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January 15, 2008
Back on the Air (so to speak)
Aaaaaaaaand... we're back!
The break this winter was really strange. I finished the courses I was teaching, turned in the grades, and then... didn't crash. I was too busy with other school-related work and getting ready for Christmas travel (which meant that we had to finish our gift-buying very early and ship everything before we left -- and if you know us, you know that we're always late with our Christmas gifts). Then The Spouse and I traveled down to Richmond, Virginia to spend Christmas with his family. Then, back up here, more school-related work, and into New Years.
Whereupon I finally crashed. Sickness galore. And, without the prospect/specter of a new semester's courses to prep for and teach, I fell into a weird stasis. But I'm back now, and there's much to be done. (As always.)
Anyway, this semester is all about looking to the future. I'm finishing my book this semester, traveling to conferences, and finally launching a newly redesigned and rebuilt web page for the faculty union.
In my research, I'm always looking toward the future, and not just because I get to work with cool, digital things, either. Digital researchers often prognosticate about what's coming next (Ray Kurzweil is a good example of this), but I try to avoid making predictions about the future of technology. I try to think about what we should be doing, rather than what we will be doing. Often, this involves not evolutionary leaps or tech breakthroughs, but simply adjusting our existing practices. (Ray Kurzweil is a good example of this, too -- he often tries to use his speculations and extrapolations to suggest ethical and productive new practices and relationships with machines.)
With that in mind, here are three videos that present new technology that can (and will, I hope) lead to new practices and relationships with machines.
Our good friend Victor e-mailed this to me, and since then it's shot up the viral charts, getting over 2 million views in just a few weeks. Not bad for a grad student!
The next two are related: Photosynth and Seadragon. For some reason the videos for these won't embed. So, you can use the links above to go to Microsoft's site for each and watch the videos posted there, or you can use these links to watch the videos at TechEBlog of Photosynth and Seadragon. Below, I've embedded the presentation that first introduced me to both of these technologies:
I'm excited about these developments. Sure, they're pretty cool, and fun to watch. But more importantly, they begin to suggest new ways of storing, manipulating, and assembling data to create usable, intelligent, and entertaining information.
When I think about these three (somewhat) disparate projects, I immediately begin wondering:
- What will corporations do with these technologies? That is, how will they package them, and to what ends?
- What practices and uses will emerge from users' interactions with them?
- What will these practices teach their users?
- What can we, as teachers, use these technologies to teach our students?
In his previous presentation at TED of Photosynth and Seadragon, Blaise Aguera y Arcas talks about how Photosynth can pull together images from across the Web and Flikr to create virtually limitless image-fields of what Aguera y Arcas calls the "interesting parts of the earth" -- that is, all of the parts that people take pictures of. It's not exactly the Esper machine from Blade Runner, but it does let you see around corners as the Esper does. What's behind (architecturally speaking) the photographer of the first image of St. Peters Basilica? Photosynth shows you. And as Aguera y Arcas notes in his TED talk, the potential for Photosynth grows as more people share their images.
While Photosynth and Seadragon are mainly (so far, it seems) informational applications, Johnny Chung Lee's research into head-tracking 3-D interfaces is affective. The sense of immersion possible in a responsive 3-D environment is much greater than in a 2-D environment, even one that is designed to appear 3-D. As you can see in the video, even the boring, relatively plain abstract space created by Lee becomes a real place that you feel you're moving through. Lee talks about the potential (and problems) for adapting his technology to games, but it could also be adapted for something like Seadragon and Photosynth, obviously.
This would give us new ways to manipulate data and new interfaces for performing that manipulation. Anyone here remember what life with computers was like before the Apple Macintosh and Windows gave us graphical user interfaces? And now look at what we do with computers and how we do it.
Posted by reparent at January 15, 2008 3:57 PM