Augmented vision

Related to my recent post about the blurring of real and virtual worlds, I’m interested to read another development in the field. A company called Lumus is demonstrating spectacle-mounted video screens; I’m not sure whether they have wi-fi, but if not, later versions surely will. Then… well, let’s say we will be able to really enjoy living in a data-rich environment. Perhaps.

Relics of a more civilized age…

It may be due to watching David Lynch’s Dune at an impressionable age, or perhaps reading Michael Moorcock’s Oswald Bastable series at around the same time, but I have strong steampunk affinities. In particular, I’ve always regretted the fact that the great airships were phased out after the the Hindenberg disaster.

Although there seems to be a suggestion every 10 years or so that an airship revival is imminent, it never seems to happen. Still, I am inspired nonetheless by a couple of articles (via Slashdot) that seem to give hope that it may yet happen, enabled by the rising cost of oil.

It seems to me that these could be very useful for short-haul passenger trips around south-east Asia – perhaps they would be safer than the chronically over-loaded Indonesian passenger ferries, and less prone to disasters. They would also be very useful for moving cargo around China, or India….

I’ve written previously that my apartment overlooks the port of Singapore, and that I’m fascinated by the constant flow of ships and their cargo, as well as by the streams of commerce that they represent; perhaps one day it will be my good fortune to live with a view of a Singapore Airship Port, with gleaming zeppelins depositing passengers and goods from all over the world…

The firewall’s bureaucracy

I’ve had problems of my own with China’s Great Firewall (see here and here). That was an instance of the Firewall not working even on its own terms, since the site I was running was a perfectly inoffensive business site. The way my then-colleague in China got it sorted out was essentially bureaucratic: he submitted a form, it went to “the proper authorities”, and we were fairly quickly unblocked.

However, what if you want to say something that the Chinese government doesn’t want you to say? That’s what the Great Firewall is really for: monitoring, controlling, blocking. Wired has a very interesting article on how this is playing out – the Firewall’s technology and methods are getting ever more sophisticated… but so are the activists and techies who are trying to subvert or avoid it. According to the author, it’s the latter who are winning, especially when students in cybercafes will teach you how for only USD1/hr!

It’s also interesting that Singapore gets a mention: Singapore, with just 2.4 million regular Internet users and very deep pockets, might have a chance at quelling Internet-fueled popular revolts. In contrast, the article concludes, China is just too big, and the Chinese people are too practical and determined. They will always find a way past the censors. That’s the only time Singapore is mentioned, so I’m not sure why the author chose to throw that in.

Anyway, I found it a very interesting – very cyberpunk – snapshot of the bureaucracy of control on the one hand, vs the DIY ethos of the techies and students on the other.

The machines will speak your thoughts

OK, so it’s been a while since I posted, and I’m trying to catch up with a number of things that I’ve bookmarked, and so I’m getting creative with the post titles…

Anyway, the BBC reports that researchers at Boston University have developed a brain implant that is able to read thoughts and translate them into machine-generated speech.

The article reassures us:

“There is a huge difference between a technique like this, which is able to pick up signals the subject wants to be picked up, and being able to delve deep into the mind,” says Professor John Dylan Haynes of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences.

However, it wasn’t all that long ago that the technology to control mouse a computer by thought alone also required a chip to be implanted in the brain – now, though, it’s a $15 accessory. In the same way, I suspect that this thought-to-speech technology will also rapidly become a cheap peripheral – and no doubt governments around the world will soon have black labs working on using them in combination with truth drugs…

Telepathy for $15

Yes, another title to tease you into reading, promising more than it can deliver. I’m at that head-shaking point where I can’t quite believe what I’ve just seen.

In an interview about his latest novel, novelist William Gibson points out that writing science fiction is getting harder, because:

we can’t culturally have futures the way that we used to have futures because we don’t have a present in the sense that we used to have a present. Things are moving too quickly for us to have a present to stand on from which we can say, “oh, the future, it’s over there and it looks like this.”

Here’s the perfect example:

Neurosky, a company that will let us interact with games (and tools, and machinery, and robots, and cellphones…) just by controlling our mental state, blinking, and so on through a device that will be on the market next year – and should only add $15 to the price… Incredible… who thought it would come so soon? And look at how portable the device is! Combine this with the kind of augmented reality I was talking about the other day, and we will soon be seeing some wild stuff happening out there on the streets! Are we ready for this, I wonder…? I also wonder: when will they go to IPO….?

Here’s that augmented reality clip again: watch this back-to-back with the above, and imagine the possibilities when they’re combined….

Update:

My word, and those 3-d avatars of yourself that I mentioned in that earlier post… hehehe, I should have known: they’re going to be on the market later this year!

Augmented identity

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.

Surrounded by unseen presences

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:

Normal service will be resumed shortly

I’ve just got a copy of Spook Country (with a 25% discount, yay, thanks Borders!). All other activity will cease until I’ve finished it. So far, I’m up to page 86, and we’re already on to a topic I blogged about just the other day, completely by coincidence….