Ceci n’est pas une pipe bombe

September 23, 2015 James Ashley

This is the picture of the homemade clock Ahmed Mohamed brought to his Irving, Texas high school. Apparently no one ever mistook it for a bomb, but they did suspect that it was made to look like a bomb and so they dragged the hapless boy off in handcuffs and suspended him for three days.

This is a strange case of perception versus reality in which the virtual bomb was never mistaken for a real bomb. Instead, what was identified was the fact that it was, in fact, only a bomb virtually and, as with all things virtual, therefore required some sort of explanation.

The common sympathetic explanation is that this isn’t a picture of a virtual bomb at all but rather a picture of a homemade clock. Ahmed recounts that he made the clock, in maker fashion, in order to show an engineering teacher because he had done robotics in middle school and wanted to get into a similar program in high school. Homemade clocks, of course, don’t require an explanation since they aren’t virtually anything other than themselves.

It turns out, however, that the picture at the top does not show a homemade maker clock. Various engineering types have examined the images and determined that it is in fact a disassembled clock from the 80’s.

The telling aspect is the DC power cord which doesn’t actually get used in homemade projects. Instead, anyone working with arduino projects typically (pretty much always) uses AA batteries. The clock components have also been tracked back to their original source, however, so the evidence seems pretty solid.

The photo at the top shows not a virtual bomb nor a homemade clock but, in fact, a virtual homemade clock. That is, it was made to look like a homemade clock but was mistakenly believed to be something made to look like a homemade bomb.

[As a disclaimer about intentions, which is necessary because getting on the wrong side of this gets people in trouble, I don’t know Ahmed’s intentions and while I’m a fan of free speech I can’t say I actually believe in free speech having worked in marketing and I think Ahmed Mohammed looks absolutely adorable in his NASA t-shirt and I have no desire to be placed in company with those other assholes who have shown that this is not a real homemade clock but rather a reassembled 80’s clock and therefore question Ahmed’s motives whereas I refuse to try to get into a high schooler’s head, having two of my own and knowing what a scary place that can be … something, something, something … and while I can’t wholeheartedly support every tweet made by Richard Dawkins and have at times even felt in mild disagreement with things he and others have tweeted on twitter I will say that I find his book The Selfish Gene a really good read … etc, etc, … and for good measure fuck you FoxNews.]

micronta

The salient thing for me is that we all implicitly know that a real bomb isn’t supposed to look like a bomb. The authorities at Ahmed’s high school knew that immediately. Bombs are supposed to look like shoes or harmless tourist knickknacks. If you think it looks like a bomb, it obviously isn’t. So what does it mean to look like a bomb (to be virtually a bomb) but not be an actual bomb?

I covered similar territory once before in a virtual exhibit called les fruits dangereux and at the time concluded that virtual objects, like post-modern novels, involve bricolage and the combining of disparate elements in unexpected ways. For instance combining phones, electrical tape and fruit or combining clock parts and pencil cases. Disrupting categorical thinking at a very basic level makes people – especially authority people – suspicious and unhappy.

Which gets us back to racism which is apparently what has happened to Ahmed Mohammed who was led out of school in handcuffs in front of his peers – and we’re talking high school! and he wasn’t asking to be called “McLovin.” It’s pretty cruel stuff. The fear of racial mixing (socially or biologically) always raises it’s head and comes from the same desire to categorize people and things into bento box compartments. The great fear is that we start to acknowledge that we live in a continuum of types rather than distinct categories of people, races and objects. In the modern age, mass production makes all consumer objects uniform in a way that artisanal objects never were while census forms do the same for people.

Virtual reality will start by copying real world objects in a safe way. As with digital design, it will start with isomorphism to make people feel safe and comfortable. As people become comfortable, bricolage will take hold simply because, in a digital world rather than a commoditized/commodified world, mashups are easy. Irony and a bit of subversiveness will lead to bricolage with purpose as we find people’s fantasies lead them to combine digital elements in new and unexpected ways.

We can all predict augmented and virtual ways to press a digital button or flick through a digital menu projected in front of us in order to get a virtual weather forecast. Those are the sorts of experiences that just make people bored with augmented reality vision statements.

The true promise of virtual reality and augmented reality is that they will break down our racial, social and commodity thinking. Mixed-reality has the potential to drastically change our social reality. How do social experiences change when the color of a person’s avatar tells you nothing real about them, when our social affordances no longer provide clues or shortcuts to understanding other people? In a virtual world, accents and the shoes people wear no longer tell us anything about their educational background or social status. Instead of a hierarchical system of discrete social values, we’ll live in a digital continuum.

That’s the sort of augmented reality future I’m looking forward to.

The important point in the Ahmed Mohammed case, of course, is that you shouldn’t arrest a teenager for not making a bomb.

Why Augmented Reality is harder than Virtual Reality

September 9, 2015 James Ashley

hololensx519_0

At first blush, it seems like augmented reality should be easier than virtual reality. Whereas virtual reality involves the generation of full stereoscopic digital environments as well as interactive objects to place in those environments, augmented reality is simply adding digital content to our view of the real world. Virtual reality would seem to be doing more heavy lifting.

perspective

In actual fact, both technologies are creating illusions to fool the human eye and the human brain. In this effort, virtual reality has an easier task because it can shut out points of reference that would otherwise belie the illusion. Augmented reality experiences, by contrast, must contend with real world visual cues that draw attention to the false nature of the mixed reality content being added to a user’s field of view.

In this post, I will cover some of the additional challenges that make augmented reality much more difficult to get right. In the process, I hope to also provide clues as to why augmented reality HMDs like HoloLens and Magic Leap are taking much longer to bring to market than AR devices like the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Sony Project Morpheus.

terminator vision

But first, it is necessary to distinguish between two different kinds of augmented reality experience. One is informatics based and is supported by most smart phones with cameras. The ideal example of this type of AR is the Terminator-vision from James Cameron’s 1984 film “The Terminator.” It is relatively easy to to do and is the most common kind of AR people encounter today.

star wars chess

The second, and more interesting, kind of AR requires inserting illusory 3D digital objects (rather than informatics) into the world. The battle chess game from 1977’s “Star Wars” epitomizes this second category of augmented reality experience. This is extremely difficult to do.

The Microsoft HoloLens and Magic Leap (as well as any possible HMDs Apple and others might be working on) are attempts to bring both the easy type and the hard type of AR experience to consumers.

Here are a few things that make this difficult to get right. We’ll put aside stereoscopy which has already been solved effectively in all the VR devices we will see coming out in early 2016.

cloaked predator

1. Occlusion The human brain is constantly picking up clues from the world in order to determine the relative positions of objects such as shading, relative size and perspective. Occlusion is one that is somewhat tricky to solve. Occlusion is an effect that is so obvious that it’s hard to realize it is a visual cue. When one body is in our line of sight and is positioned in front of another body, that other body is partially hidden from our view.

In the case where a real world object is in front of a digital object, we can clip the digital object with an outline of the object in front to prevent bleed through. When we try to create the illusion that a digital object is positioned in front of a real world object, however, we encounter a problem inherent to AR.

In a typical AR HMD we see the real world through a transparent screen upon which digital content is either projected or, alternatively, illuminated as with LED displays. An obvious characteristic of this is that digital objects on a transparent display are themselves semi-transparent. Getting around this issue would seem to require being able to make certain portions of the transparent display more opaque than others as needed in order to make sure our AR objects look substantial and not ghostly.

citizen kane

2. Accommodation It turns out that stereoscopy is not the only way our eyes recognize distance. The image above is from a scene in Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane” in which a technique called “deep focus” is used extensively. Deep focus maintains clarity in the frame whether the actors and props are in the foreground, background or middle ground. Nothing is out of focus. The technique is startling both because it is counter to the way movies are generally shot but also because it is counter to how our eyes work.

If you cover one eye and use the other to look at one of your fingers, then move the finger toward and away from you, you should notice yourself refocusing on the finger as it moves while other objects around the finger become blurry. The shape of the cornea actually becomes more rounded when objects are close in order to cause light to refract more in order to reach the retina. For further away objects, the cornea flattens out because less refraction is needed. As we become older, the ability to bow the cornea lessens and we lose some of our ability to focus on near objects – for instance when we read. In AR, we are attempting to make a digital object that is really only centimeters from our eyes appear to be much further away.

Depending on how the light from the display passes through the eye, we may end up with the digital object appearing clear while the real world objects supposedly next to it and at the same distance appear blurred.

vergence_accomodation

3. Vergence-Accommodation Mismatch The accommodation problem is one aspect of yet another VR/AR difficulty. The term vergence describes the convergence and divergence of the two eyes from one another as objects move closer or further away. An interesting aspect of stereoscopy – which is used both for virtual reality as well as augmented reality to create the illusion of depth – is that the distance at which the two eyes coordinate to see an object is generally different from the focal distance from the eyes to the display screen(s). This consequently sends two mismatched signals to the brain concerning how far away the digital object is supposed to be. Is it the focal length or the vergence length? Among other causes, vergence-accommodation mismatch is believed to be a contributing factor to VR sickness. Should the accommodation problem above be resolved for a given AR device, it is safe to assume that the vergence-accommodation mismatch will also be solved.

4. Tetherless Battery Life Smart phones have changed our lives among other reasons because they are tetherless devices. While the current slate of VR devices all leverage powerful computers to which they are attached, since VR experiences are all currently somewhat stationary (the HTC Vive being the odd bird), AR needs to be portable. This naturally puts a strain on the battery, which needs to be relatively light since it will be attached to the head-mounted-display, but also long-lived as it will be powering occasionally intensive graphics, especially for games.

5. Tetherless GPU Another strain on the system is the capability of the GPU. Virtual reality devices can be fairly intense since they require the user to purchase a reasonably powerful and somewhat expensive graphics card. AR devices can be expected to have similar graphics requirements as VR with much less to work with since the GPU needs to be onboard. We can probably expect a streamlined graphics pipeline dedicated to and optimized for AR experiences will help offset lower GPU capabilities.

6. Applications Not even talking about killer apps, here. Just apps. Microsoft has released videos of several impressive demos including Minecraft for HoloLens. Magic Leap up to this point has only shown post-prod, heavily produced illustrative videos. The truth is that everyone is still trying to get their heads around designing for AR. There aren’t really any guidelines for how to do it or even what interactions will work. Other than the most trivial experiences (e.g. weather and clock widgets projected on a wall) this will take a while as we develop best practices while also learning from our mistakes.

Conclusion

With the exception of V-AM, these are all problems that VR does not have to deal with. Is it any wonder, then, that while we are being led to believe that consumer models of the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Sony Project Morpheus will come to market in the first quarter of 2016, news about HoloLens and Magic Leap has been much more muted. There is simply much more to get right before a general rollout. One can hope, however, that dev units will start going out soon from the major AR players in order to mitigate challenge #6 while further tuning continues, if needed, on challenges #1-#5.

HoloLens App Development with Unity

June 25, 2015 James Ashley

A few months ago I wrote a speculative piece about how HoloLens might work with XAML frameworks based on the sample applications Microsoft had been showing.

Even though Microsoft has still released scant information about integration with 3D platforms, I believe I can provide a fairly accurate walkthrough of how HoloLens development will occur for Unity3D. In fact, assuming I am correct, you can begin developing games and applications today and be in a position to release a HoloLens experience shortly after the hardware becomes available.

To be clear, though, this is just speculative and I have no insider information about the final product that I can talk about. This is just what makes sense based on publicly available information regarding HoloLens.

Unity3D integration with third party tools such as Kinect and Oculus Rift occurs through plugins. The Kinect 2 plugin can be somewhat complex as it introduces components that are unique to the Kinect’s capabilities.

The eventual HoloLens plugin, on the other hand, will likely be relatively simple since it will almost certainly be based on a pre-existing component called the FPSController (in Unity 5.1 which is currently the latest).

To prepare for HoloLens, you should start by building your experience with Unity 5.1 and the FPSController component. Here’s a quick rundown of how to do this.

Start by installing the totally free Unity 5.1 tools: http://unity3d.com/get-unity/download?ref=personal

Next, create a new project and select 3D for the project type.

Click the button for adding asset packages and select Characters. This will give you access to the FPSController. Click done and continue. The IDE will now open with an practically empty project.

At this point, a good Unity3D tutorial will typically show you how to create an environment. We’re going to take a shortcut, however, and just get a free one from the Asset Store. Hit Ctrl+9 to open the Asset Store from inside your IDE. You may need to sign in with your Unity account. Select the 3D Models | Environments menu option on the right and pick a pre-built environment to download. There are plenty of great free ones to choose from. For this walkthrough, I’m going to use the Japanese Otaku City by Zenrin Co, Ltd.

After downloading is complete, you will be presented with an import dialog box. By default, all assets are selected. Click on Import.

Now that the environment you selected has been imported, go the the scenes folder in your project window and select a sample scene from the downloaded environment. This will open up the city or dungeon or forest or whatever environment you chose. It will also make all the different assets and components associated with the scene show up in your Hierarchy window. At this point, we want to add the first-person shooter controller into the scene. You do this by selecting the FPSController from the project window under Assets/Standard Assets/Characters/FirstPersonCharacter/Prefabs and dragging the FPSController into your Hierarchy pane.

This puts a visual representation of the FPS controller into your scene. Select the controller with your mouse and hit “F” to zoom in on it. You can see from the visual representation that the FPS controller is basically a collision field that can be moved with a keyboard or gamepad that additionally has a directional camera component and a sound component attached. The direction the camera faces ultimately become the view that players see when you start the game.

Here is another scene that uses the Decrepit Dungeon environment package by Prodigious Creations and the FPS controller. The top pane shows a design view while the bottom pane shows the gamer’s first-person view.

You can even start walking through the scene inside the IDE by simply selecting the blue play button at the top center of the IDE.

The way I imagine the HoloLens integration to work is that another version of FPS controller will be provided that replaces mouse controller input with gyroscope/magnetometer input as the player rotates her head. Additionally, the single camera view will be replaced with a two camera rig that sends two different, side-by-side feeds back to the HoloLens device. Finally, you should be able to see how all of this works directly in the IDE like so:

There is very good evidence that the HoloLens plugin will work something like I have outlined and will be approximately this easy. The training sessions at the Holographic Academy during /Build pretty much demonstrated this sort of toolchain. Moreover, this is how Unity3D currently integrates with virtual reality devices like Gear VR and Oculus Rift. In fact, the screen cap of the Unity IDE above is from an Oculus game I’ve been working on.

So what are you waiting for? You pretty much have everything you already need to start building complex HoloLens experiences. The integration itself, when it is ready, should be fairly trivial and much of the difficult programming will be taken care of for you.

I’m looking forward to seeing all the amazing experiences people are building for the HoloLens launch day. Together, we’ll change the future of personal computing!

Marshall McLuhan and Understanding Digital Reality

June 23, 2015 James Ashley

Understanding McLuhan

While slumming on the internet looking for new content about digital media I came across this promising article entitled Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Application Development. I was feeling hopeful about it until I came across this peculiar statement:

“Of the two technologies, augmented reality has so far been seen as the more viable choice…”

What a strange thing to write. Would we ever ask whether the keyboard or the mouse is the more viable choice? The knife or the fork? Paper or plastic? It should be clear by now that this is a false choice and not a case of having your cake or eating it, too. We all know that the cake is a lie.

But this corporate blog post was admittedly not unique in creating a false choice between virtual reality and augmented reality. I’ve come across this before and it occurred to me that this might be an instance of a category mistake. A category mistake is itself a category of philosophical error identified by the philosopher Gilbert Ryle to tackle the sticky problem of Cartesian dualism. He pointed out that even though it is generally accepted in the modern world that mind is not truly a separate substance from mind but is in fact a formation that emerges in some fashion out of the structure of our brains, we nevertheless continue to divide the things of the world, almost as if by accident, into two categories: mental stuff and material stuff.

sony betamax

There are certainly cases of competing technologies where one eventually dies off. The most commonly cited example is the Betamax and VHS. Of course, they both ultimately died off and it is meaningless today to claim that either one really succeeded. There are many many more examples of apparently technological duels in which neither party ultimately falls or concedes defeat. PC versus Mac. IE vs Chrome. NHibernate vs EF. etc.

The rare case is when one technology completely dominates a product category. The few cases where this has happened, however, have so captured our imaginations that we forget it is the exception and not the rule. This is the case with category busters like the iPhone and the iPad – brands that are so powerful it has taken years for competitors to even come up with viable alternatives.

What this highlights is that, typically, technology is not a zero sum game. The norm in technology is that competition is good and leads to improvements across the board. Competition can grow an entire product category. The underlying lie, however, is perhaps that each competitor tells itself that they are in a fight to the death and that they are the next iPhone. This is rarely the case. The lie beneath that lie is that each competitor is hoping to be bought out by another larger company for billions of dollars and has to look competitive up until that happens. A case of having your cake and eating it, too.

stop_staring

There is, however, a category in which one set of products regularly displace another set of products. This happens in the fashion world.

Each season, each year, we change out our cuts, our colors and accessories. We put away last year’s fashions and wouldn’t be caught dead in them. We don’t understand how these fashion changes occur or what rules they obey but the fashion houses all seem to conform to these unwritten rules of the season and bring us similar new things at the proper time.

This is the category mistake that people make when they ask things such as which is more viable: augmented reality or virtual reality? Such questions belong to the category of fashion (which is in season: earth tones or pastels?) and not to technology. In the few unusual cases where this does happen, then the category mistake is clearly in the opposite direction. The iPhone and iPad are not technologies: they are fashion statements.

Virtual reality and augmented reality are not fashion statements. They aren’t even technologies in the way we commonly talk about technology today – they are not software platforms (though they require SDKs), they are not hardware (though they are useless without hardware), they are not development tools (you need 3D modeling tools and game engines for this). In fact, they have more in common with books, radio, movies and television than they do to software. They are new media.

A medium, etymologically speaking, is the thing in the middle. It is a conduit from a source to a receiver – from one world to another. A medium lets us see or hear things we would otherwise not have access to. Books allow us to hear the words of people long dead. Radio transmits words over vast distances. Movies and television let us see things that other people want us to see and we pay for the right to see those things. Augmented reality and virtual reality, similarly, are conduits for new content. They allow us to see and hear things in ways we haven’t experienced content before.

The moment we cross over from talking about technology and realize we are talking about media, we automatically invoke the spirit of Marshall McLuhan, the author of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McLuhan thought deeply about the function of media in culture and many of his ideas and aphorisms, such as “the medium is the message,” have become mainstays of contemporary discourse. Other concepts that were central to McLuhan’s thought still elude us and continue to be debated. Among these are his two media categories: hot and cold.

understanding media

McLuhan claimed that any media is either hot or cold, warm or cool. Cool mostly means what we think it means metaphorically; for instance, James Dean is cool in exactly the way McLuhan meant. Hot media, in turn, is in most ways what you would think it is: kinetic with a tendency to overwhelm the senses. To illustrate what he meant by hot and cold, McLuhan often provides contrasting examples. Movies are a hot medium. Television is a cold medium. Jazz is a hot medium. The twist is a cool medium. Cool media leave gaps that the observer must fill in. It is highly participatory. Hot media is a wall of sensation that does not require any filling in: McLuhan characterizes it as “high definition.”

I think it is pretty clear, between virtual reality and augmented reality, which falls into the category of a cool medium and which a hot one.

To help you come to your own conclusions about how to categorize augmented reality glasses and the virtual reality goggles, though, I’ll provide a few clues from Understanding Media:

“In terms of the theme of media hot and cold, backward countries are cool, and we are hot. The ‘city slicker’ is hot, and the rustic is cool. But in terms of the reversal of procedures and values in the electric age, the past mechanical time was hot, and we of the the TV age are cool. The waltz was hot, fast mechanical dance suited to the industrial time in its moods of pomp and circumstance.”

“Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than dialogue. With print many earlier forms were excluded from life and art, and many were given strange new intensity. But our own time is crowded with examples of the principle that the hot form excludes, and the cool one includes.”

“The principle that distinguishes hot and cold media is perfectly embodied in the folk wisdom: ‘Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.’ Glasses intensify the outward-going vision, and fill in the feminine image exceedingly, Marion the Librarian notwithstanding. Dark glasses, on the other hand, create the inscrutable and inaccessible image that invites a great deal of participation and completion.”

audrey hepburn glasses

Minecraft in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

June 17, 2015 James Ashley

Microsoft recently created possibly the best demo they have ever done on stage for E3. Microsoft employees played Minecraft in a way no one has ever seen it before, on a table top as if it was a set of legos. Many people speculated on social media that this may be the killer app that HoloLens has been looking for.

What is particularly exciting about the way the demo captured people’s imaginations is that they can start envisioning what AR might actually be used for. People are even getting a firm grip on the differences between Virtual Reality, which creates an immersive experience, and augmented reality which creates a mixed experience overlapping digital objects with real world objects.

Nevertheless, there is still a tendency to see virtual reality exemplified by the Oculus Rift and augmented reality exemplified by HoloLens and Magic Leap as competing solutions. In fact they are complementary solutions. They don’t compete with one another any more than your mouse and your keyboard do.

Bill Buxton has famously said that everything is best for something and worst for something else. By contrasting the Minecraft experience for Oculus and HoloLens, we can better see what each technology is best at.

The Virtual Reality experience for Oculus is made possible by a free hacking effort called Minecrift. It highlights the core UX flavor of almost all VR experiences – they are first person, with the player fully present in a 3D virtual world. VR is great for playing Minecraft in adventure or survival mode.

Adventure mode with HoloLens is roughly equivalent to the adventure mode we get today on a PC or XBOX console with the added benefit that the display can be projected on any wall. It isn’t actually 3D, though, as far as we can tell from the demo, despite the capability of displaying stereoscopic scenes with HoloLens.

What does work well, however, is Minecraft in creation mode. This is basically the god view we have become familiar with from various strategy and resource games over the years.

God View vs First Person View

In a fairly straightforward way, it makes sense to say that AR is best for a god-centric view while VR is best for a first-person view. For instance, if we wanted to create a simulation that allows users to fly a drone or manipulate an undersea robot, virtual reality seems like the best tool for the job. When we need to create a synoptic view of a building or even a city, on the other hand, then augmented reality may be the best UX. Would it be fair to say that all new UX experiences fall into one of these two categories?

Most of our metaphors for building software, building businesses and building every other kind of buildable thing, after all, are based on the lego building block and it’s precursors the Lincoln log and erector sets. We play games as children in order, in part, to prepare ourselves for thinking as adults. Minecraft was built similarly on the idea of creating a simulation of a lego block world that we could not only build but also virtually play in on the computer.

lego_astronaut

The playful world of Lego blocks is built on two things: the blocks themselves formed into buildings and scenes and the characters that we identify with who live inside the world of blocks. In other words the god-view and the first-person view.

coffee prince

It should come as no surprise, then, that these two core modes of our imaginative lives should stay with us through our childhoods and into our adult approaches to the world. We have both an interpersonal side and an abstract, calculating side. The best leaders have a bit of both.

You apparently didn’t put one of the new coversheets on your TPS report

The god-view in business tends to be the synoptic view demanded by corporate executives and provided in the form of dashboards or crystal reports. It would be a shame if AR ended up falling into that use-case when it can provide so much more and in more interesting ways. As both VR and AR mature over the next five years, we all have a responsibility to keep them anchored in the games of our childhood and avoid letting them become the faults and misdemeanors of the corporate adult world.

Update 6/20

A recent arstechnica article indicates that the wall-projected HoloLens version of Minecraft in adventure mode can be played in true 3D:

One other impressive feature of the HoloLens-powered virtual screen was the ability to activate a three-dimensional image, so that the scene seemed to recede into the wall like a window box. Unlike a standard 3D monitor, this 3D image actually changed perspective based on the viewing angle. If I went up near the wall and looked at the screen from the left, I could see parts of the world that would usually be behind the right side of the wall, as if the screen was simply a window into another world.

Why are the best Augmented Reality Experiences inside of Virtual Reality Experiences?

May 29, 2015 James Ashley

elite_cockpit

I’ve been playing the Kickstarted space simulation game Elite: Dangerous for the past several weeks with the Oculus Rift DK2. Totally work related, of course.

Basically I’ve had the DK2 since Christmas and had been looking for a really good game to go with my device (rather than the other way around). After shelling out $350 for the goggles, $60 more for a game didn’t seem like such a big deal.

In fact, playing Elite: Dangerous with the Oculus and an XBox One gamepad has been one of the best gaming experiences I have ever had in my life – and I’m someone who played E.T. on the Atari 2600 when it first came out so I know what I’m talking about, yo. It is a fully realized Virtual Reality environment which allows me to fly through a full simulation of the galaxy based on current astronomical data. When I am in the simulation, I objectively know that I am playing a game. However, all of my peripheral awareness and background reactions seem to treat the simulation as if it is real. My sense of space changes and my awareness expands into the virtual space of the simulation. If I don’t mistake the VR experience for reality, I nevertheless do experience a strong suspension of disbelief when I am inside of it.

One of the things I’ve found fascinating about this Virtual Reality simulation is that it is full of Augmented Reality objects. For instance, the two menu bars at the top of the screencap above, to the top left and the top right, are full holograms. When I move my head around, parallax effects demonstrate that their positions are anchored to the cockpit rather than to my personal perspective. If the VR goggles allowed me to do it, I would be able to even lean forward and look at the backside of those menus. Interestingly, when the game is played in normal 3D first person mode rather than VR with the Oculus, those menus are rendered as head-up displays and are anchored to my point of view as I use the mouse to look around the cockpit — in much the same way that google glass anchored menus to the viewer instead of the viewed.

The navigation objects on the dashboard in front of me are also AR holograms. Their locations are anchored to the cockpit rather than to me, and when I move around I can see them at different angles. At the same time, they exhibit a combination of glow and transparency that isn’t common to real-world objects and that we have come to recognize, from sci fi movies, as the inherent characteristics of holograms.

I realized at about the 60 hour mark into my gameplay \ research that one of the current opportunities as well as problems with AR devices like the Magic Leap and HoloLens is that not many people know how to develop UX for them. This was actually one of the points of a panel discussion concerning HoloLens at the recent BUILD conference. The field is wide open. At the same time, UX research is clearly already being done inside VR experiences like Elite: Dangerous. The hologram-based control panel at the front of the cockpit is a working example of how to design navigation tools using augmented reality.

Another remarkable feature of the HoloLens is the use of gaze as an input vector for human-computer interactions. Elite: Dangerous, however, has already implemented it. When the player looks at certain areas of the cockpit, complex menus like the one shown in the screencap above pop into existence. When one removes one’s direct gaze, the menu vanishes. If this were a usability test for gaze-based UI, Elite: Dangerous will have already collected hours of excellent data from thousands of players to verify whether this is an effective new interaction (in my experience, it totally is, btw). This is also the exact sort of testing that we know will need to be done over the next few years in order to firm up and conventionalize AR interactions. By happenstance, VR designers are already doing this for AR before AR is even really on the market.

The other place augmented reality interaction design research is being carried out is in Japanese anime. The image above is from a series called Sword Art Online. When I think of VR movies, I think of The Matrix. When I put my children into my Oculus, however, they immediately connected it to SAO. SAO is about a group of beta testers for a new MMORPG that requires virtual reality goggles who become trapped inside the MMORPG due to the evil machinations of one of the game developers. While the setting of the VR world is medieval, players still interact with in-game AR control panels.

Consider why this makes sense when we ask the hologram versus head-up display question. If the menu is anchored to our POV, it becomes difficult to actually touch menu items. They will move around and jitter as the player looks around. In this case, a hologram anchored to the world rather than to the player makes a lot more sense. The player can process the consistent position of the menu and anticipate where she needs to place her fingers in order to interact with it. Sword Art Online effectively provides what Bill Buxton describes as a UX sketch for interactions of this sort.

On an intellectual level, consider how many overlapping interaction metaphors are involved in the above sketch. We have a 1) GUI-based menu system transposed to 2) touch (no right clicking) interactions, then expressed as 3) an augmented reality experience placed inside of 4) a virtual reality experience (and communicated inside a cartoon).

Why is all of this possible? Why are the best augmented reality experiences inside of virtual reality experiences and cartoons? I think it has to do with cost of execution. Illustrating an augmented reality experience in an anime is not really any more difficult than illustrating a field of grass or a cute yellow gerbil-like character. The labor costs are the same. The difficulty is only in the conceptualization.

Similarly, throwing a hologram into a virtual reality experience is not going to be any more difficult than throwing a tree or a statue into the VR world. You just add some shaders to create the right transparency-glowy-pulsing effect and you have a hologram. No additional work has to be done to marry the stereoscopic convergence of hologram objects and the focal position of real world locations as is required for really good AR. In the VR world, these two things – the hologram world and the VR world – are collapsed into one thing.

There has been a tendency to see virtual reality and mixed reality as opposed technologies. What I have learned from playing with both, however, is that they are actually complementary technologies. While we wait for AR devices to be released by Microsoft, Magic Leap, etc. it makes sense to jump into VR as a way to start understanding how humans will interact with digital objects and how we must design for these interactions. Additionally, because of the simplification involved in creating AR for VR rather than AR for reality, it is likely that VR will continue to hold a place in the design workflow for prototyping our AR experiences even years from now when AR becomes not only a reality but an integral thread in the fabric of reality.

The HoloCoder’s Bookshelf

April 30, 2015 James Ashley

Professions are held together by touchstones such as as a common jargon that both excludes outsiders and reinforces the sense of inclusion among insiders based on mastery of the jargon. On this level, software development has managed to surpass more traditional practices such as medicine, law or business in its ability to generate new vocabulary and maintain a sense that those who lack competence in using the jargon simply lack competence. Perhaps it is part and parcel with new fields such as software development that even practitioners of the common jargon do not always understand each other or agree on what the terms of their profession mean. Stack Overflow, in many cases, serves merely as a giant professional dictionary in progress as developers argue over what they mean by de-coupling, separation of concerns, pragmatism, architecture, elegance, and code smell.

Cultures, unlike professions, are held together not only by jargon but also by shared ideas and philosophies that delineate what is important to the tribe and what is not. Between a profession and a culture, the members of a professional culture, in turn, share a common imaginative world that allows them to discuss shared concepts in the same way that other people might discuss their favorite TV shows.

This post is an experiment to see what the shared library of augmented reality and virtual reality developers might one day look like. Digital reality development is a profession that currently does not really exist but which is already being predicted to be a multi-billion dollar industry by 2020.

HoloCoding, in other words, is a profession that exists only virtually for now. As a profession, it will envelop concerns much greater than those considered by today’s software developers. Whereas contemporary software development is mostly about collecting data, reporting on data and moving data from point A to points B and C, spatial software development will be more concerned with environments and will have to draw on complex mathematics as well as design and experiential psychology. The bookshelf of a holocoder will look remarkably different from that of a modern data coder. Here are a few ideas regarding what I would expect to find on a future developer’s bookshelf in five to ten years.

1. Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan – written in the 60’s and responsible for concepts such as ‘the global village’ and hot versus cool media, McLuhan pioneered the field of media theory. Because AR and VR are essentially new media, this book is required reading for understanding how these technologies stand side-by-side with or perhaps will supplant older media.

2. Illuminations by Walter Benjamin – while the whole work is great, the essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ is a must read for discussing how traditional notions about creativity fit into the modern world of print and now digital reproduction (which Benjamin did not even know about). It also deals at an advanced level with how human interactions work on stage versus film and the strange effect this creates.

3. Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton – this classic was quickly adopted by web designers when it came out. What is sometimes forgotten is that the book largely covers the design of products and not websites or print media – products like those that can be built with HoloLens, Magic Leap and Oculus Rift. Full of insights, Buxton helps his readers to see the importance of lived experience when we design and build technology.

4. Bergsonism by Gilles Deleuze – though Deleuze is probably most famous for his collaborations with Felix Guattari, this work on the philosophical meaning of the term ‘’virtual reality’, not as a technology but rather as a way of approaching the world, is a gem.

5. Passwords by Jean Baudrillard – what Deleuze does for virtual reality, Baudrillard does for other artifacts of technological language in order to show their place in our mental cosmology. He also discusses virtual reality along the way, though not as thoroughly.

6. Mathematics for 3D Game Programming and Computer Graphics by Eric Lengeyl – this is hardcore math. You will need this. You can buy it used online for about $6. Go do that now.

7. Linear Algebra and Matrix Theory by Robert Stoll – this is a really hard book. Read the Lengeyl before trying this. This book will hurt you, by the way. After struggling with a page of this book, some people end up buying the Manga Guide to Matrix Theory thinking that there is a fun way to learn matrix math. Unfortunately, there isn’t and they always come back to this one.

8. Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty – when it first came out, this work was often seen as an imitation of Heiddeger’s Being and Time. It may be the case that it can only be truly appreciated today when it has become much clearer, thanks to years of psychological research, that the mind reconstructs not only the visual world for us but even the physical world and our perception of 3D spaces. Merleau-Ponty pointed this out decades ago and moreover provides a phenomenology of our physical relationship to the world around us that will become vitally important to anyone trying to understand what happens when more and more of our external world becomes digitized through virtual and augmented reality technologies.

9. Philosophers Explore the Matrix – just as The Matrix is essential viewing for anyone in this field, this collection of essays is essential reading. This is the best treatment available of a pop theme being explored by real philosophers – actually most of the top American philosophers working on theories of consciousness in the 90s. Did you ever think to yourself that The Matrix raised important questions about reality, identity and consciousness? These professional philosophers agree with you.

10. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson – sometimes to understand a technology, we must extrapolate and imagine how that technology would affect society if it were culturally pervasive and physically ubiquitous. Fortunately Neal Stephenson did that for virtual reality in this amazing book that combines cultural history, computer theory and a fast paced adventure.

What is a HoloCoder?

April 26, 2015 James Ashley

holodeck

Over the past few years we’ve seen the rapid release of innovative consumer technologies that are all loosely related by their ability to scan 3D spaces, interact with 3D spaces or synthesize 3D spaces. These include the Kinect sensor, Leap Motion, Intel Perceptual Computing, Oculus Rift, Google Glass, Magic Leap and HoloLens. Additional related general technologies include projection mapping and 3D printing. Additional related tools include Unity 3D and the Unreal Engine.

Despite a clear family resemblance between all of these technologies, it has been difficult to clearly define what that relationship is. There has been a tendency to categorize all of them as simply being “bleeding edge”, “emerging” or “future”. The problem with these descriptors is that they are ultimately relative to the time at which a technology is released and are not particularly helpful in defining what holds these technologies together in a common gravitational pull.

definitions

I basically want to address this problem by engaging in a bit of word magic. Word magic is a sub-category of magical thinking and is based on a form of psychological manipulation. If you have ever gone out to Martin Fowler’s Bliki then you’ve seen the practice at work. One of the great difficulties of software development is anticipating the unknown: the unknown involved in requirements, the unknown related to timelines, and the unknown concerned with the correct tactics to accomplish tasks. In a field with a limited history and a tendency not to learn from other related fields, the fear of the unknown can utterly cripple projects.

Martin Fowler’s endless enumeration of “patterns” on his bliki takes this on directly by giving names to the unknown. If one reads his blog carefully, however, it quickly becomes clear that most, though not all, of these patterns are illusory: they are written at such an abstract level that they fail to provide any prescriptive advice on how to solve the problems they are intended to address. What they do provide, however, is a sense of relief that there is a “name” that can be used to plug up the hole opened up in time by the fear of the unknown. Solutions architects can return to their teams (or their managers) and pronounce proudly that they have found a pattern to solve the outstanding problem that is hanging over everyone – all that remains is to determine what each “name” actually means.

In this sense, the whole world of software architecture – which Glassdoor ranked as the 11th best job of 2015 — is a modern priesthood devoted to prophetic interpretations of “design patterns”.

I similarly want to use word magic to define the sort of person that works with the sorts of technology I listed at the top of this article. I think I can even do it quite simply with familar imagery.

A holocoder is someone who works with technologies that are inspired by and/or anticipate the Star Trek Holodeck.

interpretations

The part of the definition that states “inspired by and/or anticipate” may seem strange but it is actually quite essential. It is based on a specific temporal-cybernetic theory concerning the dissemination of ideas which I will attempt to describe but which is purely optional with respect to the definition.

But first: how can a theory be both essential and optional? This is an issue that Niels Bohr, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, tackled frequently. In the early 30’s Bohr was travelling through eastern Europe on a lecture tour. During part of the tour, a former student met him at his inn and noticed him nailing a horse shoe over the door of his room. “Professor Bohr”, he asked, “what are you doing?” Niels Bohr replied, “The Inn Keeper informed me that a horse shoe over the door will bring me luck.” The student was scandalized by this. “But Herr Professor,” the student objected, “surely as a physicist and intellectual such as yourself does not believe in these silly superstitions.” “Of course not,” Bohr answered. “But the Inn Keeper reassured me that the horse shoe will bring me luck whether I believe in it or not.”

Here is the optional theory of the Holodeck. Certain technologies, it seems to me, can have such an influence that they shape the way we think about the world. We have seen many examples of this in our past such as the printing press, the automobile, the personal computer and the cell phone. Furthermore we anticipate the advent of similar major technologies in our future. These technologies have what is called a “psychic resonance” and change the very metaphors we use to describe our world. To give a simple example, whereas we originally used mental metaphors to explain computers in terms of “memory”, “processing” and even “computing”, today we use computer metaphors to help explain how the brain works. The arrival of the personal computer caused a shift and a reversal in what semioticians call the relationship between the explanans and the explanandum.

wesley in the holodeck

Psychic impact is transmitted over carriers called “memes”. Memes are basically theoretical constructs that are phenomenally identical to what we call “ideas” but behave like viruses. Memes travel through air as speech and along light waves as images in order to spread themselves from host to host. Traditionally the psychic impact of a meme is measured by the meme’s density over a given space. Besides density, the psychic impact can also be measured based on the total volume of space it is able to infect. Finally, the effectiveness of a meme can also be measured based on its ability to spread into the future. For instance, works of literature and cultural artifacts such as religions and even famous sayings are examples of memes that have effectively infected the future despite a distance of thousands of years between the point of origin of the infection and the temporal location of the target.

While the natural habitat of bacteria like e coli is in the gastrointestinal tract, the natural habitat of memes is in the brain and this leads to a fascinating third form of mimetic transmission. At the level of microtubules in the brain where memes happen to live, we enter the Planck scale in which classical physics do not apply in the way that they do at the macro level. At this scale, effects like quantum entanglement create spooky behaviors such as quantum communication. While theoretically people still cannot communicate with each other in time since that level of semiotics is still governed by classical physics, there is an opening for mimetic viruses to actually be transmitted backwards in time as if they were entering a transporter in one brain and rematerialized in another brain in the past. This allows for a third manner of mimetic spread: in space, forward in time, and finally backwards in time.

Riker in the Holodeck

As an aside, and as I said above, this is an _optional_ theory of psychic impact through time. A common and totally valid criticism is that it appeals to quantum mystery which tends to be misused to justify anything from ghosts to religious cults. The problem with appeals to “quantum mystery” is that this simply provides a name for a problem rather than prescribing actual ways to make predictions or anticipate behavior. In other words, like Martin Fowler’s bliki, it is word magic that provides interpretations of things but not actual solutions. Against such criticisms, however, it should be pointed out that I am explicitly engaged in an exercise in word magic, in which case using certain techniques of word magic – such as quantum mystery – is perfectly legitimate and even natural.

Through quantum entanglement acting on memes at the microtubule level, a technology from our possible future which resembles the Star Trek holodeck has such a large psychic impact that it resonates backwards in time until it reaches and inhabits the brains of the writers of a futuristic science fiction show in the late 80’s and is introduced into the show as the Holodeck. Through television transmissions, the holodeck meme is then broadcast to millions of teenagers who eventually enter the tech industry, become leaders in the tech industry, and eventually decide to implement various aspects of the holodeck by creating better and better 3D sensors, 3D simulation tools and 3D visualization technologies – both augmented and virtual. In other words, the Holodeck reaches backwards in time to inspire others in order to effectively give birth to itself, ex nihilo. Those that have been touched by the transmission are what I am calling holocoders.

and/or

Alternatively, this theory of where holocoders come from can be taken as a metaphor only. In this case, holocoders are not people being pulled toward a common future but instead people being pushed forward from a common past. Holocoders are people inspired directly or indirectly by a television show from the late 80’s that involved a large room filled with holograms that could be used for entertainment as well as research. Holocoders work on any or all of the wide variety of technologies that could potentially be combined to recreate that imagined experience.

the dreamatorium

Anyways, that’s my theory and I’m sticking to it. More importantly, these technologies are deeply entangled and deserve a good name, whether you want to go with holocoding or something else (though the holodeck people from the future highly encourage you to use the terms “holocoder”, “holocoding” and “holodeck”).

appendix

There are two other important instances of environment simulators which for whatever reason do not have the same impact as the Star Trek holodeck but are nevertheless worth mentioning.

The first is the X-Men Danger Room which is an elaborate obstacle course involving holograms as well as robots used to train the X-Men. While the Danger Room goes back to the 60’s, the inclusion of holograms actually didn’t happen until the early 90’s, and so actually comes after the Star Trek environment simulator.

Clifford D. Simak published Way Station in 1963 (and won a Hugo award for it). It actually anticipates two Star Trek technologies – transporters as well as an environment simulator. Enoch Wallace, the hero of the story, works the earth relay station for intergalactic aliens who transport travelers over vast distances by sending them over shorter hops between the way stations of the title. Because he is so isolated in his job, the aliens support him by allowing him to pursue a hobby. Because Wallace enjoys hunting, the aliens build for him an environment simulator that lets him do big game hunting for dinosaurs.

The Coming Holo Wars and How to Survive Them

February 6, 2015 James Ashley

this is the way the RL world ends

cloud atlas: new seoul

We are the holo men,

We are the stuffed men.

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together,

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rat’s feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar.

— T. S. Eliot

“Disruptive technology” is one of the most over-used phrases in contemporary marketing hyper-speech. Borrowing liberally from previous generations’ research into the nature of political and scientific revolutions (Leon Trotsky, Georges Sorel, Thomas Kuhn), self-promoting second raters have pillaged the libraries of these scholars of disruption and have co-opted their intellects in the service of filling the world with useless gadgets and vaporware. When everything is a disruptive technology, nothing is.

Just as Sorel drew on historical examples of general strikes to form his narrative of idealized proletarian revolution and Kuhn identified three examples of scientific revolution: the transition from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican model of the solar system, the abandoning of phlogiston theory, and the shift from Newtonian to relativistic physics – to distill his theory of the “paradigm shift”, we can similarly take one step back in order to find the treasure hidden in the morass of marketing opportunism.

There have been three* major shakeups in the tech sector over the past several decades; each one was marked by the invocation of the “war” metaphor, the leveraging of large sums of money and massive shifts in the fortunes of well known companies.

The PC Wars – the commoditization of the personal computer in the 80s led to the diminishing of IBM and a surprising victor, Microsoft, which realized that the key to winning the PC Wars lay not with the hardware but with the operating system that made the hardware accessible. Following that model, the mid- to late-90s saw the rise of the Internet, various attempts to create portal solutions, and a pitched battle between Netscape and Microsoft to produce the dominant browser.

The Browser Wars – the Browser Wars saw the rise and fall of companies like Yahoo! and AOL and the eventual victor turned out not be the best browser but the best search engine: Google. More recently we’ve been going through the Mobile Wars in which Apple has been the clear winner – but also Amazon, Twitter and Facebook.

The Mobile Wars – covering both the rise of smart phones as well as tablet devices, the Mobile Wars have born fruit in the way we view consumer experiences, have shifted software development from desktop to web development, have made JavaScript a first class language, have made responsive design the de facto standard, have made the freelance creative designer the Renaissance person of the 21st century, and perhaps most important have accelerated geolocation technology. Geolocation, as will be shown below, is a key player in the next technology war.

between the idea and the reality

jupiter ascending

Shape without form, shade without color,

Paralyzed force, gesture without motion;

As a devotee of Adam Sandler movies, I was pleased to see him teamed with Judd Apatow and Seth Rogan in 2009’s Funny Men. Adam Sandler movies are up there with “Pretty Woman” and “Dumb and Dumber” in the cable industry as movies that can be shown at any time of day and still be guaranteed to draw viewers. There is a false moment in the middle of the movie, however, in which Adam Sandler and Seth Rogan are flown out to perform at a private party for MySpace. What’s MySpace you ask? It was a social network that was crushed in the dust by Facebook, of which you have probably heard, along with other even more obscure networks like Friendster and Bebo. MySpace are portrayed in the movie as an up-and-rising social network through a last-gasp cross-marketing placement with Universal Studios.

A major characteristic of today’s tech wars is that we do not remember the losers. It does not even matter how big these corporations were during their period of being winners. Once they are gone, it is as if they are completely erased from the timeline, their reputations liquidated in the same fashion as their Aeron chairs and stock options.

To be a winner in the tech wars is to be a survivor of the tech wars. This applies not just to corporations but also to the marketing, business and technical people who are carried in the wake of rising and falling technology trends. IT groups across the US now face the problem of trends they have ignored finally reaching the C-levels as they are being asked about their mobile strategies and why their applications are not designed to be responsive – and perhaps even whey they continue to be written in vb6 or delphi.

These casualties of the Mobile Wars must be wondering what choices they could have made differently over the past several years and what choices they should be making over the next. How does one survive the conflict that comes after the Mobile Wars?

between the motion and the act

2001 a space odyssey

Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death’s other kingdom

Remember us — if at all — not as lost

Violent souls, but only

As the holo men,

The stuffed men.

Surviving and even thriving in the coming Holo Wars is possible if you keep an eye out for the contours of future history – if you know what is coming. The first key is knowing who the major players are: Microsoft, Facebook, Google – though there is no guarantee any of them will still be standing when the Holo Wars are over.

Microsoft has catapulted to the front of the Holo Wars with its announcement of the HoloLens on January 21st. HoloLens is the brainchild of Alex Kipman, who also spearheaded the product development of the Kinect. It is expected to be built on some of the technology developed for the Kinect v2 sensor combined with new holographic display technology – possibly involving eye movement tracking – that has yet to be revealed.

Facebook became a participant in the Holo Wars when it bought Palmer Luckey’s company Oculus VR in mid-2014. The Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset, is basically two mobile display screens placed in front of a user’s eyeballs in order to show stereoscopic digital visualizations. The key to this technology is John Cormack’s ingenious use of sensors to track and anticipate head movements to rotate and skew images in a realistic way in the virtual world revealed by the Rift.

Google participates in several ways. Even though the explorer program is now closed, Google Glass arrived with great fanfare and created excitement around the fashion and consumer uses of this heads-up display technology. Following Google’s major investment in Rony Abovitz’s Magic Leap in October 2014, a maker of mysterious augmented reality technology, it now appears that this is the more likely future direction of Google Glass or whatever it is eventually called. Magic Leap, in turn, has added some amazing names to its payroll including Gary Bradski of OpenCV fame and Neal Stephenson, the author of Snow Crash. The third leg of Google’s investment in a holographic future is the expertise in geolocation it has acquired over the past decade.

The next key to surviving the Holo Wars is to understand what skills will be needed when the fighting starts. The first skill is a deeper knowledge of computer graphics. Since the rise of the graphical user interface, software development platforms have increasingly abstracted away the details of generating pixels and managing human-computer interactions. Future demands for spatially aware pixels will force developers to relearn basic mathematical concepts, linear algebra, trigonometry and matrix math.

In addition to mathematics, machine learning will be important as a way of making overwhelming amounts of data manageable. Modern computer interactions are relatively simple. Users sit in one place, in a fixed position respective to the machine, and rarely deviate from this position. Input is passed through transducers that reduce desire and intent into simple signals. Digital reality experiences, on the other hand, not only receive gestural information which must be interpreted but also physical orientation, world coordinates, facial expressions and speech commands. A basic knowledge of Bayesian probability and stochastic calculus will be part of the tool chest of anyone who wants to successfully navigate the Holo joblists of the future.

To reforge ourselves with skills for surviving the next seven years, designers must also become better programmers and software programmers must become more creative. The freelance creative, a job role that expanded dramatically during the Mobile Wars, will have an even brighter future in a world pervaded by augmented reality experiences. In order to make the shift, however, creatives will need to move beyond their comfort zone of creating PSDs in Photoshop and learn motion graphics as well as basic computer programming. Programmers likewise will need to move beyond the conceit that coding is an inherently creative activity; moving data around from point A to point B is no more creative than moving books around a sprawling Amazon warehouse and then packing them up for shipping is a poetic.

Real creative coding involves learning how to construct digital-to-physical experiences with Arduino, how to program self-generating visual algorithms with Processing, how to create 3D worlds in Unity and how to create complex visual interactions with openFrameworks and Cinder. These activities will become the common vocabulary of the future programmers of augmented experiences. Hiring managers and recruiters will expect to find them on resumes and without them, otherwise experienced tech workers be unhireable or worse, relegated to maintaining legacy web applications.

not with a bang but a whimper

enders game

The eyes are not here

There are no eyes here

In this valley of dying stars

In this holo valley

This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places

We grope together

How can one tell if these prescriptions for the future Holo Wars are real and actionable or simply more marketing hype attempting to take advantage of people’s natural gullibility regarding technical gadgets? Aren’t we always being burned by overly optimistic portrayals of the future that never come to pass? Where are our flying cars? Where are our remote work locations?

In order for the Holo Wars to play out, certain milestones need to be achieved. Consequently, if you start seeing these milestones realized, you will know that you are in fact living through a fight over the next disruptive technology that will destroy some major tech corporations while affirming others at the apex of the tech world, one that will also reward those that have positioned themselves with useful skills for this future economy and punish those who do not. These milestones are: technology, monetization, persistent holographic objects, belief circles, overlapping dissociative realities.

Technology: the first phase is occurring now with the three major players discussed above and several additional players such as Metaio, Qualcomm and Samsung engaged in building up consumer augmented reality hardware and supporting technologies such as geolocation and gestural interfaces.

Monetization: innovation costs money. The initial hardware and infrastructure effort will likely be subsidized by the major players. Over time, the monetization model will likely follow what we see on the internet with “free” consumer experiences being subsidized by ads. There will be a struggle between premium subscription based experiences offering to remove the ads while providing better, higher resolution experiences with better content. These portal solutions will also contend against free and low-cost plug-in content provided by hackers and freelance creatives. How this plays out will depend largely on whether the premium content providers will be able to block out independents through standards and compatibility issues as well as whether hackers will find ways to overcome these roadblocks. There is also the possibility that some of the players might be looking at a much longer game and will foster an open AR content generation community rather than attempt to crush it. If the AR economy opens up in this way, a new service sector will grow made up of one set of people generating digital worlds for another set to live in.

Persistent Holographic Objects: virtual worlds are typically subjective experiences. They can be made inter-subjective, as they are in MMOs, by creating virtual topology in which people co-exist and co-operate. In augmented worlds, on the other hand, shared topology is an inherent feature. AR shared topology is called reality. In order to make AR worlds truly inter-subjective, rather than simply objective or subjective, shared holo objects must be part of the experience. Pesistent holo objects such as a digital fountain, a digital garden, or a digital work of art will have a set location and orientation in the world. AR players will need to travel to these locations physically in order to experience them. Unlike private AR or VR experiences in which each player views copies of the same digital object, with a shared experience each player can be said to be looking at the same persistent holo object from different points of view. In order to achieve persistent holographic objects, we will require finer grained geolocation than we currently have. AR gear must also be improved to become more usable in direct sunlight.

Belief Circles: a healthy indie creative fringe-economy and persistent holographic objects will make it possible to customize intersubjective experiences. People have a natural tendency to form cliques, parties and communities. Belief circles, a term coined by Vernor Vinge, will provide coherent community experiences for different guilds based on shared interests and shared aspirations. Users will opt in and out of various belief circles as they see fit. The same persistent holographic objects may appear differently to members of different circles and yet be recognized as sharing a common space and perhaps a common purpose. For instance, the holosign in front of the local Starbucks will have a permanent location and consistent semantic purpose, in AR space, but a polymorphic appearance. To paraphrase a truism, beauty will be in the eye of one’s belief circle.

Overlapping Dissociative Realities: divergent intersubjectivities will produce both a greater awareness of synchronicity – and a sense of deja vu as AR content is copied freely into multiple locations — as well as an increased sense of cognitive dissonance. Consider the example of going into Starbucks for coffee. The people waiting in line will likely each be members of varying belief circles and consequently will be having different experiences of the wait. This is not a large departure since we typically do not care about what other people in line are doing and even avoid paying attention unless they take too long making a selection. In this case, divergent belief circles make it easier to follow our natural instinct to avoid each other. Everyone in the holo valley is anonymous if they want to be. When one arrives at the head of the line, however, something more interesting happens. Even though the customer and the barista likely belong to different belief circles, they must interact, communicate, and perform an economic exchange; these two creatures from different worlds. What will that be like? Will one then lift a corner of the holo lenses in order to rub a sore eye only to discover that this isn’t a Starbucks at all but really a Dunkin’ Donuts which had silently bought out the other chain in a hostile takeover the previous week? Will your coffee taste any different if it looks exactly the same?

* 1996 was witness to a small skirmish between OpenGL and Direct3D that has subsequently come to be known as the API Wars. While the API Wars have had long lasting ripples, I don’t see them as having the tectonic effect of the other historical phenomena I am describing – plus anyways Thomas Kuhn only provides three major examples of his thesis and I wanted to stick to that particular design pattern.

[Much gratitude to Joel and Nate for collaborating on these scenarios over a highly entertaining lunch.]

Top 21 HoloLens Ideas

January 26, 2015 James Ashley

The image above is a best guess at the underlying technology being used in Microsoft’s new HoloLens headset. It’s not even that great a guess since the technology appears to still be in the prototype stage. On the other hand, the product is tied to the Windows 10 release date, so we may be seeing a consumer version – or at the very least a dev version – sometime in the fall.

Here are some things we can surmise about HoloLens:

a) the name may change – HoloLens is a good product name but isn’t quite where we might like it to be, in a league with Kinect, Silverlight or Surface for branding genius. In fact, Surface was such a good name, it was taken from one product group and simply given to another in a strange twist on the build vs buy vs borrow quandary. On the other hand, HoloLens sounds more official than the internal code name, Baraboo — isn’t that a party hippies throw themselves in the desert?

johnny mnemonic

b) this is augmented reality rather than virtual reality. Facebook’s Oculus Rift, which is an immersive fully digital experience, is an example of virtual reality. Other fictional examples include The Oasis from Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, The Mataverse from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, William Gibson’s Cyberspace and the VR simulation from The Lawnmower Man. Augmented reality involves overlaying digital experience on top of the real world. This can be accomplished using holography, transparent displays, or projectors. A great example of projector based AR is the RoomAlive project by Hrvoje Benko, Eyal Ofek and Andy Wilson at Microsoft Research. HoloLens uses glasses or a head-rig – depending on how generous you feel – to implement AR. Magic Leap – with heavy investment from Google – appears to be doing the same thing. The now dormant Google Glass was neither AR nor VR, but was instead a heads-up display.

kgirl

c) HoloLens uses Kinect technology under the plastic covers. While the depth sensor in the Kinect v2 has a field of view of 70 degrees by about 60 degrees, the depth capability in HoloLens is reported to include a field of view of 120 degrees by 120 degrees. This indicates that HoloLens will be using the Time-of-Flight technology used in Kinect v2 rather than the structured light from Kinect v1. This set up requires both an IR emitter as well as a depth camera combined with a sophisticated timing and phase technology to efficiently and relatively inexpensively calculate depth.

hands

d) the depth camera is being used for multiple purposes. The first is for gesture detection. One of the issues that faced both Oculus and Google Glass was that they were primarily display technologies. But a computer monitor is useless without a keyboard or mouse. Similarly, Oculus and Glass needed decent interaction metaphors. Glass relied primarily on speech commands and tapping and clicking. Oculus had nothing until their recent acquisition of the NimbleVR . NimbleVR provides a depth camera optimized for hand and finger detection over a small range. This can be mounted in front of the Oculus headset. Conceptually, this allows people to use hand gestures and finger manipulations in front of the device. A virtual hand can be created as an affordance in the virtual world of the Oculus display, allowing users to interact with virtual objects and virtual interactive menus in virtro.

The depth sensor in HoloLens would work in a similar way except that instead of a virtual hand as affordance, it’s just your hand. You will use your hand to manipulate digital objects displayed on the AR lenses or to interact with AR menus using gestures.

An interesting question is how many IR sensors are going to be on the HoloLens device. From the pictures that have been released, it looks like we will have a color camera and a depth sensor for each eye, for a total of two depth cameras and two RGB cameras located near the joint between the lenses and the headband.

holo_minecraft

e) HoloLens is also using depth data for 3d reconstruction of real world surfaces. These surfaces are then used as virtual projection surfaces for digital textures. Finally, the blitted image is displayed on the transparent lenses.

ra1

ra_2

This sort of reconstruction is a common problem in projection mapping scenarios. A great example of applying this sort of reconstruction can be found in the Halloween edition of Microsoft Research’s RoomAlive project. In the first image above, you are seeing the experience from the correct perspective. In the second image, the image is captured from a different perspective than the one that is being projected. From the incorrect perspective, it can be seen that the image is actually being projected on multiple surfaces – the various planes of the chair as well as the wall behind it – but foreshortened digitally and even color corrected to make the image appear cohesive to a viewer sitting at the correct position. One or more Kinects must be used to calibrate the projections appropriately against these multiple surfaces. If you watch the full video, you’ll see that Kinect sensors are used to track the viewer as she moves through the room and the foreshortening / skewing occurs dynamically to adjust to her changing position.

The Minecraft AR experience being used to show the capabilities of HoloLens requires similar techniques. The depth sensor is required not only to calibrate and synchronize the digital display to line up correctly with the table and other planes in the room, but also to constantly adjust the display as the player moves around the room.

eye-tracking

f) are the display lenses stereoscopic or holographic? At this point no one is completely sure, though indications are that this is something more than the stereoscopic display technique used in the Oculus Rift. While a stereoscopic display will create the illusion of depth and parallax by creating a different image for each lens, something holographic would actually be creating multiple images per lens and smoothly shifting through them based on the location of each pupil staring through its respective lens and the orientation and position of the player’s head.

One way of achieving this sort of holographic display is to have multiple layers of lenses pressed against each other and using interference shift the light projected into each pupil as the pupil moves. It turns out that the average person’s pupils typically move around rapidly in saccades, mapping and reconstructing images for the brain, even though we do not realize this motion is occurring. Accurately capturing these motions and shifting digital projections appropriately to compensate would create a highly realistic experience typically missing from stereoscopic reconstructions. It is rumored in the industry that Magic Leap is pursuing this type of digital holography.

On the other hand, it has also been reported that HoloLens is equipped with eye-tracking cameras on the inside of the frames, apparently to aid with gestural interactions. It would be extremely interesting if Microsoft’s route to achieving true holographic displays involved eye-tracking combined with a high display refresh rate rather than coherent light interference display technology as many people assume. Or, then again, it could just be stereoscopic displays after all.

occlusion

g) occlusion is generally considered a problem for interactive experiences. For augmented reality experiences, however, it is a feature. Consider a physical-to-digital interaction in which you use your finger/hand to manipulate a holographic menu. The illusion we want to see is of the hand coming between the player’s eyes and the digital menu. The player’s hand should block and obscure portions of the menu as he interacts with it.

The difficulty with creating this illusion is that the player’s hand isn’t really between the menu and the eyes. Really, the player’s hand is on the far side of the menu, and the menu is being displayed on the HoloLens between the player’s eyes and his hand. Visually, the hologram of the menu will bleed through and appear on top of the hand.

In order to re-establish the illusion of the menu being located on the far side of the hand, we need depth-sensors to accurately map an outline of the hand and arm and then cut a hand and arm shape out of the menu where the hand should be occluding it. This process has to be repeated as the hand moves in real-time and it’s kind of a hard problem.

borg

h) misc sensors : best guess is that in addition to depth sensors, color cameras and eye-tracking cameras, we’ll also get a directional microphone, gyroscope, accelerometer and magnetometer. Some sort of 3D sound has been announced, so it makes sense that there is a directional microphone or microphone array to complement it. This is something that is available on both the Kinect v1 and Kinect v2. The gyroscope, accelerometer and magnetometer are also guesses – but the Oculus hardware has them to track quick head movements, head position and head orientation. It makes sense that HoloLens will need them also.

bono

i) the current form factor looks a little big – bigger than the Magic Leap is supposed to be but smaller than the current Oculus dev units. The goal – really everyone’s goal, from Microsoft to Facebook to Google – is to continue to bring down the size of sensors so we can eventually have heavy glasses rather than light-weight head gear.

j) vampires, infrared sensors and transparent displays are all sensitive to direct sunlight. This consideration can affect the viability of some AR scenarios.

k) like all innovative technologies, the success of HoloLens will depend primarily on what people use it for. the myth of the killer app is probably not very useful anymore, but the notion that you need an app store to sell a device is a generally accepted universal constant. The success of the HoloLens will depend on what developers build for it and what consumers can imagine doing with it.

Top 21 Ideas

Many of these ideas are borrowed from other VR and AR technology. In most cases, HoloLens will simply provide a better way to implement these notions. These ideas come from movies, from art installations, and from many years working at an innovative marketing agency where we prototyped these ideas day in and day out.

1. Shopping

Amazon made one click shopping make sense. Shopping and the psychology of shopping changes when we make it more convenient, effectively turning instant gratification into a marketing strategy. Using HoloLens AR, we can remodel a room with virtual furniture and then purchase all the pieces on an interactive menu floating in the air in front of us when we find the configuration we want. We can try and buy virtual clothes. With a wave of the hand we can stock our pantry, stock our refrigerator … wait, come to think of it, with decent AR, do we even need furniture or clothes anymore?

2. Gaming

IllumiRoom was a Microsoft project that never quite made it to product but was a huge hit on the web. The notion was to extend the XBox One console with projections that reacted to what was occurring in the game but could also extend the visuals of the game into the entire living room. IllumiRoom (which I was fortunate enough to see live the last time I was in Redmond) also uses a Kinect sensor to scan the room in order to calibrate projection mapping onto surfaces like bookshelves, tables and potted plants. As you can guess, this is the same team that came up with RoomAlive. A setup that includes a $1,500 projector and a Kinect is a bit complicated, especially when a similar effect can now be created using a single unit HoloLens.

hud

The HoloLens device could also be used for in-game Heads-Up notifications or even as a second screen. It would make a lot of sense if XBox integration is on the roadmap and would set XBox apart as the clear leader in the console wars.

3. Communication

‘nuff said.

4. Home Automation

clapper

Home automation has come a long way and you can now easily turn lights on and off with your smart phone from miles away. Turning your lights on and off from inside your own house may still involve actually touching a light switch. Devices like the Kinect have the limitation that they can only sense a portion of a room at a time. Many ideas have been thrown out to create better gesture recognition sensors for the home, including using wifi signals that go through walls to detect gestures in other rooms. If you were actually wearing a gestural device around with you, this would no longer be a problem. Point at a bulb, make a fist, “put out the light, and then put out the light” to quote the Bard.

5. Education

Microsoft-future-vision

While cool visuals will make education more interesting, the biggest benefit of HoloLens for education is simple access. Children in rural areas in the US have to travel long distances to achieve a decent education. Around the world, the problem of rural education is even worse. What if educators could be brought to the children instead? This is one of the stated goals of Facebook’s purchase of Oculus Rift and HoloLens can do the same job just as well and probably better.

6. Medical Care

Technology can be used for interesting diagnostic and rehabilitation functions. The depth sensors that come with HoloLens will no doubt be used in these ways eventually. But like education, one of the great problems in medical care right now is access. If we can’t bring the patient to the doctor, let’s bring the GP to the patient and do regular check ups.

7. Holodeck

matrix-i-know-kung-fu

The RoomAlive project points the way toward building a Holodeck. All we have to do is replace Kinect sensors with HoloLens sensors, projectors with holographic displays, and then try now to break the HoloLens strapped to our heads as we learn Kung Fu.

8. Windows

window

Have you ever wished you could look out your window and be somewhere else? HoloLens can make that happen. You’ll have to block out natural light by replacing your windows with sheetrock, but after that HoloLens can give you any view you want.

But why stop at windows. You can digitize all your walls if you want, and HoloLens’ depth technology will take care of the rest.

9. Movies and Television

vr-cinema-3d

Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR have apps that let you watch movies in your own virtual theater. But wouldn’t it be more fun to watch a movie with your entire family? With HoloLens we can all be together on the couch but watch different things. They can watch Barney on the flatscreen while I watch an overlay of Meet the Press superimposed on the screen. Then again, with HoloLens maybe I could replace my expensive 60” plasma TV with a piece of cardboard and just watch that instead.

10. Therapy

It’s commonly accepted that white noise and muted colors relax us. Controlling our environment helps us to regulate our inner states. Behavioral psychology is based on such ideas and the father of behavioral psychology, B. F. Skinner, even created the Skinner box to research these ideas – though I personally prefer Wilhelm Reich’s Orgone box. With 3D audio and lenses that extend over most of your field of view, HoloLens can recreate just the right experience to block out the world after a busy day and just relax. shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

11. Concerts

burning-man-festival-nevada

Once a year in the Nevada desert a magical music festival is held called Baraboo. Or, I don’t know, maybe it’s held in Tennessee. In any case, getting to festivals is really hard and usually involves being around people who aren’t wearing enough deodorant, large crowds, and buying plastic bottles of water for $20. Wouldn’t it be great to have an immersive festival experience without all the things that get in the way. Of course, there are those who believe that all that other stuff is essential to the experience. They can still go and be part of the background for me.

12. Avatars

Gamification is a huge buzzword at digital marketing agencies. Undergirding the hype is the realization that our digital and RL experiences overlap and that it sometimes can be hard to find the seams. Vernor Vinge’s 2001 novella Fast Times at Fairmont High draws out the implications of this merging of physical and digital realities and the potential for the constant self reinvention we are used to on the internet bleeding over into the real world. Why continue with the name your parents gave you when you can live your AR life as ByteMst3r9999? Why be constrained by your biological appearance when you can project your inner self through a fun and bespoke avatar representation? AR can ensure that other people only see you the way that you want them to.

13. Blocking Other People’s Avatars

BlackBlock

The flip side of an AR society invested in an avatar culture is the ability to block people who are griefing us. Parents can call a time out and block their children for ten minutes periods. Husbands can block their wives. We could all start blocking our co-workers on occasion. For serious offenses, people face permanent blocking as a legal sanction for bad behavior by the game masters of our augmented reality world. The concept was brilliantly played out in the recent Black Mirror Christmas special starring Jon Hamm. If you haven’t been keeping up with Black Mirror, go check it out. I’ll wait for you to finish.

14. Augmented Media

fiducial

Augmented reality today typically involves a smart phone or tablet and and a fiducial marker. The fiducial is a tag or bar code that indicates to the app on your phone where an AR experience should be placed. Typically you’ll find the fiducial in a magazine ad that encourages you to download an app to see the hidden augmented content. It’s novel and fun. The problem involves having to hold up your tablet or phone for a period of time just to see what is sometimes a disappointing experience. It would be much more interesting to have these augmented media experiences always available. HoloLens can be always on and searching for these types of augmented experiences as you read the latest New Yorker or Wired. They needn’t be confined to ads, either. Why can’t the whole magazine be filled with AR content? And why stop at magazines? Comic books with additional AR content would change the genre in fascinating ways (Marvel’s online version already offers something like this, though rudimentary). And then imagine opening a popup book where all the popups are augmented, a children’s book where all the illustrations are animated, or a textbook that changes on the fly and updates itself every year with the latest relevant information – a kindle on steroids. You can read about that possibility in Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age – only available in non-augmented formats for now.

15. Terminator Vision

robocop

This is what we thought Google Glass was supposed to provide – but then it didn’t. That’s okay. With vision recognition software and the two RGB cameras on HoloLens, you’ll never forget a name again. Instant information will appear telling you about your surroundings. Maps and directions will appear when you gesture for them. Shopping associates will no longer have to wing it when engaging with customers. Instead, HoloLens will provide them with conversation cues and decision trees that will help the associate close the sale efficiently and effectively. Dates will be more interesting as you pull up the publicly available medical, education and legal histories of anyone who is with you at dinner. And of course, with the heartbeat monitor and ability to detect small fluctuations in skin tone, no one will ever be able to lie to you again, making salary negotiations and buying a car a snap.

16. Wealth Management

With instant tracking of the DOW, S&P and NASDAQ along with a gestural interface that goes wherever you go, you can become a day trader extraordinaire. Lose and gain thousands of dollars with a flick of your finger.

17. Clippit

clippit

Call him Jarvis if it helps. Some sort of AI personal assistant has always been in the cards. Immersive AR will make it a reality.

18. Impossible UIs

minority_report

phone

3dtouch

cloud atlas floating computer

I don’t watch movies the way other people do. Whenever I go to see a futuristic movie, I try to figure out how to recreate the fantasy user experiences portrayed in it. Minority Report is an easy one – it’s a large area display, possibly projection, with Kinect-like gestural sensors. The communication device from the Total Recall reboot is a transparent screen and either capacitive touch or more likely a color camera doing blob recognition. The 3D touchscreen from Pacific Rim has always had me stumped. Possibly some sort of leap motion device attached to a Pepper’s Ghost display? The one fantasy UX I could never figure out until I saw HoloLens is the “Orison” computer made up of floating disks in Cloud Atlas. The Orison screens are clearly digital devices in a physical space – beautiful, elegant, and the sort of intuitive UX for which we should strive. Until now, they would have been impossible to recreate. Now, I’m just waiting to get my hands on a dev device to try to make working Orison displays.

19. Wiki World

wikipedia

Wiki World is a simple extension of terminator vision. Facts floating before your eyes, always available, always on. No one will ever have to look up the correct spelling for a word again or strain his memory for a sports statistic. What movie was that actor in? Is grouper ethical to eat? Is Javascript an object-oriented language? Wiki world will make memorization obsolete and obviate all arguments – well, except for edit wars between Wikipedia editors, of course.

20. Belief Circles

wwc

Belief circles are a concept from Vernor Vinge’s Hugo award winning novel Rainbows End. Augmented reality lends itself to self-organizing communal affiliations that will create inter-subjective realities that are shared. Some people will share sci-fi themes. Others might go the MMO route and share a fantasy setting with a fictional history, origin story, guilds and factions. Others will prefer football. Some will share a common religion or political vision. All of these belief circles will overlap and interpenetrate. Taking advantage of these self-generating belief circles for content creation and marketing will open up new opportunities for freelance creatives and entrepreneurs over the next ten years.

21. Theater of Memory

Giulio Camillo’s memory theater belongs to a long tradition of mnemonic technology going back to Roman times and used by orators and lawyers to memorize long speeches. The scholar Frances Yates argued that it also belonged to another Renaissance tradition of neoplatonic magic that has since been superseded by science in the same way that memory technology has been superseded by books, magazines and computers. What Frances Yates – and after her Ioan Couliano – tried to show, however, was that in dismissing these obsolete modes of understanding the world, we also lose access to a deeper, metaphoric and humanistic way of seeing the world and are the poorer for it. The theater of memory is like Feng Shui – also discredited – in that it assumes that the way we construct our surroundings also affects our inner lives and that there is a sympathetic relationship between the macrocosm of our environment and the microcosm of our emotional lives. I’m sounding too new agey so I’ll just stop now. I will be creating my own digital theater of memory as soon as I can, though, as a personal project just for me.