RealityPrime

The tension between engineering and design is felt in software development in one place more than any other: user experience and user interface design. The fact that the discipline is called ‘design’ shows the bias clearly. UIs are voodoo art, they say. Users are entirely unlike computer hardware — fuzzy, irrational, and wet — and no compiler will validate your design for you.

That much is true. But like much of software engineering, experimentation, validation, and testing is the name of the game. And even the best design firms in the world do not resort to one genius-level artist, alone in a tower, handing tablets from on high. They mock-up designs and test them out internally and with impartial human testers, which I’ll argue is far more science than art.

Which is exactly why engineers can be great interface designers too — if they learn the language. Freehand drawing skills and a photographic eye may be largely constitutional. Design skills, on the other hand, can be learned both directly and through experience, except we often don’t.

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CNN’s "Holographic Interview" technology seems like a lot of fluff — all visual tricks no doubt, and not at all the magic Princess Leah hologram we all expect. Right? So goes the blogosphere.

But first of all, the Princess Leah hologram — even assuming Star Wars really happened (a long, long time ago…) — is also just a trick of light. But what people should realize is that there is some cool technology going on here.

Remember that experiment with the SuperBowl a few years back, where they could virtually rotate the view using a fixed array of cameras? Well, it kind of sucked because the cameras weren’t aligned very well. And the interpolation wasn’t really working.

But with this techology, the same approach seems to actually work right. The company doing the work here is VisRT and SportVu, which means it may involve my old friend Ran Yakir (hi, Ran).

From what I understand, the way it works is to have 35 cameras in a circle at the transmitting end. A single virtual viewpoint, based on the real-time studio camera position, is synhesized from those 35 cameras and sent to the CNN studio for compositing into the final image.

Does Wolf really see the Hologram? Yes, probably, but not in open space as we’d expect. It’s probably on a monitor. That part is the trick, as with virtual sets in general. But the real-time interpolationof a circle of 35 cameras is still very cool.

Why not 36 cameras, you ask, such that each slice is exactly 10 degrees? No one knows for sure. But since the Hebrew calendar has 13 months instead of 12, maybe this circle has 350 degrees to compensate… (kidding)

Anyway, what would be even cooler is if they could send those 35 channels of HD video as a bundle and have your home PC do the interpolation. With some head-tracking and maybe some stereoscopic viewing, you too could see a cool a floating 3Dish hologram, with the synthesized views indexed to your actual viewing angle(s). 35 HD video channels is all it takes, and a really fast PC. No problem!

Here’s a link with more info, and Gizmodo has basically hte same info here.

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There are two things I know about DRM. One is it doesn’t work. Two is that people hate it.

Frankly, it’s not surprising to me that potential customers of EA’s Spore are turning to bittorrent sites to download copies of the game. The pirated copies seem to be more functional than the ones they can buy — the store bought copies may cease to work if they believe you’ve committed the IP crime of multiple (>3) installs.

But what is remarkable to me is how EA is so scared of piracy that they are in effect suprring the illicit market by voluntarily crippling their own software. They must know this, and yet they make the same choice, time after time, with more and more obnoxious methods. Even Sony is getting the message, so why not EA?

DRM prevents average users from easily making copies, no doubt. It does very little to deter pirates. So in effect, people who would have only bought one copy anyway will at best only buy one copy, and they will increasingly turn to free and unfettered sources, despite the risks.

Imagine, then, if EA took the complete opposite tack and gave the game away for free, with no restrictions other than that you couldn’t upload and download content without a paid network account. They could probably open a PayPal account for voluntary donations and do better with the would-be pirates.

If they employed one of the known strategies for putting subscription-based games on physical store shelves, they might even do better overall.

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Here’s a first stab at the missing documentation for LLVolume.cpp — not on a line-by-line basis, because frankly, the code today looks way more complicated than the code I originally wrote. But this should, if I did my job, explain how prims work and what can be done under the hood. It doesn’t cover what could be done with new systems, but I’ll leave that for another day.

This is version 1.0. Comments are welcome, and I can take a 2nd pass at it later.

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The post on LLPrimitives is coming soon. This interstitial post is just to convey my frustration in trying to deliver a simple blog post with 2D vector (pseudo-3D) graphics. Never mind my original aim to use SVG with interactive sliders to help explain some basic 3D prim concepts.That could still probably be done, but not easily in Wordpress, I’m discovering. And frankly, I don’t have any time left to play around with it, or hack my PHP.

So the final solution seems to be to deliver a basic Word (2003) doc to Scribd and let you experience it that way, which is to say, as Flash. The fact that most of the world still delivers its graphics as bitmaps means, to me, that even the 2D world has a long, long way to go.

It’s funny. I encounter alot of people in my travels who distrust 3D solutions (with good reason) and assert (somewhat naively, IMO) "Why not just do it in 2D? It’s easier."

My answer is now going to be, "No, it’s not! 2D sucks just as much for doing anything novel and interactive that works across browsers and systems. If you have to start over anyway, why not do it in 3D?"

There. I feel much better now.

P.S. Let me know if you can’t see the test below. I may not have made it public on Scribd, but it’s just a few overapping circles.

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[I debated which blog to post this to and came down on the side of science and technology, though there's certainly a religious and political angle to consider.]

Measles is back. There is no scientific evidence — beyond the ramblings of a few celebrities and anti-science wackjobs — that vaccines cause autism. There is unquestionable evidence that measles causes measles.

Measles is very contagious and potentially deadly. Vaccination does a pretty good job of prevention, although its effectiveness is reduced if other parents decide not to vaccinate their kids and measles becomes more prevalent in your community. There is, unfortunately, no vaccine against stupidity — besides education, that is.

Bottom line: if you choose not to vaccinate your children, you are committing child abuse, against your children and mine, in the same as way parents who let their children die without medical care.

If you are concerned about stories you’ve heard about mercury in MMR vaccines, then demand a vaccine without mercury. Don’t stick your head in the sand.

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Which reminds me…

I got an email the other day that asked me if my comments in a recent interview indicated that Microsoft "was going to get into Virtual Worlds in a big way."

I was somewhat taken aback, to be honest. Not to be overly ego-centric on behalf of my new employer, but by my standards, Microsoft is into Virtual Worlds in a big way already — consider Virtual Earth (mirror world), Halo 3 (multi-user worlds, with very good machinima/storytelling capabilities), and even MSN Messenger’s video chat (2D telepresence) as examples of virtual worlds.

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So everyone wants to know what it’s like working at Microsoft. Well, unfortunately I can’t really answer that yet, since I’ve only been there two weeks — I just got my first paycheck, which allays my subconscious fear that someone was going to come up and tap me on the shoulder, saying "Avi, your interview is over. Go home."

In truth, people have been very friendly and welcoming, despite the fact that I’m coming in during a  crunch period for both bugs and strategy, which must be very much like planning to have a second baby while delivering your first.

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Even though I’m now at Microsoft, I’ve always favored OpenGL for its simplicity and ease of getting things working. It’s what I started my professional career on, and something I’ve stuck with for 16 years.

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