RealityPrime

I even have some idea how this works and it’s still magic. Wow

Rendering Synthetic Objects into Legacy Photographs from Kevin Karsch on Vimeo.

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One billion unique downloads.

Congrats to the entire Google Geo team. Well done.

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The title is not a typo. ‘Affect’ refers to the way we sense and display emotions. And computers are about to understand this better than some people.

I came across this incredibly well written article at New Scientist, which touches on some of the possibilities. I won’t even excerpt it. Just read it.

This in a sense gives people yet another super power. The ability to read minds, or at least emotions. People with extremely high emotional IQ can already do this, but it eludes many others. Some people, like me, have high perception and sensitivity of other people’s states, but poor recognition of how we ourselves come across.

Technology can help this. And coupled with something like AR contact lenses, this can be a game changer for interpersonal interactions.

Forget the cliche of floating someone’s name or birthday over their head so you don’t need to remember it. What happens when computers guide our conversations to be more effective (appropriately affective)? Think business negotiations, social situations like dating, and basic training wheels for emotional interaction from childhood to adult.

The downside is a normalization of unique differences between people. But perhaps if we’re smart, we can retain the best of social interactions and improve the pitfalls without homogenizing everything to a too-simplistic algorithm.

Very promising indeed.

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Someone at work forwarded me this comic, nicely designed to get you thinking about the following point: At what point does a game system evolve into an organized religion?

[And by religion, I don't mean it in the grand tradition of personal and spiritual belief systems, but rather as "institution designed to defend itself against other religions and the lack-thereof, and thus self-propagate."]

Think about it. Organized religion uses reward systems daily and in the afterlife too. Such an such sin gets so many hail Mary’s. Blowing up civilians gets so many virgins. it’s all about points and expectations, even if the promises are much less immediately gratifying than they might be in games.

In games, we can give you badges for achievements. We can unlock content you would not otherwise get to. We can promote you on social ladders and give you the attention and recognition you think you deserve.

What I find most interesting about this is that in thinking for a long time about real world game systems that the comic is skewering, I came to the conclusion years ago that there must be more than one such system. People can then subscribe to the system of their choice. That would lead to politically-driven point systems, religiously-driven point systems, and so on. And it’s not inconceivable that someone would try to make such a sociopathic point system eventually, intolerable as it would be. [this is where the rest of us have to use the criminal point system to stop it]

The main twist I wanted to offer on this meme is not just that we could see multiple systems in play, but that the ratification of the systems — maybe even the validation of the point awards themselves to some extent — must come from the participants, not some holy temple of rightness.

That doesn’t prevent mob rule, as is true of Democracy, but it at least guarantees that people can self govern, and if not, they get more or less what history has proven happens when people give up those rights or have them stripped without a fight.

Very interesting stuff. I wonder what my old Disney colleague Jesse Schell thinks of all this…

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When I was in college, I was in a fraternity. Hard to believe for those that know me, but it was an engineering school, where the male:female ratio was 8:1 (“…where the Men are Men and so are the Women…”), and 90% of the undergrads found their social life in the Greek system. So my friends and I joined.
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Funny as hell…. Hang on Woody!

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Check this out:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-to-work-with-joyent-to-port-nodejs-to-windows-azure/9802

Node.js + Azure is a powerful combination, letting us run the same JS/JSON in the browser, server and database with an event model that makes scalability a breeze. Good stuff!

I am incredibly excited that this is being officially supported. Go team!

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I was disappointed today to read the headline “Microsoft refuses to endorse WebGL, labels it ‘harmful’,” which itself is derived from a Microsoft security blog post titled “WebGL Considered Harmful,” which itself parrots a security scare report from a few weeks back.

Is WebGL actually harming your computer in any way? I doubt that’s a serious or credible claim. And, frankly, if Microsoft has taken a formal position against WebGL, no one I know got the memo.

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In previous posts like this and this from back in the depths of 2008, I made some aggressive 3-5 year predictions about available technology. Here are some mid-2011 updates on what works so far and what doesn’t.

Facial Expressions captured (3-5 years from 2008 = 2011-2013): True. Look at Avatar Kinect, coming soon. While limiting the rendering of said facial expressions to Rankin-Bass style XBox avatars was not my personal preference, the result still works well. The team has done an impressive job. However, it’s not as portable as I was hoping for in my original article in terms of the mobile AR solution, so a few points off for me.

Laser Retinal Scanners (2-3 years from 2008 = 2010-2011). False. Well, the tech apparently does exist, but it clearly hasn’t been commercialized to any degree, except in the form of pico projectors. Dim. Also, I’m now not at all sure this tech going to win in the end. See below.

3D Rendering is Photo-Realistic. (2011). True. High-end video game makers have been focusing on things other than realism in recent years. The result of their 3D engine work is certainly not indistinguishable from reality, but it works well enough not to notice. The physics of light and materials works really well. It tends to be things like cracks and dust and dirt that graphics programmers and designers overlook. The worlds tend to be too perfect, hyperrealistic rather than photorealistic.

Virtual Humans pass the Uncanny Valley (2013). Still possible, but doubtful. I’ve seen some examples of CGI still shots that could not only pass the uncanny valley, but easily fool a human into thinking it was real. I have not seen any 3D animation pass the uncanny valley though, except where it uses motion capture of a real human. And even then, it’s close, but typically doesn’t capture enough information to pass — the subtlety, deformations of fatty layers of skin and fluid dynamics. Even things like “eye gaze” is still a problem in 2011. For example, there’s good evidence we can accurately tell where someone is looking by the glint of their eyes, which changes based on the subtle deformation of their eyeballs as they go from “near” to “far”. Virtual actor “gaze” looked far more believable in Monsters, Inc. for example, than Beowolf. These are all solvable problems, but no one has put it all together yet IMO. Avatar mostly worked on this front, but it intentionally wasn’t using humans. We get two years until I need to admit the delay…

AR Contact Lenses (5-7 years from 2008 = 2013-2015 for sure; 2011-2013 is possible at great expense). It’s still possible! Well, forget the 2011 option, but this is looking better all the time. The University of Washington contact lens work is still 5-10 years out, alas. But the combination of a cheap mostly inert contact lens plus simple AR glasses is a potential game changer (assuming people who don’t need them will choose to wear the lenses). It’s certainly still possible for 2013, given Innovega’s recent public announcements. And Vuzix made some impressive announcements of their own from what I hear.

Google Earth for the Human Body (no date) — true! – with similar benefits and flaws we discussed. I don’t see the “mapping problem” solved yet, but it’s really hard. Give it time. As a teaching tool, it’s a great start. And it’s all done in WebGL as a bonus. I only complained about the sad state of Web3D standards, but that too may be about to change.

So as of today, I’d give myself about a 60% rating, with some items still TBD. Not a bad batting average for such aggressive estimates, but hopefully I’ll do much better next time.

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