I missed this when it came out at the Consumer Electronics Show this year. Hilarious.

What can you do in a virtual world? Quite a bit, although we're still quite far from the answer being, “Anything you can do in the real world.” Here's a baseline list of today's raw capabilities, in the language of virtual worlds. (The higher level activity one does with these capabilities is another story.) [Read More!]

In The Perfect Storm, a fisherman tries to escape his economic burdens by shooting through the convergence of three massive storm systems. If he survives, he comes out a better man. We have a perfect storm of energy and economic problems, but I believe that there is a way to navigate through them by pitting one front against another in a novel way. [Read More!]

The UK's Tech Radar has a preview of a nice piece that will appear in PC Plus. It overviews Intel's Miramar work on 3D and collaboration.

Meanwhile, there's a nice discussion of much more of the history of Miramar on this blog.

I think the two make a nice example of the difference between blogging and first sources on the one hand, and journalism on the other.

I was taught that science is all about managing complexity by creating abstractions over different domains. A common layman's mistake is to anecdotally observe or hear that something is true at some level, somewhere, and assume that this fact or definition applies throughout every discussion. For example:
One hears that computers are “programmed in binary,” or that they “understand binary,” but in fact, programmers don't write in binary. Programmers work at a higher level of abstraction than binary encoding.
One hears that computers use “digital circuits,” that are simply “on” or “off”, but in fact, the physics of each electronic component is continuously variable. Device physics is at a lower level of abstraction than digital electronics.

So, what's a server and what is peer-to-peer? It depends on what 's being discussed?

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I'm old enough to vaguely remember Walter Cronkite forty years ago showing us hand painted “NASA Simulation” video of the Apollo spacecraft maneuvering in space. There simply was no way to position a news camera outside the Lunar and Command Modules to get the shot.

Now we have computer generated movies and commercials. I've seen computer simulations of plane crashes and of presidential candidates. But yesterday morning was the first time I'd seen computer-generated pictures of human participants in breaking news. I'm not sure I approve of the concept altogether, but given it's existence I do like the editorial decision to render the named humans in untextured solid red.

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We had had our usual weekly Engineering Meeting yesterday. Some slides, a couple of charts, some spreadsheet pages, and a bunch of folks arguing. Nothing exciting, although it was pretty cool for random attendees to change the slides and spreadsheet in real time, and to put post-its on them.

As usual, our weekly meeting was in-world. No one commented about the technology. No one commented about the fact that the meeting was lead by a manager away at MIT, some engineers were in Maryland and Oregon, and some folks were at home saving gas rather than in the office. Boring.

Pretty cool, no?

My wife's XP computer died in a power surge and we bought an iMac. The thing I'm most intrigued by turned out to be completely different than what I expected. [Read More!]

In January, 2005, David Smith was on stage at Kyoto University, speaking in a panel on the future of Croquet. Slouched in his chair, he pulled an iPod from his pocket and threw it on the table, along with his old-fashioned styled spectacles. “In twenty years, that will be the computer. Maybe earlier. Wearable computers and micro-projection display already exist. Virtual Croquet worlds will be layered onto the physical world around us.”

At the same time, in San Diego, CA, author Vernor Vinge was wrapping up “Rainbows End,” a novel set in 2025 in which the common person's view of the world is augmented by wearable computers overlaying virtual worlds onto contact lenses. The central denizen of the worlds in the story is a troublesome white rabbit, which also happens to be a common avatar in the Alice In Wonderland themed Croquet worlds.

[Read More!]