Author: James Ashley

The Great AI Awakening

James Ashley

bathers_and_whale

This is a crazy long but nicely comprehensive article by the New York Times on the current state of AI: The Great AI Awakening.

While lately I’ve been buried in 3D interfaces, I’m always faintly aware of the way 1D interfaces (Cortana Skills, Speech as a service, etc.) is another fruit of our recent machine learning breakthroughs (or more accurately refocus) and of how the future success of holographic displays ultimately involves making it work with our 1D interfaces to create personal assistants. This article helps connect the dots between these, at first, apparently different technologies.

It also nicely complements Memo Atken’s Medium posts on Deep Learning and Art, which Microsoft resident genius Rick Barraza pointed me to a while back:

Part 1: The Dawn of Deep Learning

Part 2: Algorithmic Decision Making, Machine Bias, Creativity and Diversity

There’s also a nice throw away reference in the Times article about the relationship between VR and Machine Learning which is a little less obscure if you already know Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation which in turn depends on Jorge Luis Borges’s very short story On Exactitude In Science.

If you really haven’t the time though, which I suspect may be the case, here are some quick excerpts starting with Google’s AI efforts:

Google’s decision to reorganize itself around A.I. was the first major manifestation of what has become an industrywide machine-learning delirium. Over the past four years, six companies in particular — Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and the Chinese firm Baidu — have touched off an arms race for A.I. talent, particularly within universities. Corporate promises of resources and freedom have thinned out top academic departments. It has become widely known in Silicon Valley that Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, personally oversees, with phone calls and video-chat blandishments, his company’s overtures to the most desirable graduate students. Starting salaries of seven figures are not unheard-of. Attendance at the field’s most important academic conference has nearly quadrupled. What is at stake is not just one more piecemeal innovation but control over what very well could represent an entirely new computational platform: pervasive, ambient artificial intelligence.

 

When he has an opportunity to make careful distinctions, Pichai differentiates between the current applications of A.I. and the ultimate goal of “artificial general intelligence.” Artificial general intelligence will not involve dutiful adherence to explicit instructions, but instead will demonstrate a facility with the implicit, the interpretive. It will be a general tool, designed for general purposes in a general context. Pichai believes his company’s future depends on something like this. Imagine if you could tell Google Maps, “I’d like to go to the airport, but I need to stop off on the way to buy a present for my nephew.” A more generally intelligent version of that service — a ubiquitous assistant, of the sort that Scarlett Johansson memorably disembodied three years ago in the Spike Jonze film “Her”— would know all sorts of things that, say, a close friend or an earnest intern might know: your nephew’s age, and how much you ordinarily like to spend on gifts for children, and where to find an open store. But a truly intelligent Maps could also conceivably know all sorts of things a close friend wouldn’t, like what has only recently come into fashion among preschoolers in your nephew’s school — or more important, what its users actually want. If an intelligent machine were able to discern some intricate if murky regularity in data about what we have done in the past, it might be able to extrapolate about our subsequent desires, even if we don’t entirely know them ourselves.

 

The new wave of A.I.-enhanced assistants — Apple’s Siri, Facebook’s M, Amazon’s Echo — are all creatures of machine learning, built with similar intentions. The corporate dreams for machine learning, however, aren’t exhausted by the goal of consumer clairvoyance. A medical-imaging subsidiary of Samsung announced this year that its new ultrasound devices could detect breast cancer. Management consultants are falling all over themselves to prep executives for the widening industrial applications of computers that program themselves. DeepMind, a 2014 Google acquisition, defeated the reigning human grandmaster of the ancient board game Go, despite predictions that such an achievement would take another 10 years.

My problem with More Personal Computing as a Branding Attempt

James Ashley

We all know that Microsoft has had a long history with problematic branding. For every “Silverlight” that comes along we get many more confusing monikers like “Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007.” As the old saw goes, if Microsoft invented the iPod, they would have called it the “Microsoft I-pod Pro 2005 Human Ear Professional Edition.”

While “More Personal Computing” breaks the trend of long academic nomenclature, it is still a bit wordy. It’s also a pun. For anyone who hasn’t figured out the joke, MPC can mean either [More] Personal Computing — for people who still haven’t gotten enough personal computing, apparently — or [More Personal] Computing — for those who like their technology to be intimate and a wee bit creepy.

But the best gloss on MPC, IMO, comes from this 1993 episode of The Simpsons. Enjoy:

In Atlanta? Test Out Your HoloLens App at the Microsoft Innovation Center

James Ashley

alex

While the HoloLens, Microsoft’s mixed-reality device, is still a bit pricey at the moment, you can still get in on HoloLens development.

Microsoft provides an HoloLens emulator that let’s you build apps on your desktop without a device. You’ll need Windows Pro and around 4 Gigs of RAM to run the emulator. The dev tools are just Visual Studio and Unity.

If you live in the Atlanta area, you can also try your app out on a real HoloLens at the Microsoft Innovation Center in downtown Atlanta. The historic FlatIron building – where the MIC is housed – will let you request time with a dev edition HoloLens on their contact page.

This is what Microsoft did for Windows Phone when it first came out, and basically provides a way to try before you buy.

So what are you waiting for? Download the tools, build an app by following the online tutorials, and schedule some time to see what your app looks like in mixed reality.

HoloLens and The Plight of Men in Tech

James Ashley

The Golan Levin led Art && Code conference on VR and AR has just ended at Carnegie Mellon. It’s an amazing conference that reminds me of the days of MIX in terms of creativity and seriousness.  I have always secretly felt that there’s a strong correlation between gender parity at conferences and the quality of the conference — something MIX had to some degree and Art && Code has strongly.

rinseandrepeat

From Rinse and Repeat by Robert Yang

I don’t mean to be political or controversial, though. I just find this more enjoyable than //build or Ignite, which are valuable in other ways.

jchlaura

Brain by Laura Juo-Hsin Chen

A serious concern that bubbled up to my consciousness at Art && Code, however, is the plight of men in tech. Something has happened to us, I think, that in our gender isolation, we’ve become dull and less playful. Our very notions of what is fun in tech is limited and diminished and we don’t even realize it. We all go about doing our best Steve Wozniak pretending to be Steve Jobs impressions and talk about passion in a way that makes it sound like a wet rag we found in an alley, perpetuating the nerd on nerd self-violence that is choking the nascent mixed reality industry. And I think this is unfair.

memory Place

Memory Space by Sarah Rothberg

Part of the reason for this is probably the high cost of the tech we work with. When the gear is expensive, we feel a responsibility to appear more serious. We worry that appearing to be having fun doing what we do requires justification. A great example is Rene Schulte’s justification of wig caps for his company’s HoloLens demo when the only explanation needed should have been that the hololens is gangsta and our only legitimate response should have been that he needed more bling.

Nail Art Museum by Jeremy Bailey

My favorite talk at this conference was about political games by Robert Yang. The more I think about it the more profound it seems. He explores gender roles and race relations with a first person adventure that takes place in a gay spa. Mostly due to misunderstandings about what he is trying to do, his games are banned from twitch and he gets a lot of hateemails. His oeuvre of games is accused of having found rock bottom in the uncanny valley (though this is more a description of his aesthetic, I feel, rather than the success of his experiments).

I talked to him for a bit in the buffet line and he said he’s considered putting a contextual/researchy explanation in front of his games but also thinks it ruins the integrity of his bathhouse game and I agreed strongly.
And maybe sex games are still a step too far for us — but we should at least be able to be more playful and fun and willing to create apps that are exploratory rather than just cookie-cutter commercial translations of existing web apps.

Fun with Hyperbolic Space by Vi Hart

I think the cause of our predicament is the homogeneity of the people currently doing More Personal Computing development. The symptom and effect is the small number of women in this field. Hololens is, if anything, even more narrow in this way than windows development in general despite being more inherently innovative and transformative.

But what’s the point of transformation if we create a NUI world that has all the problems institutionalized in our current one?

As developers we have a limited ability to affect this — mostly because of lack of time and the other usual but legit reasons.

 

Shining 360 by Claire Hentschker

Where we can have an influence though is by by creating diversity in our own thinking. I can make this even easier — we create diversity by having more fun in what we do. If what we do looks more fun and has more joy, it will attract more diverse people who will want to use it for artistic and even subversive purposes and, in turn, make what we do even more fun. It’s a virtuous circle that gives back a hundred fold.

And while secretly my criteria for when we’ve succeeded with diversity is when we get a Robert Yang gay sex game on the HoloLens, a more modest one — just getting a non-zero number of women developers into the hololens dev community and making sure they have a voice — would also be great.

For what it’s worth, VR has the same institutional problem. But this is a fresh start and we can do better.

My modest proposal to accomplish this starts with a plea to Microsoft and other MR vendors like Meta and Magic Leap. You have plans or already have implemented plans to provide devices and developers to major large enterprises like NASA in order to build mixed reality experiences. Why not divert a portion of these resources to some of the new media artists linked in this post so we can see the true potential of Holographic Computing to change, challenge and improve our social world rather than simply find new ways to channel capital?

I understand that to some extent it’s a matter of which comes first, the chicken or the portrait of the chicken. I would simply plead with you, the mighty corporate curators of mixed reality, to this time choose the portrait of the chicken first. It’s the truer vision.

MIXED REALITY ESSENTIALS: A CONCISE COURSE

James Ashley

On Saturday, October 29th, Dennis Vroegop and I will be running a Mixed Reality Workshop as part of the DEVintersection conference in Las Vegas. Dennis is both a promoter and trainer in Mixed Reality and has made frequent appearances on European TV talking about this emerging technology as well as consulting on and leading several high-profile mixed reality projects. I’ve worked as a developer on several commercial mixed reality experiences while also studying and writing about the various implications and scenarios for using mixed reality in entertainment and productivity apps.

Our workshop will cover the fundamentals of building for mixed reality through the first half of the day. Through the rest of the day, we will work with you to build your own mixed reality application of your choice—so come with ideas of what you’d like to make. And if you aren’t sure what you want to create in mixed reality, we’ll help you with that, too.

Here’s an outline of what we plan to cover in the workshop:

  1. Hardware: an overview of the leading mixed reality devices and how they work.
  2. Tools: an introduction to the toolchain used for mixed reality development emphasizing Unity and Visual Studio.
  3. Hello Unity: hands-on development of an MR app using gestures and voice commands.
  4. SDK: we’ll go over the libraries used in MR development, what they provide and how to use them.
  5. Raycasting – covering some things you never have to worry about in 2D programming.
  6. Spatial Mapping and Spatial Understanding – how MR devices recognize the world around them.
  7. World Anchors – fixing virtual objects in the real world.

Break for lunch

    8.  Dennis and I will help you realize your mixed reality project. At the end of the workshop, we’ll do a show and tell to share what you’ve built and go over next steps if you want to publish your work.

We are extremely excited to be doing this workshop at DEVintersection. Mixed Reality is forecasted to be a multi-billion dollar industry by 2020. This is your opportunity to get in at the ground floor with some real hands-on experience.

(Be sure to use the promo code ASHLEY for a discount on your registration.)

Pokémon Go as An Illustration of AR Belief Circles

James Ashley

venn

Recent rumors circling around Pokémon Go suggest that they will delay their next major update until next year. It was previously believed that they would be including additional game elements, creatures and levels beyond level 40 sometime in December.

A large gap between releases like this would seem to leave the door open to other copy cat games to move into the opening that Niantec is providing them. And maybe this wouldn’t be such a bad thing. While World of Warcraft is the most successful MMORPG, for instance, it certainly wasn’t the first. Dark Age of Camelot, Everquest, Asheron’s Call and Ultima Online all preceded it. What WoW did was perhaps to collect the best features of all these games while also ride the right graphics card cycle to success.

A similar student-becomes-the-master trope can play out for other franchise owners, since the only thing that seems to be required to get a game similar to Pokemon going is a pre-existing storyline (like WoW had) and 3D assets either available or easily created to go into the game. With Azure and AWS cloud computing easily available, even infrastructure isn’t such a challenge as it was when the early MMORPGs were starting. Possible franchise holders that could make the leap into geographically-aware augmented reality games include Disney, Wow itself, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Magic the Gathering, and Star Wars.

Imagine going to the park one day and asking someone else face down staring at their phone if they know where the bulbasaur showing up on the nearby is and having them not knowing what you are talking about because they are looking for Captain Hook or a jawa on their nearby?

This sort of experience is exemplary of what Vernor Vinge calls belief circles in his book about augmented reality, Rainbow’s End. Belief circles describe groups of people who share a collaborative AR experience. Because they also share a common real life world with others, their belief circles may conflict with other people’s belief circles. What’s even more peculiar is that members of different belief circles do not have access to each other’s augmented worlds – a peculiar twist on the problem of other minds. So while a person in H.P. Lovecraft’s belief circle can encounter someone in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld belief circle at a Starbuck’s, it isn’t at all clear how they will ultimately interact with one another. Starbuck’s itself may provide virtual assets that can be incorporated into either belief circle in order to attract customers from different worlds and backgrounds – basically multi-tier marketing of the future. Will different things be emphasized in the store based on our self-selected belief circles? Will our drinks have different names and ingredients? How will trademark and copyright laws impact the ability to incorporate franchises into the muti-aspect branding of coffee houses, restaurants and other mall stores?

But most of all, how will people talk to each other? One of the great pleasures of playing Pokemon today is encountering and chatting with people I otherwise wouldn’t meet and having a common set of interests that trump our political and social differences. Belief circles in the AR future of five to ten years may simply encourage the opposite trend of community Balkanization in interest zones. Will high concept belief circles based on art, literature and genre fiction simply devolve into Democrat and Republican belief circles at some point?

Pokemonography

James Ashley

Pokémon Go is the first big augmented reality hit. It also challenges our understanding of what augmented reality means. While it has AR modes for catching as well as battling pokémon, it feels like an augmentation of reality even when these modes are disabled.

krabby

Pokémon Go in large part is a game overlaid on top of a maps application. Maps apps, in turn, are an augmentation overlaid on top of our physical world that track our position inside of the digital representation of streets and roads. More than anything else, it is the fully successful cartography referred to George Luis Borges’s story On Exactitude in Science, prominently referred to in Baudrillard’s monograph Simulacra and Simulation.

Pokémon Go’s digital world is also the world’s largest game world. Games like Fallout 4 and Grand Theft Auto V boast of worlds that encompass 40 sq miles and 50 sq miles, respectively. Pokémon Go’s world, on the other hand, is co-extensive with the mapped world (or the known world, as we once called it).  It has a scale of one kilometer to one kilometer.

dragonaire

Pokémon Go is an augmented reality game even when we have AR turned off. Players share the same geographic space we do but live, simultaneously, in a different world revealed to them through their portable devices. It makes the real world more interesting – so much so that the sedentary will participate in exercise while the normally cautious will risk sunburn and heatstroke in post-climate change summers around the world in order to participate in an alternative reality. In other words, it shapes behavior by creating new goals. It creates new fiscal economies in the process.

electabuzz

Which is all a way of saying that Pokémon Go does what marketing has always wanted to do. It generates a desire for things that, up to a month ago, did not exist.

magikarp

A desire for things which, literally, do not exist today.

What more fitting moniker to describe a desire for something that does not exist than Pokémonography. Here are some pics from my personal collection.

porygon

snorlax

warturturtle

raichu

dratini

lapras

dragonite

gyrados

The ReadRe Project: Ready Player One

James Ashley

This is the first of a multipart blog series covering re-reads of popular media about Virtual and Augmented Reality. In future installments, I plan to cover classics like William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and the anime series Ghost in the Shell. The worn premise of the series is that our collective vision of the future was formed long ago in the past and we are, in many ways, simply walking the path others have set for us in their imaginations. That being the case, the best way to navigate our own futures is by raiding popular fringe culture in order to find the blueprints. In other words, this is an excuse to revisit some of my favorite books, movies and anime.  Each entry in the series will provide a summary of the work, an overview of the AR or VR technology represented, and an analysis of the impact of the work on contemporary virtual world technology – in other words, what lessons can be drawn from the work.

rpo

Non-spoilerish summary of the work

Ernst Cline’s novel takes place in a dystopic 2044 where the world economy has collapsed, corporations have taken over, and the hacker hero, 17 year old Wade Watts, spends most of his life plugged into a virtual reality world called the OASIS while waiting to graduate from high school. He has also spent the past five years of his life as a Gunter – someone on a quest to find the video game easter egg left behind by the creator of the OASIS, James Halliday, somewhere inside his massive online virtual universe. To whomever discovers his easter egg,  James Halliday has bequeathed his vast fortune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

The secret to solving Halliday’s puzzles turns out to be an understanding of Halliday’s love for the 80’s, the decade in which he grew up, and an encyclopedic understanding of the popular movies, music, and video games of the 80’s as well as a decent familiarity with D&D. Wade, along with a motley band of friends, fights an evil mega-corporation for control of Halliday’s inheritance as well as control of his online world.

adventure

How it works

The VR hardware consists of a hi-rez virtual reality stereoscopic headset and haptic gloves connected to a custom game console. Basically the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive with much higher resolution. An internet connection is required. Instead of servers, the shared simulation runs using some sort of peer-to-peer networked computing system that borrows compute time from all the machines of all the players. The virtual world itself is a single shared world rather than a series of shards. Everyone who plays, which turns out to be almost everyone in the world, is in the OASIS at the same time.

Monetization turns out to be a major aspect of the plot. The OASIS is not subscription based and does not have ads. Instead, Halliday’s company makes its income through in-app purchases and transportation fees for teleportation from one part of the OASIS universe to another.

This is because the OASIS universe is huge and consists of thousands of planets filled mostly with user created content. To get from one planet to another requires an in-game spaceship or travel through a transporter. Different worlds, and even sectors of OASIS space, are governed by different themes. This is perhaps the most interesting part of Ernst Cline’s VR universe. The OASIS is ultimately a pastiche of imaginary worlds from science fiction and fantasy. The Star Wars sector is just next door to the Star Trek sector of space. Firefly has it’s own area. The Lord of the Rings, Dragonriders of Pern and World of Warcraft each have at least one planet devoted to them. Different sectors of VR space even work under different physical laws, so magic will not work in some while technology will not work in others.

Cline’s VR universe doesn’t involve world-building, as such, but rather a huge mash-up project to recover and preserve all past efforts at world-building.

S1ModuleCover

Ponder the lessons to be learned at your own risk!!!!

The eighties were my decade and a book devoted to recovering obscure details about it is inherently fun for me. In fact, it feels like it is written for me.

That said, the notion of a future overwhelmed by nostalgia is troubling. Not only is the OASIS effectively a museum for retro-futurism, but the quest at the center of the book is an attempt by a Howard Hughes figure to make others obsess over his teenage years as much as he does.

What if virtual reality is an old man’s game? We all hope that future technology will create new worlds and open up new possibilities, but what if all the potential for VR and AR is ultimately overwhelmed by the obsessions of the past and guided by what we have wanted VR to be since Star Wars movie first appeared on movie house screens?

What if this is the ultimately paradox of emerging technologies: that new technology is always created to solve the problems and fill the appetites of yesterday? We can make our first lesson from the history of VR a paraphrase of George Santayana’s famous saying.

Maxim 1 – In the virtual world, those who can’t let go of the past are doomed to repeat it.