Tag: HoloLens

Hitchhiking the Backroads to Augmented Reality

James Ashley

To date, Microsoft has been resistant to sharing information about the HoloLens technology. Instead, they have relied on shock and awe demos to impress people with the overall experience rather than getting mired down in the nitty-gritty of the software and hardware engineering. Even something as simple as the field-of-view is never described in mundane numbers but rather in circumlocutions about tv screens X distance from the viewer. It definitely builds up mystery around the product.

Given the lack of concrete information, lots of people have attempted to fill in the gaps with varying degrees of success which, in their own way, make it difficult to navigate the technological true true. In an effort to simplify the research one typically has to do on one’s own in order to understand HoloLens and AR, I’ve made a sort of map for those interested in making their way. Here are some of the best resources I’ve found.

1. You should start with the Oculus blog, which is obviously about the Oculus and not about HoloLens. Nevertheless, the core technology the makes the Oculus Rift work is also in the HoloLens in some form. Moreover, the Oculus blog is a wonderful example of sharing and successfully explaining complicated concepts to the layman. Master these posts about how the Rift works and you are half way to understanding how HoloLens works:

2. Next, you should really read Oliver Kreylos’s (Doc OK) brilliant posts about the HoloLens field of view and waveguide display technology. Many disagreements around HoloLens would evaporate if people would simply invest half an hour into reading OK’s insights :

3. If you’ve gone through these, then you are ready for Dr. Michael J. Gourlay’s youtube discussion of surface reconstruction, occlusion, tracking and mapping. Sadly the audio drops out at key moments and the video drops out for the entire Q & A, but there’s lots of gold for everyone in this mine. Also check out his audio interview at Georgia Tech:

4. There have been lots of first-impression blog posts concerning the HoloLens, but Jasper Brekelmans provides far-and-away the best of these by following a clear just-the-facts-ma’am approach:

5. HoloLens isn’t only about learning new technology but also discovering a new design language. Mike Alger’s video provides a great introduction into the problems as well as some solutions for AR/VR interface and usability design:

6. Oculus, Leap Motion and others who have been designing VR experiences provide additional useful tips about what they have discovered along the way in articles like the now famous “Swayze Effect” (yes, that Swayze):

7. Finally, here are some video parodies and inspirational videos of VR and AR from the tv show Community and others:

I know I’ve left a lot of good material out, but these have been some of the highlights for me over the past year while hitchhiking on the backroads leading to Augmented Reality. Drop them in your mental knapsack, stick out your thumb and wait for the future to pick you up.

HoloLens Fashionista

James Ashley

microsoft-executives-testing-the-hololens

While Google Glass certainly had its problems as an augmented reality device – among other things not really being an augmented reality device as GA Tech professor Blair MacIntyre pointed out – it did demonstrate two remarkable things. First, that people are willing to shell out $1500 for new technology. In the debates over the next year concerning the correct price point for VR and AR head mounted displays, this number will play a large role. Second, it demonstrated the importance of a sense of style when designing technology. Google glass, for many reasons, was a brilliant fashion accessory.

If a lesson can be drawn from these two data points, it might be that new — even Project Glass-level iffy — technology can charge a lot if it manages to be fashionable as well as functional.

When you look at the actual HoloLens device, you may, like me, be thinking “I don’t know if I’d wear that out in public.” In that regard, I’d like to nudge your intuitions a bit.

Obviously there is time to do some tweaking with the HL design. I recently found some nostalgic pictures online that made me start to think that with modifications, I could rock this look.

It all revolves around one of the first animes imported to the United States in the 70s called Battle of the Planets. It sounded like this:

Battle of the Planets! G-Force! Princess! Tiny! Keyop! Mark! Jason! And watching over them from Center Neptune, their computerized coordinator, 7-Zark-7! Watching, warning against surprise attacks by alien galaxies beyond space. G-Force! Fearless young orphans, protecting Earth’s entire galaxy. Always five, acting as one. Dedicated! Inseparable! Invincible!

 

And it looked AMAZING. I think this look could work for HoloLens. I think I could pull it off. The capes and tights, of course, are purely optional.

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Why Augmented Reality is harder than Virtual Reality

James Ashley

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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.

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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.

Come hear me speak about Mixed Reality at Dragon Con 2015

James Ashley

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I’ve been invited by the Robotics and Maker Track to speak about near future technologies at Dragon Con this year. While the title of the talk is “Microsoft Kinect and HoloLens,” I’ll actually be talking more broadly about 3D sensors like Kinect and the Orbbec Astra, Virtual Reality with the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive as well as Augmented Reality with HoloLens and Magic Leap. I will cover how these technologies will shape our lives and potentially change our world over the next five years.

I am honored to have been asked to be a panelist at Dragon Con on technology I am passionate about and that has been a large part of my life and work over the past several years.

I should add that being a panelist at Dragon Con is a nerd and fan’s freakin’ dream come true for me. Insanely so. Hopefully I’ll be able to stay cool enough to get through all the material I have on our collective sci fi future.

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I will cover each technology and the devices coming out in the areas of 3D sensors, virtual reality and augmented reality. I’ll discuss their potential impact as well as some of their history. I’ll delve into some of the underlying technical and commercial challenges that face each. I’ll bring lots of Kinect and Oculus demos (not allowed to show HoloLens for now, unfortunately) and will also provide practical advice on how to experience these technologies as a consumer as well as a developer in 2016.

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My panel is on Sunday, Sept 6 at 2:30 in Savannah rooms 1, 2 and 3 in the Sheraton. Please come say hi!

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HoloLens App Development with Unity

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

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

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

stereoscope

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!

Minecraft in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

James Ashley

minecraft_ar_godview

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.

 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

The HoloCoder’s Bookshelf

James Ashley

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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?

James Ashley

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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.

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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

 

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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.

danger_room

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.

WayStation(Simak)

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 HoloLens Toolchain and XAML Grids

James Ashley

occlusion2occlusion

What tech stack will be used to develop applications for HoloLens, Microsoft’s innovative new augmented reality platform?

Keeping in mind that Alex Kipman is the visionary behind both HoloLens and the Kinect sensor, some clues can be gleaned from the current Kinect SDK. The Kinect SDK initially supported development in WPF and C++ with DirectX. Over time, however, and in line with Microsoft’s internal shift to be more open and embrace the tech stacks of non-Microsoft communities, the Kinect SDK has grown to include support for Unity3D, Cinder, OpenFrameworks, OpenCV and even MATLAB.

Legos vs Play-Doh

lego_vs_playdoh

This is a two-pronged approach to tooling that Microsoft luminary Rick Barraza has famously characterized as the distinction between building with legos and sculpting with play-doh.  Legos represent what Microsoft has traditionally been extremely good at: creating reusable components. Reusable components abstract the underlying technology layers so even beginning developers can accomplish difficult tasks without needing to understand the intricacies of networking, graphics cards, or memory management. As long as all you want to do is the 95% of tasks that Microsoft components support, legos may be all that you ever need. Microsoft has almost single-handedly created the modern enterprise software developer community based on component building, drag-and-drop IDEs, and copy /paste.

But what if you are not interested in building applications that look like everyone else’s? What if you want to do the 5% of things that reusable components do not allow you to do. This has typically been difficult. Not only does it require having a fine grain understanding of the underlying operating system but also a desire to hack around Microsoft’s safeguards. Because Microsoft had for so long embraced the component model of software development, it internally saw its role as one of safeguarding applications from attempts to follow any other model of software development. API classes are typically sealed to prevent extension and if one were to ask to have them unsealed, the inevitable reply was always “what would you use that for”?

Now lets consider a more playful software world in which it makes sense for classes to be unsealed by default so we can just start squishing them around in our hands to see what comes of it. This is software as exploration and in fact there is a whole community, frequently styled “creative coders”, who work in this way. The processing software programming platform created by Casey Reas and Ben Fry is the epitome of this movement. It was originally created as a better way to teach computer programming since it is built around drawing shapes rather than displaying text. From this simple and divergent starting point, all “hello world” applications are dramatically different.  Even more profound, however, it became clear that through simple loops and seed values, vastly different effects could be generated using only a few lines of code. Playing with processing feels like sculpting with play-doh. Other homologous tool chains were eventually created that shared processing’s emphasis on the visual rather than the textual: OpenFrameworks, Arduino, Cinder and Unity3D.

Which is a long-about way of saying that for premium experiences, these creative coding tool chains will likely be the tools of choice. If you want to get a jump start on HoloLens development, go learn these platforms:

 

HologramFramwork APIs

 hologramAPIs

I mentioned above that Microsoft has a two-pronged approach to tooling software developers. So far I have only mentioned the play-doh side. As we come closer to the Windows 10 release, however, there has been increased activity in the long dormant WPF platform team – enough to suggest that some sort of Holographic support might be released with a new version of WPF. WPF, after all, is Microsoft’s premier platform for component-based development. If the marketing ideal for HoloLens is to make as many HoloLens supported applications as possible straight out of the gate (as it should be), then an easy to use platform for building new HoloLens applications as well as porting old ones to the new paradigm is an obvious pre-requisite.

The image above is from enterprising colleagues who inspected the Windows 10 symbol packages to find out what kind of holographic support would be natively built into the new OS.  The initial impression is that low-hanging integration will be possible by using some sort of texture mapping model. For example, Silverlight provided a component called the VideoBrush that allowed any control that supported brushes to use a video rather than a solid or gradient texture as a background image. This included even complex 3D shapes or skewed geometries.

HoloLens Grids

occlusion4

To me, this suggests a grid-based programming model for quickly painting applications as textures onto valid surfaces identified by the HoloLens’s built-in depth sensors. The depth sensors will use computer vision algorithms to identify and tag surfaces in a room that can be used to project digital content. The user’s movements and any desirable digital-realistic skewing will be taken care of by the underlying holographic framework. For now, let’s assume that interactions will also be taken care of automatically and will follow a mouse-like hover/press idiom for convenience.

 simplegrid

XAML-based languages like WPF have a unique layout component called a Grid. Unlike tables in html, XAML grids define the layout and the content separately. The layout is specified in ColumnDefinitions and RowDefinitions – for instance one may specify a grid that is 3 X 3, or 2 X 1 (as above), and so on. Content is written out (or dragged) below the column and row definitions. Their placement in the layout is then defined by attaching positional directives on the content as shown below.

 grid2

In this code snippet, I haven’t defined a row so there is just one row by default. I have defined two columns which are a zero based array. Finally, I’ve specified on the green panel that I want it to be positioned in the first column by writing Grid.Column=”0” . The red panel, in turn, is placed in column 1, the second column in the series. The resulting WPF application is shown below:

grid3

In this case, the application is not particularly impressive. We can imagine the same code being written against the Holographic Framework with the following results, however:

occlusion3

And here is what the code for your first “Hello, World” application might look like:

holoworld

occlusion5

It is, I hope, not difficult to see how we can then go from a standard XAML Grid like the one above to a HoloLens-enabled Grid like the one below:

occlusion

At this point, given the dearth of information currently available (I’m dumpster diving through Windows 10 symbol packages, after all) this is obviously just a wild guess. I believe it is a plausible programming model, however, and would provide a royal road to quickly generate applications for Microsoft’s newest and brightest technology innovation.

The Coming Holo Wars and How to Survive Them

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.]