HelloWorld

Eadweard Muybridge and Virtual Reality

On Wednesday i finished reading Rebecca Solnit's excellent and insightful  River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West which I picked up very cheaply at the MIT Bookstore sale in Boston some months ago (what fantastic sales they have there!). It was intriguing to read so much detail about the 1870s experiments of Muybridge and his colleagues as they struggled to develop a photographic method that would capture an instant of motion. Eventually, all of these fragments would be joined together and cinema would be born, but  in 1872 when Muybridge photographed a horse in motion at Stanford's Palo Alto estate in California, nobody had any idea what the future held.

On Thursday I visited the Reality Centre at my university, De Montfort, in Leicester where we tested the Collaborative Stereoscopic Access Grid Environment devised by Martin Turner and his team at the University of Manchester, and which we hope to install in the new DMU Centre for Creative Technologies when it is completed next year. As we put on and took off our special viewing glasses to watch Martin 'fly' through the virtual reality landscapes created by Howell Istance and his team, I had a powerful sense of deja vu, a kinship with Muybridge and his fellows as they fiddled and adjusted and tried out new ideas, never taking their eyes off the subject, staring at the images they produced, trying to achieve what seemed sometimes way out of reach but which, with just one final adjustment, would hit the mark. We strained to see what we wanted to be there, what we knew would be there, and sometimes it came into view, and sometimes it shimmered away again.

As I walked home in the rain, experiencing wetness in a definitely very real way, I thought of Muybridge and Stanford 133 years ago. Imagine virtual reality in 133 years from now. But maybe it will not be  the machines that will have evolved, perhaps it is more likely to be the body itself. It is very noticeable that the human body and the horse body have not altered at all since Muybridge's experiments, but in 2138 they may actually have changed more than the technologies we're currently developing to view them. Perhaps even as a result of them.

 

Dreaming of SETI & NETI

Page 14

The language we have given our computers mirrors the language of slumber – hibernate, sleep, suspend. I’m surprised we don’t have command called ‘dream’ – after all, there is an equivalent, which is when you run a programme in the background. That must be the nearest a computer comes to dreaming. Or perhaps it’s dreaming when it's running a task like the Seti search for extra-terrestrial life. Most people only make use of a tiny percentage of their computers’ capacity, so applications like seti@home live in the spaces. While you sleep at night, your computer reads signals from deep space and looks for alien life forms. That sounds pretty much like dreaming to me.

Now your computer can dream of other machines too. Today's Wired News carries a piece about, not SETI, but NETI.

Neti@home is named after the University of California at Berkeley's SETI@home project, which uses volunteer computing power to search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

SETI distributes data collected from a high-powered radio telescope in Puerto Rico to millions of computers around the world, borrowing their processing power to analyze the data for potential evidence of extraterrestrial communications or activity.

"With NETI, we're searching for network intelligence -- intelligence about the way the Internet works so we can make it work better," said Simpson.

NETI to Examine Net's Strengths By Michelle Delio, Wired News | 02:00 AM Apr. 27, 2004 PT

The storage capacity of my skull

Page 18

It’s as if my knowledge is extensible. Before the internet, my head contained most of what I knew. The rest was stored in my bookshelves, photo albums, video tapes, and filing cabinets, but if I learned something in the traditional sense - a foreign language for example -the majority of the words were stored in my brain whilst I kept the rest in reserve in a dictionary. In day to day terms, I made an effort to remember peoples’ phone numbers. I knew the recipe for goulash. I had various travel routes memorised and stored away for easy access. And if some new piece of information came along, I just filed it away for future use and retrieved it when I needed it. Occasionally data would drop out of my head, never to be retained, and sometimes I remembered things I would really rather have forgotten, but the total amount of knowledge I could hold was limited by the storage capacity of my skull. What does that add up to? A couple of litres or so. OK, I had a couple of litres of data.

It seems it's even less than a litre. According to The Guardian:
"The number of things you can hold in your mind at once has been traced to one penny-sized part of the brain."
See Memory bottleneck limits intelligence Thursday April 22, 2004, The Guardian

Audio excerpt: computer sleep

Page 14

Listen to this excerpt

...sitting at my writing table in the dark and very late, I work on a text lit only by a cluster of small lanterns swinging to the vibration of my hand moving across the paper. This stillness in the night can be like the stillness of online. It is the charm of midnight, the intimacy of the unconscious, to sit here knowing how many sleeping things are close by yet hidden from my view and to be aware that such quiet does not signal solitude, as it might in the daytime, but means simply that this part of the world is in suspension.

The language we have given our computers mirrors the language of slumber – hibernate, sleep, suspend. I’m surprised we don’t have command called ‘dream’ – after all, there is an equivalent, which is when you run a programme in the background. That must be the nearest a computer comes to dreaming. Or perhaps it’s dreaming when it is running a task like the Seti search for extra-terrestrial life . Most people only make use of a tiny percentage of their computers’ capacity, so applications like seti@home live in the spaces. While you sleep at night, your computer reads signals from deep space and looks for alien life forms. That sounds pretty much like dreaming to me.

Storage

Page 18

Now, my brain is a single node in a network of nodes. Information passes in, and out, and through it, all the time. Every day I’m asked for the answers to all kinds of questions, and every day I ask different questions of others. I provide opinions. Others provide them back. I can ask individuals by email or I can ask the world via a website. Why hold it all in my head? It would be impossible to do so anyway, but why bother? If I want to know anything, I just need to ask the web.

I've been giving away a lot of reference books recently, or selling them on Amazon. I just don't need many of them now that I have the web. Today I am about to take the following to the charity shop:

- The Hutchinson Encyclopedia in Full Colour 9th Edition 1990. hardback. pp 1,241. Very heavy. Haven't opened it since the kids grew up.

- Good Housekeeping Family Health Encyclopedia: the complete modern reference book for the home. 1989. Hardly ever looked at it anyway and certainly don't need it now there is so much updated medical information online.

- Everywoman's Medical Handbook. 1988. To be honest, this was never very useful.

I plan to do the BookCrossing thing at some point and release some books into the wild, but I never seem to be able to organise myself and the right book to be in the right place at the right time. Giving away books in public seems to be quite complicated!