Gleaning and Presenting

I’ve been back on the presenter circuit these past few weeks and it honestly feels really good. Presenting in the Age of The Vid is peculiar and requires a change up in skills. Voicing over a slide deck really doesn’t work anymore. Having your face in the corner of the Skype or Zoom helps. A bit of face presence and a lot of videos works the best because it provides something visually interesting to hold the audience’s attention while providing the realtime authenticity (and the potential for hockey-fight level disasters) that makes live theater worthwhile.

My colleague Charles De Andrade and I did two talks at the beginning of the month at MEP Force 2020, a conference of digital tech in the construction industry. We did a case study talk on how the use of 3D visualizations on the desktop as well as in Mixed Reality improves planning and reduces cost, especially in a situation where we increasingly need to be able to work remotely. The second talk went into the details of the challenges involved in getting very large buildings into very small visualization devices and how we work around these with lots of math.

Then this past weekend I did a talk at XReality organized by Dom Wu called Dreaming in Holograms about my work in spatial computing and my hobby ‘gleaning’ sci fi scenes and screen scrapes from movie and television.

To glean, according to Webster’s, is to gather grain after the reapers have finished harvesting. Besides grain, you can also glean potatoes, grapes, vegetables, figs – pretty much anything that is left behind after the normal harvesting process. And I glean sci fi.

So I spent 90 minutes discussing my gleaning hobby and how it relates to my profession – building Holographic applications.

And of course how both of these have left me with a strange condition. I dream in holograms. My dreams are filled with semi-transparent buildings and semi-transparent people. This is true of my falling dreams as well as my swimming through air dreams. It’s even true of my being late to class and naked dreams. Oddly, though, all my nocturnal holograms are monochromatic, filled in with many shades of gray, and never in full color.

I’ve heard of a man in Japan who dreams in fish – which I find difficult to imagine.