CHAT 2010: The Bathysphere

Perhaps I would not have been as underwhelmed by the Bathysphere if I had not seen Robert Bach’s demonstration of Project Natal yesterday. The two projects invite comparison: each attempts to translate real-world motion into virtual motion. While Natal uses the body itself, the Bathysphere tracks the motion of three objects—a geodesic “beach ball,” a fishing rod, and a multicolored umbrella—and translates the user’s interactions with these objects into the movements of computer-generated sea life projected onto the walls of the exhibit.

The octopus, ray, and school of fish mimic the movements of their respective controlling objects, but do not allow the user to interact any more deeply with the virtual environment. Effectively, they are cursors, with the ball, rod, and umbrella functioning as novelty trackballs. Building this system must have been a tremendous technical challenge; hopefully, more will be done with it with time.

Edit: HASTACer Adam Rogers has a more positive take, including a video of the Bathysphere here.

CHAT 2010: User Driven: Does Size Matter?

Panelist Paul Jones took control of the discussion early, and didn’t let go. Seizing on moderator Paolo Mangiafico’s contrast between “lean back” (large screen: broadcast consumption) and “lean forward” (small screen: conversation participation) modes of media interaction, Jones pointed out the awkward middle space that the panel discussion itself occupied: a simulation of a small conversation being shown to a large audience. Jones stepped down from the stage in order to address the audience more directly.

Two of the panelists, Russ Pitts and Ross White, followed him down. Panelist William Shaw and Mangiafico stayed behind on stage, creating a visual contrast that corresponded roughly to the positions that the panelists took on new media. Jones, Pitts, and White all seemed open to the value of audience participation and social media; Shaw emphasized that the William Blake Archives, the project on which he works, is a “large screen” project designed to provide high-resolution tools to the lone scholar, whether professional or amateur.

Here are a few of the many points Jones made in his near-total domination of the talk:

The paradox of the mobile internet is that it doesn’t matter where you are, but it matters more where you are. The Internet closes distance and levels geographical distinctions, but because you’re accessing the Internet on a mobile device, the people you’re communicating with can’t assume that your physical body is tethered to your office or home. People on the mobile Internet spend a lot of time talking about where they are and what’s going on around them.

Print has a reputation for stability when compared to online media, but in fact print is highly unstable—multiple revisions, versions, and translations of most texts exist. [As I’m interested in text as a visual medium, I would add printings, layouts, type settings, etc.]

There are three populations happy with Kindle: 1. people who need large print books; 2. people who travel a lot; 3. people who do a lot of book editing and reviewing (so they don’t have to carry a bunch of books and manuscripts around). These are not necessary the audiences that Amazon imagined. We don’t know what people will do with the iPad until they’ve had a chance to do it.

Small-screen talk is more important than large-screen talk. People listen to their friends rather than to authorities; studies have shown that intimate settings and peer status create trustworthiness. By being aware of these tendencies, we will be able to make the truth stick in a world with too much information and no recognized experts.

Editor's note: I was unable to find an online presence to link to for William Shaw.

Links: Web 2.0 freedom, VR interfaces, soft luddites

• The Web democratized media for the technologically adept. Web 2.0 is democratizing it for everyone else. But what happens when the regime notices?

A couple of new devices chip away at the wall between cyber- and meatspace:

• Researchers at the University of Tokyo have created a pair of goggles that recognizes and stores references to objects that you look at.
• Meanwhile, researchers at Carnegie Mellon have created an electromagnetic device that allows you to feel virtual objects.

A few links on the “soft luddite” front:

• Readers report an emotional attachment to physical books. I wonder if this is simply a matter of familiarity, as the article implies. I doubt it. I suspect that the cultural mythos surrounding the book is adding a quasi-moral dimension here. Could you really bring yourself to abandon the good, true, trusty book, emblem of the learned and vehicle of the Word?
• BuzzFeed gently mocks the technology-fasting that seems to be all the rage lately, while providing several links to examples of the phenomenon.

Link roundup: surface computing

In the interest of posting more frequently, I've decided to start posting link roundups. On any given day I run through 50+ rss feeds and news sites, and compile lists of links that I think might be of use in writing future columns or blog posts.

Here’s the first batch: links dealing with the recent explosion in surface computing and multi-touch interfaces. I think there’s a widespread sense that this represents the first viable update to the basic computing interface since the popularization of the mouse.

Like that device, multi-touch interfaces allow us to interact with simulated space in the same way we interact with real space: by moving our bodies. Surface computing, however, represents a much more elegant way of doing so. By combining the point of physical contact and the point of visual representation, simulated objects become more phenomenologically material.

Jeff Han’s early (Feb. 2006) multi-touch table is now available in expanded form at Neiman Marcus for a cool $100,000 (found at Techdirt). Throughout his demo, Han emphasizes the intuitiveness of the interface, going so far as to claim that the interface has disappeared. Multi-touch computing is the rare example of a technology that seems to have arrived fully naturalized: it has appeared in our world as a new and fascinating species of cultural object, instantly graspable.

This effect may help explain why it’s already showing up in the toolkits of the barkeeper and the musician.

Invocations of the computing interface from “Minority Report” are becoming cliché, as in this examination of Microsoft's Surface table.

A couple more: Sharp combines multi-touch with optical scanning and, of course, Apple's iPhone—the most commercially successful implementation of multi-touch to date.

Edit: Somehow I missed this massive history of multi-touch computing from Microsoft researcher Bill Buxton.