The development community deserves a great book on the Kinect 2 sensor. Sadly, I no longer feel I am the person to write that book. Instead, I am abandoning the Kinect book project I’ve been working on and off over the past year in order to devote myself to a book on the Microsoft holographic computing platform and HoloLens SDK. I will be reworking the material I’ve so far collected for the Kinect book as blog posts over the next couple of months.
As anyone who follows this blog will know, my imagination has of late been captivated and ensorcelled by augmented reality scenarios. The book I intend to write is not just a how-to guide, however. While I recognize the folly of this, my intention is to write something that is part technical manual and part design guide, part math tutorial, part travel guide and part cookbook. While working on the Kinect book I came to realize that it is impossible to talk about gestural computing without entering into a dialog with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and Umberto Eco’s A Theory of Semiotics. At the same time, a good book on future technologies should also cover the renaissance in theories of consciousness that occurred in the mid-90’s and which culminated with David Chalmers’ masterwork The Conscious Mind. Descartes, Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari and Baudrillard obviously cannot be overlooked either in a book dealing with the topic of the virtual, though I can perhaps elide a bit.
A contemporary book on technology can no longer stay within the narrow limits of a single technology as was common 10 or so years ago. Things move at too fast a pace and there are too many different ways to accomplish a given task that choosing between them depends not only on that old saw ‘the right tool for the job’ but also on taste, extended community and prior knowledge. To write a book on augmented reality technology, even when sticking to one device like the HoloLens, will require covering and uncovering to the uninitiated such wonderful platforms as openFrameworks, Cinder, Arduino, Unity, the Unreal Engine and WPF. It will have to cover C#, since that is by and large the preferred language in the Microsoft world, but also help C# developers to overcome their fear of modern C++ and provide a roadmap from one to the other. It will also need to expose the underlying mathematics that developers need to grasp in order to work in a 3D world – and astonishingly, software developers know very little math.
Finally, as holographic computing is a wide new world and the developers who take to it will be taking up a completely new role in the workforce, the book will have to find its way to the right sort of people who will have the aptitude and desire to take up this mantle. This requires a discussion of non-obvious skills such as a taste for cooking and travel, an eye for the visual, a grounding in architecture and an understanding of how empty spaces are constructed, a general knowledge of literary and social theory. The people who create the next world, the augmented world, cannot be mere engineers. They will also need to be poets and madmen.
I want to write a book for them.