Posts Tagged ‘reality’
Elastic reality
This week my young colleague Yuichiro Takeuchi presented ClayVision: The (Elastic) Picture of the City, winner of a very best paper award this year at SIGCHI, describes a technique that lets you appear “through” an iPad display into an altered world. The image recorded by the back-facing camera is digitally processed, permitting you to see the city about you in interestingly distorted techniques. Building can grow, shrink or sprout awnings, tall towers can spring from fountains, monuments can sway and dance, crooked streets can turn into straight.
There is a possible dark side to this kind of an elastic reality, provided that it is a great deal easier to engineer the virtual than it is to engineer the physical. Consider of the wholesale transition in Hollywood motion pictures over the course of the last two decades from model miniatures to computer graphic special effects.
One day, when we are all wearing our eccescopic contact lenses, and the capacity to visually transform our planet turns into an each day reality, maybe civic engineers will no longer bother to maintain our cities in excellent fix, beyond the minimal require to prevent structural collapse.
As extended as we are all “wearing”, we will discover ourselves sharing a golden age of gleaming towers, graceful airships that soar serenely over candy colored trees, and clear blue lakes that reflect the movements of glittering sculptures in the sky. Needless to say, this beautiful cityscape will adjust each day for our collective pleasure and delight.
But anyone thoughtless adequate to pop out their hi-tech make contact with lenses will be faced with a bleak reality of neglected buildings with shattered windows dealing with cracked and blackened sidewalks, in which piles of uncollected garbage roll through the gray and rotting streets. Not that anyone would ever be so foolish as to take out their get in touch with lenses.
Right after all, when was the last time, after possessing enjoyed a great meal at a restaurant you actually liked, that you demanded to go back to the kitchen to confront the underlying reality?
Reconstructed reality
I had a fantastic conversation with a buddy today about the way interaction technologies go by means of phases, at some point obtaining a location where they match well with how people really function greatest.
It’s a type of Darwinian process, whereby technologies progressively adapts itself to arrive at what really performs best for people. For example, musical instruments that men and women can use a lot more efficiently to make compelling music have a tendency to win out above ostensibly more impressive musical instruments that are much less expressive in human hands.
My pal raised the subject of recorded music collections. I don’t believe many individuals think we will ever cycle back to an interface that feels specifically like the long-playing record collection. But there was something about that interface, an emotionally compelling physicality, that is absent from iTunes, Pandora, Spotify and all of the cyber alternatives for sharing music.
When you visited a pal who had a record collection, there was constantly something in their collection — maybe that 1 song by an obscure band you could in no way hear on the radio — that you desired to listen to. The act of sliding the record out of its sleeve, handing it to your pal, the putting of the needle in the groove, all these acts had a ritual high quality which extra immensely to the feeling of emotional closeness in between the listeners.
Now of course, you just scroll down a list on a screen and click on the name of a song. Probably at some point individuals will really feel that something is missing from this abstracted way of undertaking things. And when they do, will new forms of physical interaction substitute the rather disembodied way we at present share music?
As our technologies mature, will some kind of physicality reemerge — not simply because we need it to, but due to the fact we want it to?