Not the most obvious combination of topics, but bear with me
I went to the cinema with a couple of friends last night to catch Fido, the latest zom-com to hit the screens. This seems to have had a pretty low-key release; I hadn’t heard of it at all until my friend suggested we go. It’s a kind of unofficial tribute/sequel to both George Romero’s films, and – in a way – to Shaun of the Dead… not to mention Lassie!
The setting is a bright, technicolour, America of the 50s or early 60s. The zombie wars have been won… to an an extent. The undead have been beaten back and humanity saved; clean-cut, picture-perfect small-town America lives on, inside fenced communities. Beyond the defences lies the Wild Zone, where zombie hordes still roam freely. A technological breakthrough allows collars to be fitted to zombies, suppressing their cravings for flesh. This allows them to be used as cheap, untiring, workers in businesses and the home… always present, but never completely trusted.
I have to say, it’s very, very funny! So funny, in fact, that it would be easy to miss all of the social and political points being made. The racial point being made is clear enough, and there’s a lot being said about what “the authorities” will do to ‘protect’ the community… eternal vigilance is the price of… not having your flesh ripped from your bones! It’s definitely a must-see
And peak oil? Well: we went to the Lido on Orchard Road to catch the film, and it was cold in there. I mean, really cold, even by the standards of Singaporean cinemas. I went prepared, with a hooded jacket, and I got through the film by keeping the hood up and hugging my chest to keep warm. My feet felt like blocks of ice, even though I was wearing boots. One of my friends, who was wearing flimsy slacks and sandals, was reduced to using the detachable waterproof shell from my backpack as a cover for her legs, feet pulled up on the chair.
I mean, come on! It’s absolutely ridiculous to have the temperature so low. It’s more than ridiculous, it’s unsustainable. As oil prices rise, this kind of wasteful energy usage will have to stop; it will just become too expensive to sustain. Unfortunately, it’s not just the cinemas here: shopping malls, offices, and lecture halls all consistently have their temperature set far too low. The joke goes that you can tell Singaporeans because they’re the ones who wear summer clothes outside and winter clothes inside – but there’s no way it can last. But now everyone is used to it, and expects it – how will people cope when the aircon goes?
Unintended consequences… The Three Gorges Dam in China, and the many other new dams built recently, apparently did what they were intended to recently, which is to prevent the massive flooding which has been a feature of Chinese history. That’s to say: there were still severe floods, but not anything like the vast scale that had occurred previously, without the dam to control the flow of water down the Yangtze.
However, there’s been a side-effect no-one anticipated – as the waters backed up to unprecedented levels behind the dam, they flooded lots of little holes in the ground, and drove out the occupants… Rats – billions of them, which have devastated crops and are on the march…. Farmers in one township have killed 90 tons of rats and not dented the horde… Subtopia has a detailed account of this phenomenon, and links to an amazing video from Reuters… Not one to watch if you have a rat phobia!
It’s often said that growing its own cultural industry, and thus creating its own domestic constituency of artists affected by piracy, is what is really going to lead China to enforce intellectual property laws stringently.
I was reminded of that by reading an article in Wired, The Chinese Novel Finds New Life Online, which covers the growth of a new niche, the online novel. It seems that China’s experience backs up that of Cory Doctorow: releasing books for free online actually serves to boost sales of the print version.
The article is also interesting in describing the business models being developed, and how authors and publishers are trying to fend off the pirates….
Once again, I’m feeling a bit unimaginative on the subject header front, but anyway: I knew when I wrote the post on unseen presences that people way more intelligent and talented than me must already be thinking about this; it was just a matter of finding them… Anyway, here’s one link for you, the venture capitalist Susan Wu, who wrote back in March:
Let’s start with the basics – “What happens in an online environment when there are absolutely NO cognitive barriers between our online and offline selves?” “Why does an avatar matter at all?” “What types of relationships do people have with each other online and how can an avatar make that more or less meaningful?”
… and posits many other very interesting questions just in that one post.
New body-replacement or augmentation technologies keep on appearing… MIT have developed the first robotic ankle replacement. Unlike previous ankle replacements, this one will allow the wearer to walk with a natural gait. The final paragraph, which outlines what else they’re working on, is also interesting.
Meanwhile, the BBC reports that women who have had mastectomies may be able to grow new breasts using fat removed by liposuction from their own belly. The key is the addition of “concentrated stem cells”, which stimulate the fat to turn into breast tissue, rather than being reabsorbed into the body. The scientists involved aren’t actually sure how it works, but apparently trials in Japan have been very successful.
Last year I wrote a review of Margaret Chan’s book, Ritual is Theatre: Theatre is Ritual, about Chinese Spirit Mediums in Singapore. Here’s an interesting clip that I just found on YouTube:
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, probably provoked by reading William Gibson’s latest novel, and by some articles about gaming technology.
Gibson was one of the first to discuss how virtual presences might manifest themselves in the real world. In Count Zero, it was achieved through biochips physically implanted in the brain, allowing a virtual entity to possess a human (a process shown again, using a slightly different technology, in the Matrix sequels, where Agent Smith manages to leave the Matrix and take over a human body).
I ‘m not going quite that far here, but I’m wondering where we’re going with the convergence of:
virtual communities
customisable online avatars
augmented reality (AR)
ubiquitous wireless access
unobtrusive personal/mobile computing
omnipresence
AR and mobile computing are now pretty much ready to go. I find this French clip very interesting for several reasons:
the computers and goggles that the people in the clip are using are pretty unobtrusive; if they walked past you in the street you wouldn’t necessarily notice anything unusual;
the “locative art” is multi-user; they are all seeing and interacting with the same virtual objects;
the virtual ‘life-forms’ don’t do much in this clip… but what could they do?
the augmentation of reality isn’t confined to adding in objects and entities; it also redraws the location – for example, at the end of the clip, by redrawing the actual walls, adding in water, and so on.
The clip suggests to me that this kind of technology and experience will be mainstream soon. Probably the first steps will be to move gaming, and environments similar to Second Life out into the real world; keyboards and monitors will come to be seen as a temporary aberration.
The extension of Second Life et al into augmented reality is one element of what I find interesting here. In Second Life, I have an avatar – which could look realistic, or not. In augmented reality, I will be physically present in one place, but why should I not have one or more avatars roaming other ‘real’ places. As artists get closer to bridging the uncanny valley, my avatar could be completely realistic. It could potentially use game-style AI to model my real behaviour, even when I was not actively controlling or monitoring it. To someone else immersed in AR, it may not be possible to tell if this is the ‘real’ me without taking off the goggles.
I will also be interacting with avatars. Some will belong to people I know personally in real life. Some will be people I only know from online interaction. Some will be intelligent agents, and others will be AI-driven NPCs. This is where things get a little strange, because the motivations and abilities of all but the first group are essentially unknown. If you and I know each other only from online interactions, then we are each dealing with a construct we ourselves have developed, interpreting the information we have given each other as well as observed behaviour. I cannot know whether you are in fact a real individual. Thus, in Second Life one avatar, Wilde Cunningham, is actually controlled by a group of people; if I were to meet Wilde without knowing this, his behaviour might seem very erratic, and part of my sense-making would be to rationalize and explain variations in his speech and actions. Other, seemingly real, persons may not have any real-world person controlling them; they may be software controlled, but I still may not be able to tell without exiting AR.
This leads me to omnipresence. We’re already accustomed to this: through internet chat like MSN, Skype, Twitter, and so on, our friends are ‘always there’, to be contacted when we need them… IF we can get their attention! How is this going to work in AR? Will be call their name and see their avatar materialise before us? Will we constantly surrounded by their ghostly shapes, which only solidify as they interact with us?
Other issues involve dealing with avatars and agents who have better software, faster connections, wider knowledge, and superior connections… there are a lot of variables here.
Where this leads me is to wonder how behaviour will change once augmented behaviour becomes normal. Believers in voodoo – the metaphor used by Gibson – as well as the tang-ki mediums of the Singaporean Daoists, all believe that we are surrounded by unseen enitities who can be called upon. Some are friendly, some are not; some are predictable, some are not; some are powerful, some are not.
Do these traditional beliefs give us behavioral patterns, metaphors, and tools that we can draw upon as we design systems from e-commerce to e-learning, or social and gaming systems? Will we find that people tend to default to this kind of behaviour and sense-making?
My feeling is yes. Although the pieces for widespread AR are all present today, they haven’t been put together yet. When they are, people are going to find it very strange. After all, to someone from my grandparents’ generation (of that ‘rational’ but un-computerised world), explanations from a traditional spirit medium and from an AR-enabled person, of their respective experience of the world would seem equally incredible and incomprehensible – but sharing many similarities. I suspect that as people try to cope with the very different AR world, they will look backwards for tools and concepts that help their adaptation. I also suspect that unanticipated consequences will result!
Update
This clip gives an excellent introduction; the book it’s introducing is already being advertised on the sides of buses here in Singapore:
I’ve been thinking about buying a new MP3 player recently, but I know that I won’t use it all that much once I buy it: it’s something I want to use on the bus into work from time to time, not a major lifestyle accessory. That being the case, I really don’t want to spend too much on buying one, and that probably rules out an iPod – at least, at full price. So I was a bit surprised to see Carrefour selling an iPod Nano at what seemed to be a knockdown price. It turned out not to be an iPod at all, but a clone from a Chinese manufacturer called Meizu. It looks identical, and the feature set seems to be the same.
I’d never heard of Meizu before, but by chance the name re-appeared today, in an excellent article in Popular Science: China’s iClone. This is required reading for anyone interested in China’s economy, in intellectual property, or in case studies of economic development. Essentially, Meizu have not only reverse-engineered the iPhone, they’ve extended it and improved upon Apple’s original design – according to the article at least.
One very interesting snippet, which I’ve not seen mentioned anywhere else, is that the iPhone’s killer feature, the touch interface, is not original to Apple in the first place: it’s licensed by Apple from…. the original, Chinese, developers. Who knew?
The article ranges far beyond phones, though, to show how China is moving from cheap fakes, to reverse-engineered copies, to original designs in exactly the same way as China and Korea did before it – but much, much faster.
Once China is producing its own design value, of course, we’ll see much stricter enforcement of IP protection laws, which will in turn probably see the end of the RMB8 DVD, and of the Beijing Silk Market, for example. A small price to pay for China becoming a design innovator…
Oh, and I haven’t yet decided on an MP3 player yet. The Meizu iPod Nano clone is still a contender, but I may go instead for a Creative Pebble, which has FM radio…
