems for feedback to biz about supply chain impacts. BI meets NRG ID.
Mike Mathieu: Data becoming more important than code. Civic data is plentiful and largely untapped. Make civic apps! #etech
Mike Mathieu: Take 10 minutes today and pick your crisis. Figure out how to create software to help. #etech
What is #SantaCruz doing to make civic data available to service builders? We want to help SC be healthier & more productive.
Mark Fraunfelder: “I haven’t heard of anybody having great success with automatic chicken doors.” #etech [re-emerging technology]
Realities of energy efficiency: 1gallon of gasoline = ~1000hrs of human labor. #etech
Kevin Lynch: Adobe is saving over $1M annually just by managing energy. #etech
Designing backwards: Think about the destiny of the item before thinking about he initial use. (via Brian Dougherty) #etech
RealTimeCity: physical & digital space merges, people incorporate intelligent systems, cities react in accord w/needs of pub welfare. #etech
Oh my we’re being LIDAR’d while Zoe Keating plays live cello n loops. ZOMG!!!
zoe keating & live lidar is blowing my mind at #etech 1.3M points per sec!
Julian Bleeker cites David A. Kirby: “Diegetic prototypes have a major rhetorical advantage over true prototypes” #etech
Julian Bleeker: Stories matter when designing the future, eg. Minority Report. #etech
Julian Bleeker: “Think of Philip K. Dick as a System Administrator. #etech
Rebecca MacKinnon: Which side are we helping, River Crabs or Grass Mud Horses? #etech
Kati London: How can we use games to game The System and how can they be used to solve civic problems? #etech
Nathan Wolfe: Trying to fight pandemics only at the viral human level ignores deep socioeconomic causes of animal-human transmission. #etech
Nathan Wolfe, re: viral jump from animal to human populations: “What happens in central Africa doesn’t stay in central Africa.”
Nathan Wolfe: need to work with % of population w/ hi freq of direct contact with animals for early detection of viral transmission.
Nathan Wolfe: Vast majority of biosphere is microscopic, mostly bacterial & viral. Humans: very small piece of life on Earth. #etech

Another Rant: On the Cloud, Augmented Reality, & the Networked World

[This is a reply I left recently to a Global Futures question about the near-future of the web. It goes a little off-topic at the end but such is the risk of systems analysis. Everything's connected.]

Within 10-15 years mobile devices will constantly interact with the world around us, analyzing objects, faces, signage, locations, and anything else their sensors can engage. Camera viewfinders will identify visual sources using algorithms to match them up with cloud data repositories. Bluetooth and GPS will interact on sub-channels silently exchanging relationships with embedded sensors across devices and objects. A user’s mobile device will become their IP address hosting much of their profile information and mediating relationships across social nets, commercial transactions, security clearances, and the array of increasingly smart objects and devices.

Cloud access and screen presence will be nearly ubiquitous further blurring the line between desktop, laptop, server, mobile devices, and the objects in our world. It will all be screens interfacing between data, objects, and humans. Amidst the overwhelming data/content glut we will outsource mathematical chores to cloud agents dedicated to scraping data and filtering the bits that are pertinent to our personalized affinities and needs. These data streams will be highly dynamic and cloud agents will send them to rich media layers that will render the results in comprehensible and meaningful displays.

The human sensorium and its interaction with reality will be highly augmented through mobile devices that layer rich information over the world around us. The digital world will move heavily into the natural analog world as the boundaries between the two further erode. This will be readily apparent in the increasing amount of communication we will receive from appliances, vehicles, storefronts, other people, animals, and even plants all wired to the cloud. Meanwhile, cloud agents will sort through vast amounts of human behavioral information creating smart profiles and socioeconomic and environmental systems models with incredible complexity and increasing predictive ability. The cloud itself will be made more intelligible to agents by the standardization of semantic web protocols implemented into most new sites and services. Agents will concatenate to tie services together into meta-functions, just as human collectives will be much more common as we move into increasingly multicellular functional bodies.

The sense of self and our philosophical paradigms will be iterating and revising on an almost weekly basis as we spread out across the cloud and innumerable virtual spaces connected through instantaneous communication. Virtual worlds themselves will be increasingly common but will break out of the walled-garden models of the present, allowing comm channels and video streams to move freely between them and the social web. World of Warcraft will have live video feeds from in-world out to device displays. Mobile GPS will report a user’s real-world location as well as their virtual location, mashing both into Google Maps and the SketchUp-enabled virtual map of the planet.

All of this abstraction will press back on the world and create even greater value for real face-to-face interactions. Familial bonds will be more and more cherished and local communities will take greater and greater control of their lives away from unreliable global supply chains and profit-driven corporate bodies. Most families will engage in some form of gardening to supplement their food supply. The state itself will be hollowed out through over-extended conflicts and insurgencies coupled with ongoing failures to manage domestic civic instabilities. Power outages and water failures will be common in large cities. This will of course further invigorate alternative energy technologies and shift civic responsibilities to local communities. US manufacturing will have partially shifted towards alternative energy capture and storage but much of the real successes will be in small progressive towns rallying around local resources, small-scale fab, and pre-existing economic successes.

All in all, the future will be a rich collage. Totally new and much the same as it has been.

MMOGs and CCTVs: 3D Games For Spectators

Killer feature: Immersive gaming companies like Rockstar, Blizzard, ID, Epic, NCsoft, Valve et al should implement a way for game server admins to tap live in-scene camera feeds that can be bussed out to HTML. Liberty City should have public CCTV’s that viewers can watch from their browser or mobile client. Like a virtual Adam’s Block people could tune in to an alleyway or freeway underpass and let the action unfold in the streets below. World builders should enable first/third-person game cameras to send their viewport to Flash embeds.

Imagine tuning into a South Korean Quake deathmatch tournament as a spectator and being able to view the world through the game eyes of the champion or to switch across various fixed camera feeds in corridors, over walkways, and above central arenas to witness the gameplay from alternate angles. It might seem odd in sports-addled America and the UK but in Asia hundreds of millions are online and they love 3D gaming. The gameworld becomes a performance space. Second Life could finally entertain more than just the local cliques by broadcasting the actions of art collectives and protest groups out to the world.

It doesn’t take much effort to see how this multiplies the available media advertising real-estate considerably. Fixed camera views become hot advert property rented to savvy marketers who know they can reach both the local gamers and the viewing masses. Attention property goes meta. This is a two-way street as external feeds begin to pipe into the game worlds. The walls really start coming down when you can take a cellphone call in-game and then wave to the camera for your friends to see. They take a screenshot and then send it to the clan web site and the GTA Flickr feed that gets displayed on the side of a building in downtown Liberty City. Sponsored by Verizon of course.

Blizzard claims something like 10 million regular users of World of Warcraft. Their WoW wikia page is the largest collection of data on anything in the world. You think they might be interested in being able to view their clan members remotely and communicate with them at any time? Or tune into video feeds showing the night elves in Darnassus, or watch the pass at Chillwind’s Point? (Truth: I googled these.) And if Blizzard wins the fight to keep the gameworld free from advertising, marketers can accrete around the popular viewing channels and their Flash embeds.

These worlds are dark clouds, opaque from all but those that pay the playing fee. Yet there’s so much entertainment and interest and real human nature playing out in these worlds. People will watch. Agents will sift through the user data feeds streaming out along with the A/V feeds. And think of the up-sell as viewers convert to players. Someday I’m certain some of the reality tv channels on my mobile device will be looking into such immersive worlds and showing me where in my friends are and who they’re battling and what type of car they just jacked for a joyride through Liberty City. (I *really* want the GTA CCTV’s!)

Reality TV & the Eyes of the World

Cars buzz along at remarkable speeds, occasionally screeching around the corner or stomping on their breaks to avoid oblivious pedestrians. An SUV parks on the curb and 5 men dressed in dark clothes emerge bobbling around in the manner of slightly drunken friends rolling from one event to another. A tall lanky man drags himself along the sidewalk with a staggered gait, half-limping in hazy diagonals across the concrete. People sit on the sidewalk while elders riding Rascal scooters roll past them. A lone bulky figure walks slowly then stops to wave across the road. A man jogs up to him and reaches for his hand with one arm, wrapping his other around him in a hug. They seem like old friends but then quickly part striding in opposite directions. Sirens echo off in the city canyons. Another grey figure stumbles along, pauses, turns and simply stares up into the sky for some interminable duration before turning around and stumbling back the way he came.

This is Adam’s Block. The little slice of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district surveilled by Adam Jackson and his two webcams. People spend hours just watching the street life, commenting below the cam views in a streaming chat window joking and speculating about the seedy and probably illegal nature of many of the transactions they witness. This is the new age of discovery masquerading as entertainment. A time where increasingly finite fragments of the human experience are being witnessed and shared shared across the species. This is humanity observing itself and peering into the every crack of life.

Adam’s Block is riding a wave of buzz after a number of high-profile TV news shows gave him national coverage. His page is registering an average visit time of 2.5 hours – an unheard of number for any web page. The simple web cam is out-competing the most zealous media outlets. Hollywood constructed the simulacrum in which dreams could be manufactured. Reality TV broke the paradigm by televising so-called real life. Such a compelling notion faltered when the scripts and directors meticulously crafting the narratives were exposed. Now, the YouTube generation is finding entertainment in the very homes and streets of the world around them. Human life, it seems, is immensely fascinating. We’re all stars in the New Reality TV.

As Hollywood flails with more and more recycled pap and the music industry guards its shareholders by never taking risks, preferring the safe profits squeezed from the next big media clone, the public hungers for authenticity and novelty. Content industries have become so conservative and profit-driven that real expression and entertainment is mostly squeezed out and marginalized. The inevitable response is the current democratization of media content that is completely redefining the broadcast industry. The viewers are taking over the network.

Life is vastly more diverse and compelling than 98% of what corporate media churns out for consumption. And this hints at the bull in the china shop of the Information Age: the best content is free content. Profit seems to erode authenticity and inevitably manages to calcify even the most creative minds. The experience of entertainment is shifting into the experience of life in all it’s detail, leaving business to hustle whatever it can from the narrowing interstices of observer & observed.

The Google paradigm is effectively partitioning content creation from many of the fiscal interests that feed on it. It’s only getting easier and easier for an individual to record, edit, publish, and share content. Adam’s Block runs on a host server, a couple of webcams, and some simple web programming. He can leave for the weekend and the feed continues to pump out quality slice-of-life entertainment while the community of viewers adds their own content and data. An incredibly simple setup is delivering one of the roughest parts of San Francisco to potentially millions of people across the globe. For ill or good, such remote voyeurism is the new media. The lo-fi street is now competing with big-budget properties of mainstream media.

Adam’s Block is only the beginning. YouTube and video is now the dominant bandwidth usage across the web. More and more free tools will arise on the mobile web platform to make it easy for anyone to share content. More cams will go online just to glimpse and capture the daily movements of humanity. The Shiba Inu puppy cam is hugely popular and viewers are hanging on every day to see the pups grow. Justin.tv is growing with hundreds of live video channels. Cameras and screens are spreading out to capture & mediate the world. CCTV channels will open and network, bringing public access to formerly-private cameras. Imagine Neighborhood Watch leveraging every open webcam in the area to reduce crime. Or local transport authorities deriving congestion patterns. Police & emergency services will increasingly use public cams to reinforce their existing information networks. Temporary wireless field cams will be deployed to capture & broadcast events, demonstrations, and invasions. Even now Qik turns a mobile phone into a live streaming video capture device. One user was recently expelled from China for streaming a Free Tibet protest to the world. The world of voyeurs is crowdsourcing the legions of self-made journalists, investigators, and sociologists. We are finding, witnessing, revealing, recording, & archiving everything that catches our eye because, really, beneath the creeping malaise of the daily grind, it’s all absolutely mind-bogglingly amazing.

Soon the video stream will separate and become transparent, revealing the rich array of data within. Video will be object-taggable and searchable. Video content will be scanned by image recognition algorithms and sent to cloud servers to identify known matches. Bots will watch streams and add their own semantic layers to the timeline, customized to serve whichever analyst or advertiser employs them. Yelp users will be revealed by their mobile GPS, identified on video by alpha channel text as they walk into the camera viewport. Increasingly network-aware vehicles and devices will communicate to cameras augmented with radio transmitters that read remote RFIDs. Clothing and accessories will be designed to communicate directly to the eyes and agents of the global panopticon, while street tech will evolve to render users invisible to the ever-present eyes of the world. And why limit to the real world? Video streams will soon provide web portals peering into virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto. Information, culture, and networks are all merging around the individual, helping us better navigate our world and communicate & collaborate with our allies, while abstracting our very selves out into distributed digital networks.

Still, people stream past the staggering beggar on the sidewalk who turns to find some human moment with a woman in a wheelchair parked at curb edge. Below the cam view, the chat window scrolls ceaselessly meandering between rude humor at the expense of the homeless and casual comments among emerging clicks of remote viewers who know more about the SF Tenderloin than they do about each other. The world is getting smaller and smaller but is it getting any friendlier? What will become of the simple grace of human touch and the ionized charge of air between hands and hearts face-to-face against the deepening hypermediation of life lived through inumerable screens? How is such tech helping people and communities? Given the option, would viewers click to donate money to help lift these people out of the brutal poverty of their lives? Or do screens make everyone into hollow actors always capering solely for our amusement?

Obama/Simpson 2008 (video)

Homer Simpson tries to vote for Obama from Randy on Vimeo.

Brief Notes on the Collective Mind and the Death of Truth

There is a fundamental element of social construction and adaptive behavior emerging here at the dawn of the 3rd millenium CE. The theory isn’t new, but the larger-than-life spectacle of the 2008 US election cycle and the attending catastrophic meltdown of global capital is reinforcing it’s pragmatic application. Amidst these crises the competitive mechanisms of control and persuasion are grabbing as much airtime as possible to capitalize on the power vacuum opened with the shattering of the old paradigm. Everyone is rushing in to assert their agenda and make one last valiant stand at defending their personal dogma.

The Cartesian universe established the illusion of truth and rationality. Rennaissance thinkers submitted that reason was the best path. Yet it’s clear that humans are highly emotional creatures often far less motivated by logic than biology. Even our physics has betrayed rationalism, now merely a thin veneer of structure over an inherently non-dual soup. Dualism is no longer an effective metaphor to represent the complexities of the world we witness. We are at once possessed of great convictions, yet whimsically dizzied by the myriad of possible realities before us. We are children waking to adulthood, both strong and vulnerable.

Biology compels us to adapt our behaviors. Or die trying. The energy and food crunch reminds us that, even after so many long and determined aeons of civilized life, we’re still essentially a balkanized mess of tribal apes competing for resources. All mechanisms of power basically roll up to this core mandate of the human operating system. The last 50 years or so have radically altered the stage of our evolution, establishing a massive abstraction layer spanning almost all human endeavor: the Noosphere of Teilhard de Jardin. The modern competitive environment, while rooted in the flesh, is increasingly a domain of the mind. Those who understand this and act to influence the construct have demonstrated a competitive advantage, though often more in the service of biological imperative than any noble commitment to the collective.

The ability to manage social narratives has become an adaptive differentiator in an increasingly mediated world. It is not just the recognition that a narrative exists around all things that occur on the public stage, but that this narrative must be deliberately crafted and managed in order to successfully compete and advance in the game of life. This is a defining element of the modern stage and one that has only become possible within the vast infrastructure of global communication heaved up across the planet over the last hundred years.

By nature of our participation in this shared abstraction, much of our lives now exist in a consensual representation. We’re all so connected that the apprehension, interface, and understanding of life itself is increasingly a collective experience. So much content of humanity is abstracted, uploaded, shared and discussed, buzzing in frenetic cycles that get shorter and shorter every day. We are a hive becoming aware of itself but the thing we behold is not a Platonic truth. It is a consensual creation.

What truth exists is the validity of the moment. The weight of the news cycle. Which prevailing current has the greatest mindshare? Who has the most eyes? As Heisenberg predicted, the truth lies in the observation and the collapsing of the eigenstate. It is only a momentary concrescence quickly enfolded back into a sea of possibility. The Simulacrum is moving so fast now and is so rich with compelling content flickering across the full polemic spectrum, that Truth has ceded to attention. Attention is the foundation of influence. What undergoes the formality of becoming is a matter of debate, not destiny. Indeed, the unfolding of history itself is becoming a product of the human marketplace of ideas. Memes with the most persuasion are writing the future. Our collective world is crafted in large part by those who seize the narrative. Karl Rove, Frank Luntz, and Roger Ailes are perhaps the greatest masters of this emerging social adaptation.

If reality tv has taught us anything, it’s that integrity and community will always be challenged by amoralistic, self-interested actors; and that some people will inevitably sacrifice humanity for success. We are being trained to look past any moral failings and honor the mechanical skill in effectively manipulating the game to one’s advantage. Whether by muscle or cleverness, victors arise on the backs of those they out-compete. Yet more and more the battleground lies in the minds of the people and that strange interstitial space of mediated discourse.

Now, amidst financial and constitutional meltdown the very machine of civilization is called into question, the minds of the masses are left awed and exposed, eyes wide in the headlights of seeming doom, mouth agape pleading silently for context and leadership, ready for the next distraction, misdirection, scapegoat or salvation, preserved only by mad poets, fevered musicians, relentless philosophers and the like more inclined to loving than fighting, though perhaps just as drunk on the powers of Life. Opportunists are racing to grab center stage and push the story in their preferred direction, hoping the narrative is stronger than the needs and expressions of the human social animal.

The battle is on and the territory has shifted – “the hearts and minds of America” are at stake. This is deeper than it appears on the surface. We are on the edge of a knife. Progressives, leftists, and peacenicks of all stripes must engage the social construct and actively manage the narrative. It’s not enough to offer the most logical solution. Indeed, the opposition will seize on this as another example of “liberal intellectualism”. The rules of the game have evolved and we must play it or perish. If Truth is dead and history is written by the victors, then the ideals of life, liberty, happiness, and peace need the best marketing team on Earth.

But dig: though the annals of Respect implore us to hate the Game not the Player, beware of such moral relativism and it’s erosive impact on integrity. Do not absolve the player of responsibility. Do not cast your votes merely on who plays the game most effectively. The rules themselves are a fluid property of narrative and we would all do well to keep in mind the social ideals of community and cooperation. Check yourself, lest you wreck yourself.

Fractured Reality Through Augmentation?

If we’re heading towards a time when the average person is looking at the world through augmented reality overlays – mobile camera readers, HUD glasses, implants superimposing datas on the “real world” – how much of reality will still be shared? Will the building I see be the same as those around me? Will reality itself begin to fragment into inumerable niche channels? Is it already? What will this do to our sense of self & space? Is this any different than the existing degree of sub-genre-fication that divides our cultures through class & affiliation? How do local communities find strength amidst a rising tide of non-local belonging?

Some Fundamentals of Virtual World Immersion

Here’s a relatively concise list of elements I feel are required for a truly modern immersive world experience. This list includes some basic requirements as well as those forward-looking and convergent technologies defining the new digital world. Roughly in order of importance:

Life – agents, animals, vegetation, vehicles, flocking, emergent interactions
Particles – trash debris, dust, fluids, bugs & birds, all dynamic
Lighting – variant & dynamic, color shifts, shading, sun/moon tracking
Physics – collision, substance, weight, gravity, limits, damage
Audio – locational sounds, ambiance, music, machines, voices, life
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Time – periodic day & night, false(game) time vs. real-time, sun & moon(s)
Weather – wet, dry, clouds, fog, sunsets, wind, tides, waves, storms
Seasons & Schedules – weather, light, plant growth/senescence, trains/buses, clothing, habits, migrations
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Affordances – findability in & across worlds/nets, location, mapping, geocaching
Communication – in-world, out-world, across social nets, mobiles
Identity – user metadata, visible profiles, affiliations, interests, skills, media, world stats
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Interaction – with users, agents, objects, machines, architecture, landscape
Narrative – goals, needs, desires, food/money/health/tools/tech/toys
Authoring – persistent in-world modding, grafitti, tagging, comments, construction, destruction
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Media – in-world & out-world news, rss/video/SMS/Twitter/datafeeds, radio/mobile/tv/web
Record & Broadcast – user & world cameras, vids pushed to net broadcast, user record/publish, broadcast to in-world channels/spaces

2016 Metaverse Roadmap

I’m heartened to find the Metaverse Roadmap, sponsored by the Accelerating Studies Foundation. While I’ve been moaning about the shortcomings of immersive 3D technologies, they’ve been defining the template for progress. Much of their thoughts align with my own, painting an exciting future of convergence across modalities, devices, and workflows.

The emergence of a robust Metaverse will shape the development of many technological realms that presently appear non-Internet-related. In manufacturing, 3D environments offer ideal design spaces for rapid-prototyping and customized and decentralized production. In logistics and transportation, spatially-aware tags and real-time world modeling will bring new efficiencies, insights, and markets. In artificial intelligence, virtual worlds offer low-risk, transparent platforms for the development and testing of autonomous machine behaviors, many of which may be also used in the physical world. These are just a sampling of coming developments based on early stage Metaverse technologies.

In sum, for the best view of the changes ahead, we suggest thinking of the Metaverse not as virtual space but as the junction or nexus of our physical and virtual worlds.

Do You Like Our Owl?

The Tyrell Corporation:

Based in Los Angeles in the year 2019, Tyrell is named after its founder Dr. Eldon Tyrell and is a high-tech biocorp primarily concerned with the production of life-like androids called replicants. Tyrell’s slogan is “More human than human”. The headquarters for the corporation is over 700-stories tall. The Tyrell corporation is the only outfit making Nexus-6 replicants which are so human-like that the only way L.A.P.D Blade Runner Units can indentify them is to sit suspects down and go through an exhausting empathy test called the “Voight-Kampff Scale.”

The Tyrell Corporation was also involved in the exporting of replicant labor to the outer space colonies for situations deemed too dangerous and degrading for regular humans such as military operations, high risk industrial work, prostitution and slave labor. One could call it interstellar commerce or just growing an army of slaves.