Living in a 2D world

The archetypal way of advertising 3D monitors is by showing an object protruding past the frame of the monitor:


The problem is that this is the one thing you just can’t do on current 3D monitors—the entire effect is dependent on two images being displayed (simultaneously or in close succession, depending on the exact technology) on the monitor. Outside the frame there is nothing to display, so no image, and no 3D effect. For the best effects you want the viewers watching the image from straight ahead (not way off to the side, as shown in the pictures) and towards the centre of the screen, without moving their heads too much. That way you minimise the perspective distorsions, out-of-focus images and perceptual artefacts by the borders, where the stereoscopic effect breaks down.

But of course, in a printed image, how else would you indicate that there is something special with the screen—directly photographing the stereoscopic image would just show a non-marketable blur. (This also means that the resolution in the print image often enough has no relation whatsoever with the actually achievable resolution on the screen.)

Moral: check out the items in person, don’t go by the pictures.

Coolth failure

Visiting my mother I had occasion to watch tv and it so happened that TV6 was running Johnny Mnemonic and I decided to watch. Commercial television, why hasn't it been outlawed yet? Commercial breaks chopping up the plot and I'm pretty sure they actually lost bits of the film, making it even more jarring. Even allowing for that, I was rather disappointed and even more so when I saw that William Gibson himself had written the screenplay, so no corporate script wrangler could be blamed for the results.

The main fault lies in the lack of cool. A major theme in Gibson's cyberpunk works is being cool, and Japanese vatgrown ninjas are the coolest of them all. The Yakuza are maximally inscrutable Orientals with infinite patience. In the original short story there is only one Yakuza assassin and that's because he's so utterly deadly on his own no more are needed—grenade launchers and assault guns are too crude and inelegant to be even contemplated. And Molly (in the film replaced by Jane with uncool shakes for copyright reasons!) shows her übercool by whipping the assassin's ass.

And that the data that Johnny is carrying happens to be the cure to all the world's woes? Please…

I briefly considered the point in having a person carry around data in their head, but to be sure, in many cases moving physical media around is faster than wire transfer and for stolen data it makes sense to hide the data inside the person. But the nosebleed effect of stuffing data in your head? It's not like the memory chip grows bigger with the data, you know…

Then of course, technology marches on and having information being faxed in 2021 made me laugh almost as much as the exhortation “Turn on your VCRs!”. The 320 GiB Johnny crams into his head were still upgraded a thousandfold from the “several hundred megabytes” he carried in the original story. And the virtual reality scenes? Too incoherent, but then Gibson never had a really coherent explanation of cyberspace anyway.

My dreams arrived…now?

I went to Norrköping today to visit the Norrköping Visualization and Interaction Studio. Ow, how performance has increased since I myself worked in the area.

We were treated to a demo of the Uniview interactive planetarium software. Our guide put us in space somewhere above the Earth, and then zoomed in on the International Space Station, its real-time position computed, but then time sped up and we could see ISS move around the Earth and then various other classes of satellites were added until the Earth was wrapped in a dense cloud of orbiting dots with an almost equally dense torus of geostationary satellites further out. Then they were gone and the surface of the Earth was mapped with economic indicators for all countries, but soon we left Earth for Mars, having a look at its surface before we sped out of the solar system, the Oort cloud enveloping it, continuing out of the galaxy and on and on until we passed the boundary of the visible universe. To my surprise space was hour-glass-shaped, an artefact due to the disk of our galaxy hiding most of the universe from our telescopes—clearly there is so much more to find out for us!

In the next room, another surprise: a Mitsubishi television screen, 73" across and perhaps 0.4 m deep. The screen was back-projected from a DLP projector inside the housing and not only did it do $1920\; \times \; 1080$ pixels progressive display, but it could be switched into active stereo 3D mode, displaying a crystal-crisp image. (The skydiving video really made me consider taking up skydiving.)

How cool that all the things we dreamed of then finally have appeared!

After taking leave of the NVIS people I returned to the station by way of Hobbyhörnan, where Håkan was in such a garrulous mood that I had to all but gnaw my leg off an hour later in order to catch the bus home. (Yes, bus. Due to track repairs, rail communications between Stockholm and Norrköping are limited at the moment.)

A loss

Randy Pausch died today.

I had the great privilege of meeting him in person as he was giving a series of seminars at the HITLab in 1991. My notes from that meeting will have to serve as my tribute (note that this was written before the creation of the World Wide Web):

Today Randy Pausch from the University of Virginia is here and has spoken on his SIGCHI presentation “Virtual Reality on Five Dollars A Day”. He brought his equipment with two Private Eyes and a baseball cap for mounting, but unfortunately the equipment wouldn't sync so that we could get stereo images. […] Randy's claim is that rapid feedback is much more important than cool graphics and that one today doesn't have particularly good graphics in the Eyephones anyway—the cool pictures one sees are usually taken from the external video screen rather than the LCD screens that the user sees. […]

Since the Private Eye is monochrome so they only can draw wireframes, they have seen to that all objects are animated so that one can keep track of what lines go together. As a side effect the worlds become more interesting that way, there's always something going on. […]

After this he spoke about another, related, project—SUIT (Simple User Interface Technology). They have made a platform-independent interface builder—they have versions running under X, Mac and PC. NeXT was however not an option—“they are so consciously incompatible with everything else that it isn't worth it, in addition the NeXT InterfaceBuilder is superior there”. This interface builder they used in undergraduate education with completely incredible results—it took first-year students less than two hours to learn to use the system!

[— — —]
Since my last report Randy Pausch gave another seminar, this on Tailor, bespoke user interfaces. It turns out that Randy doesn't really work with virtual worlds, but with computer-supported speech generation for children with CP and he has had very encouraging results so far. (Though his opinion was that the money put into it would be put to better use in prenatal care instead of prosthesis research and I realised that maternal and child health centres are not a matter of course for everybody in this country.)

We also had a longer discussion about the utility of and possible spread of VR technology. Randy has a liberating distance to the subject and dares to express his doubts. Conversely he was very interested in MUDs as examples of already existing virtual worlds and Johan [Andersson], who is an expert on them had a lot to say. I realised that the problems with virtual worlds, and hypertexts, which in some sense are abstract virtual worlds, are that they have to be large to be really meaningful, but a lone programmer/author can never add enough to them to make them interesting. MUDs have that in common with Usenet that there are lots of people involved who, more or less independently of each other, extend the system, add all kinds of things that make it meaningful, useful and interesting in other ways. That's why the Net is so important, visualisation and holograms and such may be good, but it's really a lot of people that should be moving over it. […]

Randy is an excellent and entertaining lecturer with sound ideas about pedagogics, so I asked him to come to KTH and lecture at some suitable point. “I can be bought”, he said and gave me his business card.

We never got around to inviting him, and now it's too late, but over the years I've frequently had reason to read papers and reports by him. Indeed, less than three years ago I had reason to suggest the use of SUIT for a project at work. Eventually we decided on a different solution, but I wrote to Pausch and asked if I could have the source code to SUIT and he sent it to me a few hours later and I demoed it to my colleagues shortly thereafter.

I foresee ergonomics issues

My first idea when I got the opportunity to work with the VPL DataGlove was to create a virtual keyboard. My plan was that it should be able to edit all aspects of the keyboard layout—the precise keys, where they were located in space and to have nifty functions to edit the layout so that one didn't necessarily have to lay out each key individually. To my disappointment the position sensors on the glove had neither the resolution nor speed necessary for typing, nor did the software handle collision detection well for so many objects, so when I realised that even a numerical keypad would require keys several centimetres across that could be pressed only once every few seconds or so, I gave up the idea.

Now I'm sorely tempted by the Virtual Laser Keyboard. Just the thing—a perfectly “soft” keyboard with optical tracking and wireless connection to your computer/PDA/mobile phone. Unfortunately the specs only say state that it has a QWERTY layout, so the risk is that the keyboard layout is locked in ROM, rather than being configurable, which would be a pity.

Then of course, there is the issue of typing on an unyielding surface, which brings down speed and accuracy, but I still could imagine trying it out.