Video: https://youtu.be/Wikrs4Tj_GM
Chat Log: https://futuretextlab.info/2022/02/28/chat-28-feb-2022/
Frode Hegland: Brandel and yeah, that’s that’s what I mean. They’re all based. Hello, Brandel, hi Brandel. We may not have much time to talk to you. We’re very busy here today.
Brandel Zachernuk : Understandable.
Frode Hegland: I don’t know where everyone is, Peter is. He’s got issues with his dad, and Mark is somewhere off in the wilderness of the English countryside. So, but you can get it. Yes, nothing more dramatic. The transcript from our Friday meeting was supposed to be here, and I asked the guy, Actually, no, I didn’t. He just emailed me saying, Sorry, it’s been delayed. He’s in Poland, so he’s been working on food trucks all weekend.
Brandel Zachernuk : Yeah, that’s definitely believable.
Frode Hegland: Yeah, that’s why I said, OK, no rush. We had our close friends, Tim and his family, they’re from Ukraine, from eastern Ukraine here this weekend for dinner, and they were updating on situations. And it’s crazy, interesting, crazy and horrible. But I don’t know if you just saw the Swiss frozen Russian assets.
Keith Martin: Oh, no, that’s good.
Frode Hegland: Yeah, that’s a little more shocking than the neutral Swedes sending missiles. So. And I talked to a friend of mine who works as the deputy editor for a prestigious organization not to put on record here. I asked him, Do you think maybe Putin is sick and is going to die and he wants to do something? He said the what he hears and thinks is because of COVID. He’s been isolated for so long and you can see the meetings he has with people with a long table. He has grown very paranoid and it’s been stewing in his own anger at bad things happening to Russia. So either way? Not pleasant. But anyway, here we go.
Keith Martin: Very worrying if he’s actually doing this because he’s not stable. As opposed to just evil,
Frode Hegland: There was a bit of a Brandel in the discussion yesterday with with my friend Tim, where you want to show me something on the map and I thought this is where we would should have a big VR map, we could move around and all of that. And I remember for a moment, I have this thing called it notepad. So we just put it on the table. And of course, it was just a large iPad. But in my mind, I was trying to think of it as being a projection rather than an iPod. So I thought that was kind of fascinating.
Brandel Zachernuk : Yeah. Ipods are a lot more interesting than we use them to be at this point, I think that multitouch is something that it’s very hard to get your head around what to do with. There are a few apps that are actually legitimately multitouch, especially beyond drawing. There’s some really interesting sort of videos and demonstrations of being able to use multiple fingers simultaneously to continue to configure something like type, to have multiple fingers on the thing and being able to sort of squiggle them around to change the size and characteristics of the serif, for example. Really, really fascinating as an idea. I haven’t written it one myself to play with multitouch on it, but I think it’s a really interesting idea. And then using it as a multi multi input controller for some kind of pen device experience as well. Really, really interesting. But yeah, like the idea of being able to position things. One really neat concept that I’ve seen floating around is using ARKit on a phone that you don’t have any intention to look at, but one where you say you have a phone. I don’t have my phone. Oh, no, I do. So you have your phone and you’re using it like this. One benefit of ARKit is that it lets you know where the phone is.
Brandel Zachernuk : And you know, the primary sort of expectation is that you’re doing that in order to do what’s called object registration, being able to match the visual appearance of a synthetic object over your digital screen. But if you just vary the information about the six degree of freedom position of your phone, then it’s basically like a virtual reality controller without the virtual reality. So you can pass that that path through space and you can see some kind of representation on the back or or whatever else you might want to do. And then you can also use the the ability to configure multitouch to use that as a way of being able to control control things at that same time so you could have an object like. Like an airplane or like anything else, and then put your thumb on it and use that to control some dimensional aspect of it at the same time as your piloting the object through making use of air. So a lot of really interesting things you can do there to kind of break down the boundaries between which applications are running on which device is and what sort of inputs and systems that you’re using.
Brandel Zachernuk : But it requires just a little bit more creativity in terms of what you think and what you think an application is what you think a device is. The way that it can work together and kind of being adequately disrespectful of the underlying computing sort of medium, which is something that I think is very valuable for systems. One of the one of the first computer programs that sort of recognizable as being interesting for today’s purposes is called Colossal Typewriter, and it was written on one of these giant mainframes. And it was, I think it’s just about got the people expelled because they were like typing word processing. Word processing as a term hasn’t been. It hadn’t been invented yet, but they were like, writing is. Secretarial, how dare you sort of harness put a yoke around this grand and majestic, inherently masculine machine for something that’s women’s work embarrassing, like, yeah, menial women’s work. And I think that’s fascinating because it sort of underscores the point that as soon as you can figure out how to wake cycles, then you’re probably on to something. So that’s why I like using air. That’s something as silly as just being being a child’s toy or of.
Frode Hegland: So and the thing just before you guys joined, I was dealing with, I had to send back a hard drive. And I had another hard drive that was an issue for late term. And it turns out it may have been that my MacBook Air M1, the USB port at the back, doesn’t work right? Hmm. So different levels of technology and innovation where we’re dealing with here this moments. I had a cable trouble and you’re redefining what interfaces are. Yeah, I mean, the first time I looked a little bit about what you’re talking about in different areas is my car. I drove a Tesla s and the video there is interpreted two and a half thousand times a second. I think it is. You know, and Keith and I come from very stodgy photographic backgrounds, you know, you take one picture and you look at it really carefully and you do this to do that. And the question is like, it is, it is no longer a camera. We call it a camera. It’s not a camera. It is a view, right? So, so this phone is certainly not a phone. A lot of people don’t even talk on it anymore, right? So I guess what you’re saying, because it is so important what you’re saying, we need to we need to give them new names or neutral names, maybe. Because, you know, you’re wearing the the AirPods, but you know, there’s all this spatial audio, spatial audio, which is hugely important and
Keith Martin: Well, I think terminology doesn’t have to change. It’s just what we understand what we mean when we say something. Like what smartphones before the iPhone, they existed, and they they were impressive until the iPhone came along and then the dog shit.
Brandel Zachernuk : Yeah, the Nokia Communicator 1998, like 90 to 10, was just an amazing article of
Keith Martin: The sort of the the proper flip up there. It was amazing.
Brandel Zachernuk : Yeah. Yes. Yes. And I see. Yeah. Hmm. Yeah. Well, so I mean, one of the one of the things with with that is that is literally skeuomorphism. Using the old terminology or more explicitly is sort of material features of older representations of things carries through into the more modern design approach. Right. But but but it’s it’s just as it’s just as relevant to to consider what the practical consequences of skeuomorphism within our terminology is because it it likens things to things they were they were like before, but also makes it makes it clear that those limitations are likely to kind of artificially apply in some measure as well. I don’t know if you watch my video on word by word processing video. I guess it didn’t go too much into the theory behind it, but one of the one of the sort of the issues currently facing word processing is that Xerox is a company that you see in computers for cynics, TED Nelson’s short sort of series that he has about the fact that the iPhone isn’t technology really good? Really neat. Some of it. But he says like an iPhone isn’t technology per say, it’s a series of choices about what what you pick out of technology as a consequence of what the values of the organization are.
Brandel Zachernuk : And Xerox, what does a paper company? They were a document company. You know, they make copiers and it was a little bit more open, open minded to think of themselves as being at least document companies. But that means that paper and moving paper around and thinking of things that’s pretty abused for paper was sort of intrinsic to what it is that we’re doing. And maybe it wasn’t even something that that Park was guilty of. Although if you think about what SwRI had up on screen, it didn’t really have much to do with paper at that point. And the print preview was something that was much more sort of central to the Xerox word. But it means that, yeah, most of our and I believe it’s still currently the case that the PDF is the basis for Mac window rendering. And so there are substantial sort of skeuomorphic consequences to that, if only because it’s just easier to implement and easier to think about things in the terms of the they’re implemented with them. Yeah. But like with with books, the printed page is one. But also just the the number of glyphs that we use is a feature of movable type.
Brandel Zachernuk : We have different glyphs in English and we we got wired, but we lost Thorin and I can remember the other one. But there are two symbols that people used pretty frequently prior to that. And the way that we use, we don’t really understand the practicalities of the way that we use the use, the hardass that looks like a map in terms of what was really meant by trying to use it. The simplest for that so that the condensation and you know, the German language reform to the early 20th, late 19th early 20th century in order to remove some of their silly or gloss was also just a response to type. But we don’t we don’t need any of those things now. They certainly sort of provide some benefits being able to special the characters within the fingers, which has has its benefits. But again, these are these are sort of limitations based on past requirements. And as such, while that’s not an invitation to say to throw them out, it’s certainly something that should have ought to give us a call to consider what the practical realities of them are because we can’t do anything. So we should start thinking about what we should.
Frode Hegland: Estelle, guys, I think that’s really, really a worthwhile direction. I mean, one thing we see in some sci fi, I think relates as you have a thing, you put it on a table and up comes a hologram, right? Of course, if you want to be or any object can do that. But I’m wondering if. Imagine if the other way around, like just as an artistic nonsense, you have a shape in here and we put on our RV and I have to paint. So where I cover it, it appears right? Yeah, I mean, it is basically insane the level of technology we have available. You know, I’m sure there’s more processing power in the Apple Pencil than the Space Shuttle had kind of thing.
Brandel Zachernuk : There’s more power in the air, and this was a few years ago in the BRIC than there was in the original Apple. Maybe the original map and the power brick for the for the 2017 MacBook Pro, there was more power than the original Mac.
Frode Hegland: That makes sense. The original Mac was a work of genius, but very, very simple. Yes. Mm hmm.
Brandel Zachernuk : And I think there might be more power in the pencil than in the sixty eight K then in the past sixty eight K. I think
Frode Hegland: It’s interesting. Yeah, sorry. I was just going to say I remember back in the days with Doug said, like 20 years ago, the laptop that I had. Then I remember at a Macworld. One of the engineers pointed out that it could do a calculation and less time that it takes for the light from the screen to go from the screen to my eyeball. But of course, you know, anyway, but and this is really refreshing. Brandel because I’m a bit of a techno fetishist, you know, if I need to relax, what do I do? I need? I go maybe to the Apple website and look at all the exciting things you put up there. And when I was much younger, I would read Mac User Magazine and specifically the ads. Some of the articles sometimes. And that’s how I know. Keith Keith was the Technical Editor for Mac User Magazine. And, you know, so there is that the next piece of kit will always be better. So it’s really nice for you to say, you know, it’s insane. I mean, like I have two cameras here that I’m working on today. This one is proved to be 100 X and it’s not full frame, but it does the most incredible 4K video. Use this in a Hollywood movie. You just can’t tell the difference. Yeah. You know, and that’s it. Only 20 megapixels. This is full frame, but still pictures. The are one mark. Two. I print huge pictures of this thing. But, you know, appreciating the technology, it’s one thing being stuck and thinking about it in one way. You know the thing, if you think of every problem, if you only have a hammer, you’ll think of every if every problem being a nail that kind of thing, right? So so we spend some more time on educating ourselves.
Brandel Zachernuk : Right. It’s I think, yeah, it’s it’s useful to figure out how to wield technology, but it’s also it’s also useful to think about what it is that technology is and what what’s harder to think about with it as a consequence of how it’s currently framed. So, yeah, I definitely agree.
Frode Hegland: But looking at some of the videos you have given us the Google presentation, you know, talking about lots of VR interface issues and stuff. Mm-hmm. And. Well, there was something specific in there. Yeah, I don’t know, I lost my train of thought entirely. Yeah, but. You know, you know, when you read in VR or anything, it’s nice to have the whatever text presented nicely, you know, having text with a transparent background is great for movies, and that’s about it. So there are some things that we’ve developed over the last five and a half thousand years, which will always remain probably. But we’re kind of stuck with all this crud around the edges, aren’t we? Because I still think of just, you know, being in this room with you guys having the normal screen because, oh yeah, one of the beautiful things in the Google one was they talked about jovial movement by movement, had movement and movement, you know, the different spheres and all that makes complete sense. So a 13 inch laptop, I think, is still probably the best space for writing that that’ll probably never change, but only for writing, not for editing or not for reading, right? So to have this exploding out thing now, the meeting on Friday, the one before our meeting Brandel with the NIH people, they were really shocked at the problems with the metaverse of being able to have documents in and out. But what is a document now as well? Yeah.
Keith Martin: Well, how metaphysical do you want to get with that kind of information? Yes, OK. Please don’t move about without losing or scattering your information
Frode Hegland: A document as a way of organizing. Yeah, exactly. It’s a frame. This is within the document. This is outside. That’s one way of looking at it, for sure. I agree. Mm hmm. I was. So, Emily and I, we have gym classes now or no classes, but with our personal trainer online, of course, I was thinking it would be interesting to have a piece of software where if we use two iPhones or iPads, her receiving software would use that to make full 3D models of one or two participants so she can really check the postures. You know, that can be so hard.
Brandel Zachernuk : No, I mean, the iPads with LiDAR have the ability to do pretty high fidelity skill optimization. I think they generally should be able to do reasonable skeleton. And yeah, it’s like I said, one of the one of the challenges is imagining sort of adequately multi device environments where you say, Well, enjoy this figure. This like, that’s a figure that like that and we should be able to kind of use the information from them. That’s where, you know, kind of there is some academic. Right, right. Yeah, there’s networking, right? And stuff like that. But you know, in principle, if you can say, here’s a bundle of data from this kind of source for this kind of reason, you should be able to kind of permissions pending and everything get multiple devices just kind of sold into the idea of of being able to provide the combination of those things together. One of the things that was really cool about. Microsoft Kinect and the Azure Kinect system, it’s the depth sensing cameras that Microsoft research relates to them. Microsoft tried to productize them, didn’t do well, but its Face ID, this sensor is the direct lineage of PrimeSense is a company that Apple wants to do that, but the combination not just a multiple Kinect, but also multiple frames of the same Kinect.
Brandel Zachernuk : So it was never envisioned as something to be used as a mobile sort of tracker. But very quickly researchers just realized they could sort of treat multiple frames of the same Kinect data as candidates to kind of act as though it’s a fusion of multiple sources and so that you could. It’s called Kinect Fusion, and it allowed people to create things with vastly higher fidelity because each frame is a vote. And if you move that thing around, then it means that you have a more votes upon which to sort of reconcile and determine what the ground truth is of the sort of the whole of the surface you’re looking at. To the point where I was curious about whether people would intentionally sort of mount a Kinect in a mobile or sort of unstable way in order to be able to maximize the vote. You got to have inertial measurement units attached to it with the high fidelity. So you know exactly what the alternation of those views are, but it would be really neat.
Frode Hegland: What was the Photosynth? That’s it. Do you remember Photosynth Photosynth with a bit of video? I mean, the way you’re talking now, I can imagine taking my phone, going around the room, scanning the room, as is something we can do today and then putting the phone on a tripod or something so that that instantly becomes the VR environment. For our meeting, we choose whose room we want to be in. So maybe I invite you into my physical room in that way, but because it knows the geometry, it should be able to place you in that room. And you should be able to have more of a 3D understanding of me rather than flat.
Brandel Zachernuk : Yeah, yeah, so so Apple object capture, it should be able to do things like that, if it doesn’t now, then that’s certainly not giving too much away. That is the vision to be able to be the basis for all of the technology for being able to figure out where things are. It’s currently an offline process, but it’s the sort of thing that that has silicon gets better. And as people learn how to write for that silicon better, that it should be able to become more efficient, efficient. But yeah, I think you can download object. I’m sure you haven’t played with it before. It’s very, very interesting. Yeah, the object actually yields channels.
Frode Hegland: The object capture is amazing, but you know, the room capture I’ve played with some of the room capture stuff to
Brandel Zachernuk : Capture the app do room capture or is it only for objects?
Frode Hegland: I think it’s only object, the room capture. I use something else, but I can imagine for Apple’s demo or a demo in a year where we start with the whole scanning. You know, why are you doing that? And then, boom, we’re all in this room and it doesn’t have to be a AR. Vr depends on whatever you want. And then I would assign where seats are. And once that’s done, once that’s my office forever, I can choose to use that or choose to change it. That’s really very interesting because then obviously we have we can spend some time decorating our room and by decorating it, that means assigning what part of the room we want to have as hooks, so to speak, for data. Mm hmm. So easily instead of always going, it’s like, I put this up on this and I put that there.
Brandel Zachernuk : Yeah, it gives you the opportunity to have a much higher fidelity offline process of what what surfaces might be sort of interactively relevant, but also that whatever sort of more manual work is requisite for being able to say which ones are more semantically relevant in terms of the function of certain surfaces within your house? Yeah, I’ve been curious as to why and this isn’t your fault, obviously, but like why Oculus hasn’t done more work on understanding and respecting the environment in which you’re actually in for it. You know, something that should be not a no brainer, obviously, like some brands, but to to be able to get the rough hull of the room you’re in such that you could maybe do some low fidelity colorizing it pass through because pass through as the video is useful. But if it’s possible to even just do some understandable at this point that it’s it’s a greyscale camera that’s being used with. But yeah, like it should be possible to to make some determinations of functions, if not direct visual appearance and give a little bit more visual interest and detail to that thing by being able to kind of paint with basic casting like that. Things blue? I don’t know. Yeah, perfect, but it’s blue.
Frode Hegland: That sounds like a real struggle.
Brandel Zachernuk : Great.
Keith Martin: I wish. I wish that would be built in would be sort of explored. I mean, it may be, but to my knowledge, I don’t know.
Frode Hegland: Yeah. Hang on, guys. Imagine using your iPhone, scanning the room, putting it in a data thing, going into your Oculus, the Oculus, you know, just the normal environment thing. And you say, I’m actually in this room now and then you do a couple of alignments.
Keith Martin: Hmm. Or if your headset had the the same sort of tech as the phone, so you don’t need to do it with your phone first?
Frode Hegland: Yes, but we’re not a hardware company.
Brandel Zachernuk : Madness.
Frode Hegland: Yeah, they are, but I’m just saying that I think that would be a startup company that could get funded.
Brandel Zachernuk : Oh yeah, yeah, there’s there’s a lot of be funded. Yeah, I agree.
Keith Martin: I don’t know exactly what the cameras are in the Quest headset, but they do appear to be to have some sort of near infrared capability.
Brandel Zachernuk : Yeah. Yeah, so there I think there are mono. I believe they don’t have any kind of vibrating fire ratings are the things that allow it like no camera is color, but you make it color by overlaying overlaying a pixel grid of mosaic red green blue green on them in order to make sure that there are some kind of differentiation. And so you lose the spatial resolution in favor of having some kind of color resolution. But by default, kids of all stripes have have quite wide their air capability. And in fact, you have to remove you’ve got to cover it up in order to make sure that it’s limited its its sensitivity to the air range. It matches more of human perception. It’s quite fun. One of the things that I’ve done in the past is pulled out the air filter from a webcam in order to make it into a night vision webcam and then put it on my daughter’s crib when she was a baby and built an air floodlight so that we could, we could watch her and put a little micro surveillance system.
Keith Martin: Yeah, well, I took the well, had the sensor taken off this, so not this, not the sensor, the filter. And then I just put in whichever ones I want to sort of limit my view to.
Brandel Zachernuk : That’s neat, that’s really neat. Yeah, it was. There’s a really neat book by one of my. One of the people I mentor, her professor, did a. But she’s an anthropologist and was at a NASA JPL for the spirit and know, not spirit, curiosity and no God. Anyway, one of the two rovers that were on on Mars for a number of years and they they’re all false color. And so the ways that they talk about what they intend to do with all of the false color filter is really fascinating because of the. So the fact that it has to be filtered through the human sensor or sensory system, but but but they all maintain an awareness that that is not what the color is actually are and that they are flexible because we have to take that cup in three wavelengths. But they have. They had filters for 10 and 10 different on each camera so that they had the ability to be able to kind of make models at various points of the entire emission spectra from a given scene. And it’s made for people to yeah, and very interesting for people to kind of be able to move beyond. One of the things that I’ve always been interested in is we’re stereoscopic right now and we’re quite dramatic in our stereoscopic. But what if we were to sacrifice stereoscopic to be chromatic? So, you know, if you use one, I make sure that it’s overlaid over the same spot, so there’s no stereo parallax.
Brandel Zachernuk : But then you send a false color information to it so that you you can multiplex that that signal so that you have six colors coming through from a single vantage point. Then it would be distressing at first. But as we’ve kind of learned from the basic sort of study of neuroplasticity is that will accommodate whatever you throw at us. Essentially, some people more than others. But but but but basically, if you just do something, people will start to make sense of it. That’s what the human brain is. It’s what it’s for. And so the ability to become dramatic, I think, will be really, really interesting in terms of how well, how well people might be able to understand things to do with chemical compounds and and the reality of intricacies of of emission spectra with an actual natural environment. Because we see grains, we know intuitively that people who spend more time in nature get to understand grains a lot better, but we don’t know how much better. And we haven’t done any sort of technical or technological intervention of their nature as naturalism, which would be fun as hell to kind of work on.
Frode Hegland: I think that’s a very important point of discussion because it would be fun, of course, but also the question of what is useful. I believe we have those three color receptors. There are Dobson and the the other one for because that is what light wavelengths we get from the Sun. Most of. So, you know, that’s one interesting thing and thing I experimented with a few years ago was during the day, you know, we’re more the blue light were alert. Our vision is spread out. But then, as you know, artistic individuals, we sit in the evening warm lights and we save the world and have deep discussions. And it turns out that the wavelength you get from a setting sun and the wavelength you get from burning wood is pretty much the same. So that the change from when we could start burning wood at night in front of us, that meant that that kind of sleepy, relaxed don’t worry about what’s going on everywhere. The mood lasted longer than us. So I think burning wood and the fact that wood happens to be built. Well, it’s made from carbon. Generally, of course, that the burning color is the same as the setting. Sun color has had a profound influence on who human beings are. So the way that colors you are talking about is really, really important and.
Keith Martin: The interest seems to be like to know more about that. Does it seem like it might be a tiny bit of a background in type?
Frode Hegland: Thing? No.
Keith Martin: Well, I mean, I’d like to know more.
Frode Hegland: I have an article on it. I actually did the Kelvin tests and all of that stuff because what I realized is. As an artistically minded person, I like sitting up late in the evening talking to people by fire or, you know, incandescent bulb or whatever. And to have those kinds of discussions in the middle of the day sitting outside. No, it just doesn’t happen. Yeah.
Keith Martin: But yeah, I mean, is it correlation or is it causation? Oh, we find it restful because that’s the light we experience when we are done with the day. Or do we find it restful for some more sort of direct biological?
Frode Hegland: The research that I read that started me thinking about this is that the blue light is light that makes us look around because there could be predators. So it makes our our perspective very open and wide. But then it has that. It is that. But as you know, the sun goes down. Daytime predators go to sleep, too. Of course, there are nighttime ones as well, but that changes things. So then we become, you know, everything is dark in the shadows, so we don’t have this same kind of looking thing. But anyway, that’s that’s a
Keith Martin: Variable is the level of light as well as the relative color.
Frode Hegland: Yeah, no. I mean, yes, it is. But OK,
Keith Martin: I I’m not. I’m not saying that’s wrong. I’m just I’m just saying this is really interesting, and I really would like to know more because they do seem to be a lot of variables that may have been all covered. Or maybe not.
Frode Hegland: Well, I think, you know, questioning is very useful because also this whole thing about for us people who are glossies, we should have blue tents. It’s absolute rubbish. It’s just to make more money from the opticians. Absolutely no value whatsoever, right? But if we are to to create these VR environments, I mean, currently Brandel, you and Adam and Fabian tend to have neutral background environments where you have your objects inside. I think Keith and I are both on the mattress, what’s outside?
Keith Martin: So, you know, I just don’t have a lot of room in this building.
Frode Hegland: Well, also, you know, if we are designing a room for high powered blah blah blah, maybe we should experiment with one color. Now, here’s an interesting story about a specific pink. I’ll try to remember where I came across this, I’ve come across it twice, but there was a specific pink color that was determined to be very, very calming, really calming for people. So it was used in hospitals and even prisons, and it really worked. It was also used for some football teams used it and the away team’s changing rooms, so their mood would be altered before playing. But it turned out that the research hadn’t been fully disclosed, and it really does calm you down in a measurable way for a short period of time, and then it actually raises up your aggression afterwards. So having it in prisons was not a good idea. That was a clear example of of color. It is a special pink.
Brandel Zachernuk : Baker Miller, thank.
Frode Hegland: Come again
Brandel Zachernuk : To Miller.
Frode Hegland: Thank you. That’s exactly right. But also, you know, we have different. People who have different mindsets, I mean, just look at us, we all have three very different brains. Imagine if we do the scanning of an office, we all go in there, but we have three different colors in that room. You know, we’re sharing the room, but it’s rendered differently for each one of us, the geometry is the same. Mm hmm. You know, maybe one of us once said even going further than the mood thing, maybe one of us is more colorful and likes, you know, roses on the wall fine. Etc.. These will become more and more important issues. In fact, I ordered that I think was tried to be delivered today. I’ll have it by Friday on architects working on these environments is based on one of the links we had. So I got the book and it’s all kinds of outlandish places. It’ll be interesting to see how that works with us.
Keith Martin: What we’re going to need is use a level prefs for rooms.
Frode Hegland: Hmm. Yes, but also very different for different reasons.
Keith Martin: This room when I when I see it, is this.
Brandel Zachernuk : Yeah, I think that it will be valuable to also have sort of negative user preferences and that you would like to have a minimum level of compatibility commonality with other people’s rooms so that if people are seeing something that’s substantially deviating, then you can be apprised that because I think that being being sort of exposed to the same stimuli is something that has intrinsic value because it means that people are on the same page, so to speak. And so it’s like, that’s not the case with phones already in terms of the fact that people can be sort of conceptually surrounding themselves with different things, something that particularly the younger folks on my team back in the before times when we would have meetings and they would be somewhere else, just just not there because they were on their phones. I think it would be useful for us to be mindful of the reality that that attention takes us elsewhere and that a lack of common factors can also have substantial harms if we aren’t sort of cognizant of what kind of impacts those different triggers will have for us.
Frode Hegland: Mm hmm. Yeah, absolutely. And one of my friends who is relatively heavy on the autistic spectrum, although is extremely good at not showing it. He doesn’t like video because he feels the pressure to kind of look at something he’d rather be painting a miniature or doing something. I think in these environments, one thing I’ve told them that I would like to provide for him is for him to be able to just have his avatar be there and go through neutral movements. But he is not there. But you’re very, very right, of course, about the shared agreement of what his space is. So maybe that would mean that that avatar then is grey or slightly translucent. So everyone knows that this person now has to just step back from it, but can hear you. And if they can’t even hear the completely faded or something. So the whole language of what it is to be in a space will definitely have to be difficult.
Brandel Zachernuk : Mm hmm. Yeah. And also, I think that sort of points to what is the purpose of providing certain social indicators
Frode Hegland: Desperately want to hear what you have to say? So I can’t just one second. What was that open everything. Ok, sorry about that. Please continue. Sure.
Brandel Zachernuk : The one thing that I’m leery of within within VR at this point is people providing stimulus, visual or otherwise. That is there for the for the goal of fidelity, but isn’t actually moored to intent or to to specific information. So with your and your friend’s case, it’s understandable to want to provide. Some representation that sort of is an indicator of they have positive like signals, took it for their intent and their attention. One of the one of the challenges one of the issues is when when those aren’t moored to any specific reality. Are they they’re actually giving you less than no information because there are just information that the system is made up? It’s one of the one of the great gripes I have with Ken Carlin. Glory be to his noise algorithm is that he got us started. You’re familiar with Ken Carlin or the noise of those kinds of things.
Frode Hegland: Not not the noise bit.
Brandel Zachernuk : So he invented this really interesting, complex periodic noise system so that it’s the basis for most sort of synthetic computer graphics. He he’s a professor at New York University, but he did a lot of the early computer graphics in the 1980s. So very, very, very beginning of people coming up with stuff, and he made a marble texture for marble. And the way he built it was rather than taking photos rather than doing anything like that, he used this simplex noise, this combination of cosine and various other bits and pieces to create something that is stable enough that it looks like sort of undulations Brownian motion that, for the most part, most things look mostly like. So the so the the veins and marbling look like Brownian motion. If you can kind of configure and kid in certain ways, the rustling of grass or wheat in a field looks like Brownian motion. The distribution of leaves on a tree look like Brownian motion, but of course, they’re not simply sort of random. They’re there according to rules about what’s happening with air pressure through the grass field. They’re to do with the various tectonic forces that are sort of acting in opposition to each other, forcing things with pressure and temperature together to to create the marble and whatever sort of thermal or physical kind of reactions. And when you make that stuff up, what you end up doing is telling the human perceptual system that there is no more information there. It’s just like, Yeah, this is good enough, never mind,
Frode Hegland: You know, when in fact,
Brandel Zachernuk : There’s a lot that we can learn through looking at real fields, we can learn a lot about the tendency for different stalks of grass to to bend in certain ways at different temperatures and levels of hydration or dehydration. You know, there’s there’s a lot about the what we might be able to tell about the provenance, for example, maybe of of of of marble by virtue of being able to say, Well, this is interesting. The stuff that comes from the Tories, the south of the tourist mountains looks like this. Whereas if you’re looking somewhere sort of further west in the Mediterranean and there are these characteristics because of the higher sulfur content, and all of that is obliterated by having these plausible specious representations being sort of standing as good enough within the computing world. And I think it’s done a tremendous harm to have this sort of this tradition of giving somebody something that’s just good enough to be to fool them, but not backed by any particular relationship to fact. It doesn’t mean that there has to be exactly the same, but what what it does mean for me is that fidelity exists to tell you things, you know, so people talk about having higher and higher fidelity models for human human faces. And, you know, maybe putting gays in satanic motion simulated into headsets that don’t have the ability to be able to make assessments of that.
Brandel Zachernuk : But I think it would be much better to look. We have lots of really interesting signals that exist within within the human face, within our human physiology that that that we could make you so like you could put a blood pressure sensor on on a headset very chip, which is the infrared thing that’s pushing into the skin with enough pressure to be able to do plus seismographic plus mammography. And and then you’d be able to to oscillate the intensity of the hue of the avatar, according to their pulse. And that would be that would be that would be very, very useful in terms of our ability to be able to understand people. If you can talk about the the length and the velocity of people’s accounts, you can talk a lot about how well they’re concentrating. If you, for better or worse, you have a good view of someone’s IRIS. You can tell whether they’re really concentrating on what you’re listening or what they’re listening to. And that is more important to me than whether it’s people have proper like five component components subsurface scattering going through the lens and effects of the eye. Like we don’t care about those, but we care about is what things mean. And so, yeah, yeah, thanks. I hate it.
Frode Hegland: Well, no, no. We’re talking about privacy, of course, and how much we choose to reveal about ourselves. And on that level, I have wondered if someone has analyzed Putin’s speeches based on the camera analysis you can do about blood flow, just looking at his face because, yeah, normal security camera can do that right? But there is how much we want to let people know about who we are because obviously already now security with the headsets, they can record a lot of information that can draw up a lot about who we are just by the way that we move and everything like that, right? So I’m thinking we could have different levels of. Well, first of all, just having the headset on your head can be your ID. It’s a Face ID, it’s a Head ID, obviously. Right? So that’s kind of your login, but also to choose how you want to reveal yourself in different levels. But also be honest about that. So you have a general persona that may be a little cartoon like, but then maybe you go into a meeting of known associates and that then resolves into something quite different. But at all times, your identity is still tied to the same person. And also the thing about set about motion, the great metaphor that I keep banging on about, there’s a bit in there and how when you see the larger, I can’t even remember when you see animals that move in our temple, not like this, you know, we can see them much more as being alive. So, yeah, how we will be in the space is obviously going to be important, but on this issue, it’s fascinating, though they are. I think there are others looking at it. I don’t think there’s hardly anyone looking at a research document.
Brandel Zachernuk : Yeah, well, so like I said, my my concern with the way that I’ve observed people working on this part is that they are keyed into the wrong details. Like I said, because people have been have a a background in computer graphics where particularly for things like either video games or or movies, they serve two different but still inappropriate purposes, both for the context of sort of work and presence and code co-location within a virtual environment and that they are there to entertain. And they are there to close down curiosity. Essentially, they’re there to sort of answer resolve and close questions like, you know, this is this is like a cool panel. This is this is marble, whatever. It’s not central to the story. You know, you’re supposed to go that way. Don’t worry about the shop front. It’s like it’s a shop front, but it’s closed. Don’t worry too much about the the politics or the dynamics of why they’ve decided not to have certain articles of clothing in the front door because the shoplifting problems that I have with it.
Frode Hegland: This is a good part of that movie that most people hate.
Brandel Zachernuk : Free guy. Idea? Pretty guy. Ok.
Frode Hegland: Have you seen it yet?
Brandel Zachernuk : No, I don’t. I don’t really watch media.
Frode Hegland: Oh, I think you should watch it for this reason because the a lot of the background is doing exactly that, but in a cartoonish way, like a shop would say, shop with expensive things. It’s like the developers just couldn’t be bothered. So that’s a bit of a fun joke to illustrate your point. Yeah, yeah. Interesting. I mean, we still have to figure out a way to take a document into a VR space, do stuff and then store what you did with it so you can use it again. And then the real challenge, I think, is two or more documents. You know how they are held together, where is that knowledge stored? Maybe that will be the artifact of something like a phone in that space where you allow that to be connected to these things because anchors and connections will become a very, very different thing. I just I just cannot stand the kind of demos that are all about. Everything can be done. In what?
Keith Martin: Well, yeah, I’d like to move away from the sort of, oh, here is my laptop in VR, here is my phone in VR because that’s like it’s another layer, it’s another level that we have to solve then go into in order to get to our documents. I’d like it to just be a way of accessing it. It’s like you say you got documents on iCloud, so then you just go to a device. Access your documents. It would be nice if VR could work in those sorts of ways so that it was, then we need to invent ways of. This is back to the exact problem you’re talking about. How do we deal with documents in VR? Well, I think one way that we’re doing it at the moment is not really the right way. It’s not just, Oh, here is my laptop screen in VR. Ok, yeah, that that kind of works. But it’s it’s like it’s I’ve got to have a device in order to look at a device in order to look at my documents.
Brandel Zachernuk : Yeah. Well, the other thing sort of purely mechanically is that computer screens are limited sort of angular range with a very, very high degree of pixel resolution for the purposes of display. So that means that the basic sort of mechanism for display of information is inappropriate for VR, which for the time being is up to 10 times lower, maybe 30 times lower in terms of its pixel pitch and with like it’ll get better, but it’ll remain low for the foreseeable future, so the representation of information needs to be bigger and more ambient in order for us to be able to make the best use of the platform and technology. That’s something I’m conscious of.
Frode Hegland: I don’t agree with that, and it’s I’m find it very strange to not agree with that because I am a pixel people. I’m a photographer. I need X million pixels, blah blah blah. But I was with Keith here many years ago when he showed me the first retina computer, and I realized it wasn’t just images, it was also texts. So yes, I absolutely love clean text on a retina screen. No question, but we did work quite well on quite low res screens for quite a while. And I find this. Yeah, yeah. But the thing is, I think it Brandel. I completely agree with you that it expands. You know, we should use the more the bigger opportunity. But I actually want to hold a little candle to the fact that a laptop screen in VR is actually not horrible.
Keith Martin: Yeah, laptop screen in VR is a low representation of what low representation of the reality?
Frode Hegland: No, it isn’t.
Keith Martin: It’s very low resolution.
Frode Hegland: No, it isn’t because there is no reality behind it. There is no platonic typeface, let’s say. So it’s always going to be represented at some resolution, right? So also one thing you can do, of course, like in amongst the people we talk to on on Friday, which only do screens in VR, can have a really big screen and have it quite far away. Right. So in terms of the value that you get because I mean, when I said no, I was obviously, Keith, I know you very well is going to be funny, but you know, when you’re talking about a printed picture hanging on the wall, I’m all about that. But in terms of what you need to get a useful interaction with your information, I think I think it’s actually quite good. And I’m not saying that to be a Luddite and say what we have is good. Let’s stop developing. I’m just saying that we don’t need to wait for the next generations. It’s actually OK. But that’s all. I’m not making a huge point. We still need to be expanded world. Of course we do.
Brandel Zachernuk : Can you use? I haven’t tried. Can you use a Bluetooth mouse in one of the one of the challenges I have found is perhaps more to do with the actual fidelity of the input. I know you can put a keyboard in, but I don’t know if you can talk about a mouse. Yeah, you have the ability to point, to my knowledge, no,
Keith Martin: The having a cursor, which is I mean, I know these wherever they are. These things are kind of like curses or controllers pointers, which is what a mouse is. But there’s no there’s no cursor floating around in space that your mouse can then abstractly move. Oh, so those are my lesser points in my. Very interesting. I mean, I wonder how it could work.
Brandel Zachernuk : Yeah, it looks like upload art makes the claim that there that there is resizable browser Windows and Bluetooth Plus on February 21. I thought it was more recent than that that resizable browser windows can. I mean, they’re don’t now.
Frode Hegland: I mean, when I’m
Keith Martin: Doing stuff that we see on a regular computer and want to interact with it in that way, then you’ll need to also build in some kind of cursor. And then have some way of controlling it.
Frode Hegland: Well, when I’m at
Brandel Zachernuk : The
Frode Hegland: I do have a mouse, I do use the trackpad. Because I’m only seeing the rectangular screen, so I use it with my normal keyboard and my normal trackpad. And I actually think that works really, really well. But of course, the problem is once you go outside the rectangle.
Keith Martin: Yeah, exactly. And that’s the sort of you’re wearing a device and then it’s showing you a representation of another device and then you’re working in that. And that just seems like it’s too many layers, actually.
Frode Hegland: Hang on. I’m not sure because in my experience, you know, I really am very sensitive to peripheral vision, right? So if I’m going to concentrate, I basically need blinkers, you know, just so to speak. But when I work in Amherst and I don’t do it that often. First of all, it’s not a laptop screen that’s strange. My neck, it’s actually up. So here’s my screen is at a nice, expensive place. You know, my hands are touching a normal keyboard so I can work with that really, really well. Ergonomically, it’s super nice. Resolution is medium. But here’s the thing, of course, you know the resolution increases when you move your head, right? Because you will the rest of the view and what’s behind it, the representation. We kind of build a high resolution image of it. It’s almost like going through a chain link fence kind of thing, right? So that’s why that freedom of movement is so important. But having just two extra monitors on the side, I haven’t really found a use for yet because author doesn’t support it. So if I could have, let’s say, the map here and the table contents here, which I can’t do yet, maybe I would use it. But of course, the dream is to have any kind of rectangle when you want to get rid of it, when you don’t have the glossary and all of that. It doesn’t go into the space, but it’s still
Brandel Zachernuk : Still a step.
Keith Martin: Hmm. This is where we kind of need a VR version of open dock, switch everything around and you have your documents and then you use your tools on the documents. Rather than going into a tool in order to work in a vacuum.
Frode Hegland: Yeah, yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. Brandel what do you think of that open dog idea?
Brandel Zachernuk : I think it’s the web. I mean, I just I think that there is the the web is the least worst and HTML is the least worst representation for those things. And that, you know, it’s worth acting like it can do it until it can’t and then amending the specification until it does. You know, I I’ve been listening to a bunch of people involved in web and podcast recently, folks like Vladimir Fukushima, who made WebGL, and he says that he thinks the web should be a substrate, but that we should throw away from JavaScript because they’re slow or something. And I just think that that’s that’s very silly and that the web has been such a transformative thing for people’s ability to create applications that we should keep using it even if people have munched and destroyed the ability to view source. I mean, I could still do it for the most part. But yeah, so I agree. I think some kind of open and interoperable standard is a valuable thing for information. If you actually scratch the surface of some of the things that people say about universal scene description, that they sort of are thinking that maybe it could be the basis for a Metaverse browser as well. But I just think that the plain old web is the best basis for that. And and I don’t I’d be curious as the reasons why people think that it can’t be. But yeah,
Frode Hegland: Well, I think what Keith was referring to with open excuse me, with open dot is the idea that it’s not an application where you put a document into, it’s a document where you put applications into.
Keith Martin: And I remember talking about. Hmm. Yeah, nothing. Nothing further than that. Just the the core concept of open doc way back when.
Frode Hegland: But I remember when I talked to Don Norman about this and I asked him, What are you going to? What are the default tools you’re going to ship it with? And he says, Oh, that’s for marketing to decide. Then I realized the project was dead. That was just absurd.
Brandel Zachernuk : But if we this in the 80s when he was at Apple?
Frode Hegland: Yeah, way back, way back it up when he was ATG thing. But the thing? Of course, there’s of course, we’re not going to throw away the internet and we’re not going to throw away the web that’s on top of the internet either. No question about that. But the notion of in the physical world, I can buy a really fancy pen or use a really cheap pen, and it’s on the same paper. It’s just so important. And to have what scares me about the Metaverse model today is. You have to move from room to room. To use different things, and it’s just stupid, so that’s why if we can separate conceptually the environment with the things in the environment, so even mentally, you guys could be floating in a space station that can be in a log cabin, but we’re still looking at the same table. I think it’s really, really important, and if we can apply different ways where what I am doing with my tools, you may not have paid for that software, but you can still view me doing it right.
Brandel Zachernuk : Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the big issues is just the first of the foundational technologies that things like virtual reality and anything sort of containing any pretensions to metaverse are based upon right now are so shaky that most of the people building experiences have to have to divert most of their attention and interest to those foundational technologies. Making sure the fidelity of the hand models or or the polygon count of the of the rooms aren’t sort of adversely affecting the experiences that people are having. And then beyond that, it becomes a solution in search of a problem because there are sort of so, so fixated on those things that they don’t have really much ability or that the medium maybe doesn’t have much ability to attract people who are more interested in these concepts of interpretation documents and other information. And so I think that one of the things that should help is when more people get down the basis upon which people build these technologies, then they can. Then there’s going to be a proliferation of people who just care less about it. Ideally, it would be good for another couple of vendors to get out there with headsets. So best of luck to Google. I really hope that they succeed this time.
Frode Hegland: But if we managed, if we managed to get a little bit of money for this lab of ours, you know, I think we should start to make these components. You know, like when there was the fight over gopher versus the web wayback and all of these things, a lot of it came down to licensing, of course, and everything we do is open and free. But it also came down to what tools were available and useful. So for instance, if we could develop a mechanism whereby you can add a 360 photo or a 3D model within a certain spec to whatever, then the environment when you’re in VR, you can easily use that. That would be one thing, obviously. And then also the the tools available to you. So, you know, along us actually building and experimenting, we make these available so that their drag and drop easy for people can have a transformative effect because I am lucky enough to have the time to to listen to you Brandel and to follow into this community. And Keith, you know, he even has a job in this now. But a lot of people the onboarding, of course, to Oculus is awful. And if we’re going to allow people to do more than just download the upload bundled metaverse application suite that I’m sure they’ll find a way to put in there, it’s got to be because it’s so easy. I’m not against Doug Engelbart, obviously, but to get the data and the stuff in there has to be easy.
Keith Martin: Mm hmm. And we need support for proper document types. I mean, we need the Oculus system to behave like a proper OS.
Brandel Zachernuk : Yeah, that is a challenge. The idea that that what’s what’s supposed to be allowed to be a not proper. The weird legal fiction that a phone is not a computer is problematic for many places because, yeah, computers and the expectation that you should be able to install what you want on them were a very useful thing to have. And so many people say, No, no, no, you have to go through.
Frode Hegland: A frozen or thinking. I think he might be frozen and thinking.
Keith Martin: It’s a very good thinking phrase.
Frode Hegland: It looks a lot like Steve Jobs right now. Thoughtful Steve Jobs.
Keith Martin: Yeah. Speaking of thinking, people have woken up waking up over in the West Coast.
Frode Hegland: Ok, you’re
Keith Martin: Being pinged and asked to look at things.
Frode Hegland: Yeah, you do that. It started slow today, but it went really well. We’re just I may have to come over and I’ll show you properly. Well.
Keith Martin: Well, is that rectangular object?
Frode Hegland: This rectangular object is called a book, I think.
Keith Martin: Show me, show me when I’m over. Next, give my apologies to Brandel. Oh. Very interesting.
Frode Hegland: I will do and yeah, I look forward to seeing you. Maybe see on Wednesday. Very good.
Keith Martin: Yeah, yeah. Really, really interesting chat and it was just warming up. And I have to go. Yeah, I do.
Frode Hegland: Hey, Brandel, you look like Steve Jobs having a big thinking moment there? How about yeah,
Keith Martin: I’ve got to run there, waking up in California and asking me stuff, so. Really nice. Great chat. I’ll see you next time.
Frode Hegland: See you later, Keith. Yeah. So, yeah, that was a good range of different topics than we usually go into. Yeah, I think just just really briefly, that thing he talked about iCloud as an example of some kind of cloudy thing. I think that if you and me were in a VR space now and I had a document, we’re talking about it. If you were to give me that document for me to interact with, you would probably have to put it in my iCloud folder. If you only give it an VR space, I wouldn’t be able to grab it, would I? In the sense of having it later as well?
Brandel Zachernuk : Well, and so if I give you something that means that your system has the ability to display it. I have to give you all of the information to the level of fidelity that you need for display, right? Yeah. So, so pending any kind of DRM considerations of restrictions of save or whatever anything that you have, the ability to display is something that you have to have had the ability to to say. That said, there’s no there’s not going to be any kind of mediation by default for us to be able to reconcile that what you have now saved is a version of a thing that came from me. And you know, that’s where concepts like get are pretty useful because you have the ability to manage sort of optional non-linear versioning. And that’s the sort of thing people assert blockchain is good for, but I haven’t seen evidence of it. But, but it definitely is, you know, a revision control revision management sort of software is useful for being able to kind of do versioning and and have multiple people kind of make pull requests and modifications and things like that. What we what we don’t necessarily have is that we so so to that end, if we if our files are actually on GitHub and you fork them and you make changes that are sort of affected based on pull requests, then we have a mechanism or at least a conceptual basis to sort of have things, share things. And.
Frode Hegland: Sorry, Edgar is wearing a real world filter. You’ll have to say, Oh, very nice. Hey, come on, show Brandel. You look amazing. He’s wearing a rabbit filter. Url is coming up. You look amazing, look at that. It’s fantastic. Thank God, that is so cool, when did you build this today? And what costs
Brandel Zachernuk : Money?
Frode Hegland: You built that with your mother? Yeah. Look at me. He protested. That’s very good. Who was that the dog? Great, OK. Yeah. So the object that. You know, the option of you, these are interesting social issues, so if you take something out into our room like the cats, if you if there’s DRM or you just don’t want to share it enough, then I will see a texture of it, so to speak, right? But if I also have rights to it by you and DRM, then it’ll be something else, so there’s got to be some kind of an indication of who owns what in a room, right? Like maybe semi translucent or labels or whatever. What do you think? What are your thoughts on that?
Brandel Zachernuk : Well, I think it’s very useful to know that somebody is interacting with something and having the ability to represent some kind of proxy to show that that’s happening, that it would make sense for that to be a shorthand that is established per sort of operating system or arena software, I guess. And but but I think growing things up would be would be useful being aware of what kind of level of disclosure. So from an application perspective or a document management perspective having. Having apps kind of using sort of reporting levels of fidelity, so right now, when you build an app, right, you you say, OK, so I want to have a menu bar, I’m just going to have these menus on it and this and this and this. What might be useful is for application. But and and web and now in Mac OS and Windows. People say this is what it looks, looks like for dark theme. This is what it looks like for a living. What might be useful is for application systems to disclose. So this is what it looks like for the user. This is what it looks like for the casual participant. And this is what it looks like to the stranger, you know and say. And it may be that it looks like nothing to a stranger, but it might be instructive to say that there are two buttons and they’re either matching this one or that one. So having having that webby idea of of responsive design pertains not just to spatial sort of variability, but potentially to trust based variability. So CSS party might actually be the least worst. Like I said, like the least worst model that we have for saying, like, this is what it is for this. This is what it is for that. And then the client, as in your system, has the ability to determine what to divulge and also to say, OK, so I’m only going to send you the untrusted, but this is what it is. This is the stylesheet for untrusted. You know,
Frode Hegland: I think that is a really, really clever way of using the web. I think that’s very excitable. Yeah, that’s very, very interesting. So I’m thinking about. Uh, in this environment. There will have to be. Rights and access, it’ll have to be really, really important. And as we’ve seen, you know, proximity to you and your bra, you could actually choose that someone can see your whole room versus other people, depending on, you know, that’s also very important. So to have. Yes. Well, so then we’ll have. Apple is already good at being an identity provider. So they already own a lot in that space they could be doing, they could own this so easily. That’s good and bad. I think what we need to do soon, if you agree, is demos that are partly fake, you know? Yeah, yeah. Just some video with overlays and stuff.
Brandel Zachernuk : Just to get to know, I think they’re exceptionally valuable. One of the things that I. I rediscovered, I think I maybe mentioned is that there’s a group called the Human Interface Device Prototyping Lab inside Apple, and they have that’s where Brett Vector was when he was at Apple, but they still are there and they did a number of videos and he did one in 09. There’s one from 2014 and a couple from 2015 because they made use of outmoded, now outmoded technical frameworks that have been taken offline for the general public. But they were public at one point in the past, and as such, people would have been able to get sort of retain copies of them. And they’re just phenomenally useful for that very purpose. Talking about building fake apps so that the manager of the team says the point of our team is to make fake apps, show them to people and see what they say. And I think that’s a that’s a very apt and concise characterization of what what prototyping is. It’s to answer questions. And the best way to answer those questions is to do them to sort of conduct those experiments as cheaply as possible. So, yeah, I I agree, I think fake things that are sort of designed for the purposes of eliciting certain sort of responses can save you an inordinate amount of time if what you’re trying to do is work out what’s what’s experientially appropriate rather than technically.
Frode Hegland: Yeah, I mean, the knowledge navigator, way back when video cost quite a bit of money to produce was probably C.k.’s or did it before I was there. But yeah, yeah, Scully
Brandel Zachernuk : Has a book, devotes a book at least a chapter in his book. I haven’t. I haven’t read it, but I’ve heard people talk about it and that he sort of he he goes into some detail about the the process that sort of underpinned it. Yeah.
Frode Hegland: It’s like an Instagram filter. Snapchat, isn’t it, but real Wonder Man. Do you want to tell Brandel that mom and dad, I saw you play football today and we heard the coach say that you were one of the best. To remember, we had to come and stand up next to him. He said you first. Yeah, yeah. Don’t talk too much. We don’t have a meeting, you’re talking too much. That’s a joke. Uh, yeah, now we should look at that and also I’ll keep trying to write this stuff down. But it becomes more and more important, I think, to have web accessible libraries. I mean, in some logical sense, we’re reinventing, you know, like Google Drive’s iCloud plus WordPress. You know, there’s a lot of things we can draw on. So you know, when I talk about academic documents and stuff to have your bookshelf with you, it’s becoming much more important because it relates to these issues so strongly.
Brandel Zachernuk : Yeah. Yeah, I think that especially the sort of ready to handedness of books, the mobility of access is an essential component of that as well, because we do technically have all our files on our computers. But what we don’t necessarily have is a is a socially legible and comfortable way of reaching for them and then producing them. So you know what, you might share a file into into Zoom, but it doesn’t have the same gestural qualities that sort of match the activity intent of it. And so sort of merging those two worlds to think about. If I were to say, Oh, here’s this piece of supercell and sort of bringing it forth and kind of share it around for that to be sort of considered front and center as a problem for somebody would be super interesting.
Frode Hegland: I think what we should also do is meet in something like horizon work rooms, just something that exists all of us. Yeah. And try to oh, memory cards, fantastic. One hundred and twenty eight gigabytes gig gigabyte SD card for the cameras just for now. How much do you think it costs?
Brandel Zachernuk : I don’t even know anymore. I had
Frode Hegland: 30 pounds. Like 50 bucks? Yeah, yeah. Maybe we should go in all of us and then somehow record it. I don’t know how, but where we pretend we can even draw on the chalkboard or whatever and pretend it’s a 3D object. And then we just roll play. Is that yours? Is that mine? What do we take with us? Just just have a session there?
Brandel Zachernuk : Yeah. Yeah, that would be interesting to do, I haven’t I haven’t spent much time in social VR because I’m a very social person. But but it’s yeah, it’s it’s I think that there are some interesting sort of opportunities for sort of trying to to create understanding and information that’s reflective of it. Yeah.
Frode Hegland: I mean, imagine if we just in six months get to the point of having a demo where we have a nice enough background, but we open a document, one of us and then we all were able to do is to take a page or two page spread of maybe one of Bob’s murals and put it on a wall. Do a few basic cool interactions, and then at the end, people can actually choose to take that with them. With some of that recorded or not, if we can do that, that will be a huge thing, I think.
Brandel Zachernuk : Yeah. Well, so I mean, it’s like what I’ve learned about this slow mirror system would allow one to record at least the performance of like a person and their hands, as well as potentially the position of of various objects under their control. So you can make a 3D model that is representative of a series of interactions and steps. I think that’s pretty interesting because it’s not something that once in a great deal of in terms of like moving things around and sort of the position of objects, objects being kind of captured in that way. Yeah, it would be an interesting start. Obviously, if you’re in controlled total control of value, then you have to be responsible for all of the co-presidents frameworks and whatever else. But it’s it’s an interesting sort of starting point, you know, like what are valuable things to capture and perform in performance?
Frode Hegland: Yes. And also once we start playing, whether fake or not fake, then you know, in addition to ownership, it’s spatial relationship. So I have a dream that at some point soon other people would say, No, no, we really need to concentrate, put your helmet on because it augments the environment like the table instantly becomes a map if you want it to. But that can’t just be theory. Bladerunner nonsense spoken at some point, you have to have a component of software that has maps. You have to decide, you know where it’s going to fit the table. You have to decide how you’re going to call it forth in the future. You’re going to have to decide if it was already something on the table, let’s say a physical object like the glass. How is that to be treated? Will that be passed through if you already had a? A timeline on that. How is that going to be moved? But we, you know, we can’t answer these questions until we we lived there a little bit.
Brandel Zachernuk : Yeah, and build the build a slightest attempt to actually live in that world with a with a shared timeline or with a with a shared document that sort of reflects this thing. Yeah, one of the things that I’ve been playing with, I don’t think it’s worth sharing, particularly on. This is cutting up version 50 year old and and sort of thinking about what what might be done with it at different scales and different representations. So. Uh, this is. Yeah, so.
Frode Hegland: If we how would you do that, would you? I mean, in the olden days we had image maps, which were great but aren’t good tools to make them anymore. But I guess you could even use Photoshop and have a specific export of different layers or cuts, right?
Brandel Zachernuk : You can use a blender as well. So I can, I guess I can share.
Frode Hegland: But yeah, yeah, yeah. Blender is a little beyond the average user, though that’s I’m thinking to make it. I mean,
Brandel Zachernuk : It is so, so here’s the mural. But all in sort of vertical slices such that if you are, if you’re in a first person mode, then you can walk along them. And that’s, you know, the sort of the mode of looking at them that the information isn’t necessarily at an appropriate scale right now. But you can start pulling things off like the 2010s to have it as a railing on top or rotate it by 90 degrees. Yeah. So it’s it’s a relatively interesting thing. So the way that you can, you can do that in Blender is, like I said, it’s fairly straightforward, you know, if you make use of this material here.
Well, right. Is.
Brandel Zachernuk : Listen out. I guess I guess it’s a colossal texture. Where does it go? Uh. Ok, well, so for this thing here. So you have this this piece of information, if we wanted to trim it, split it into three parts, then you can go in and. Prime really hates me. You can split it like this, so you just add a piece in there and then you get those pieces that you can kind of turn into distinct pieces.
Frode Hegland: How can I potentially send you a map view from author that you could easily put into blunder? What would you like to receive at us if we’re ever going to try that?
Brandel Zachernuk : Uh, so do you have the do you have relevant sort of encoded X Y coordinates in your and your system? Yeah. Um, so that if you have a picture of what it looks like and all of that information and basically in whatever format, if you have something in sort of more or less plain text, then it should work. I should be able to pass it relatively straightforward, like by just looking at the whatever coordinate stuff and kind of a reference of how that’s expected to look. Those are as long as it’s not kind of encrypted or anything. So then it’s typically not particularly challenging to pull it apart. So, yeah, OK, go ahead.
Frode Hegland: I was just going to say, just imagine a document with visual matter both in the PDF and separately as plain text to make things easier. That has maybe the map view, but also each item, the one that is a glossary term. You have access to all the text and the definition. Right then we can do a lot of things like, you know, click on a term. Well, currently an author, if you double click on a term in the map that happens, then it’ll show you all the occurrences of that in the document. It performs a find based on that, but I could imagine if we just add a little bit of intelligence, but the authorship of putting giving something at time or dates. And also, of course, I want to automate all of this, obviously. So if we build something and because I’m such a believer in real data, you know, I keep talking about that. So, you know, whatever you right at the end of it, you click, click put on your goggles. If you’re in the right environment, you open it up. Darn, it’s all wild.
Brandel Zachernuk : Yeah, yeah. The sort of false security of toy problem data. This is a real doozy. It’s one of the objections that I have to some of the more interesting ideas is that they they will do the things that he says they do. But once they get past it, then they may not scale and they may may hit those scales pretty quickly. So, yeah, no, if you have a sort of an author document, so what is the format internally? Do you know what it like, what the is asking with stuff in it? Or is it binary?
Frode Hegland: When I do show package contents, I have a lot of lists, but the main thing is in our TFT. That’s so oh, actually, this is interesting. Hang on. Why don’t I just send you a document?
Brandel Zachernuk : Yeah, yeah.
Frode Hegland: Actually, even more. Why don’t I just send you a code so you just get a free copy of author?
Brandel Zachernuk : Oh, thank you. Thank you.
Frode Hegland: And then you can do whatever, because when you view package contents, it does get kind of interesting. Uh, yeah, that gets.
Brandel Zachernuk : So do I download it through? I’ve never used the App Store before.
Frode Hegland: Oh yeah, you get it in the App Store. Exactly. The normal Microsoft App Store. You can get the free version instantly, but it doesn’t allow it to export such a actually for you, that wouldn’t make any difference, but I’ll give it, obviously. The full version for ease of everything. But yeah, that’s a really interesting point we have. The lists have a lot of information. So I’ll give you the code in a minute when it’s generated, it takes a long time for some unknown reason. All you need to do is go to the App Store, scroll down to where it says Redeem and enter it there. I’ll paste that here in our chat.
Brandel Zachernuk : So I. So you start using find on page, because it’s like the basis for.
Frode Hegland: Web stuff. Yeah, right on the main on the Discover tab. You scroll all the way down at the very bottom, it’ll be one of two buttons redeem or add money to your account.
Brandel Zachernuk : Oh, oh, so it’s oh, it’s not on the author page, it’s sorry.
Frode Hegland: No, this is really not very clever. It’s.
Brandel Zachernuk : I see. Yeah, I see. Yeah, OK. I was I had assumed that I would enter the code on that specific place.
Frode Hegland: I would agree with that assumption.
Brandel Zachernuk : I don’t I also don’t know my password because I don’t use iCloud much.
Frode Hegland: Do you work it up? Are you sure?
Brandel Zachernuk : I never used. I’ve never. Smartphones are the purchase. Um, and I never used Apple machines before. I don’t I don’t use them by choice. So no, not really.
Frode Hegland: So weird.
Brandel Zachernuk : I’ve come to appreciate the perspective that Apple has on things, but it’s still not not mostly for me in terms of the balance of capabilities and requirements that I have with hardware. It is for just about everybody else. I’m happy to hang my hat on that. It’s just that I want different things. I computers, which is mostly I would prefer to have more control and risk breaking them because I know that I won’t. I’m not downloading random things from random people and I like the web and stuff like that. But yeah, OK, so does that mean? So I did that. Where does that mean that? Right, have it now or
Frode Hegland: Actually have no idea.
Brandel Zachernuk : Yeah, sorry, it’s weird, I tried to click Redeem. I already redeem this offer. Ok, but. Oh, so then, does that mean now if I go to author, I get. The ability, OK. Ok, that wasn’t, yeah. I don’t know if I know anybody in the app in the App Store org, but I would love to help them make that make more sense.
Frode Hegland: Oh, this is so cool actually. When you do, when you make yourself a document and author and then you do view packaged content, it’s all there really cleanly. I forgot about this. So there’s a list of citations, comments, cuttings dynamically. It’s all there. I mean, it doesn’t help us completely in VR, but you know, it’s a step.
Brandel Zachernuk : So are the are the files themselves stored? So when you say the list is that appeal is to do with data files or to do with the application, or is there not a distinction?
Frode Hegland: The the format is called liquid, that’s my wrapper, because it was the original thing, right? And also I did adult author with a finish guy and he just went mad anyway. So in the contents, the basic text, I think, is sorry not to think it is in the contents that’s in an Ph.D., so that’s just normal.
Brandel Zachernuk : Right. And, OK, so I have author running, so if you have another file that has some caucus already that I can take a look at it.
Frode Hegland: Why don’t you share a screen with me and do a few things that I’ll tell you? So then you’ll learn it and then literally one minute you’ll have real data there.
Brandel Zachernuk : Right, OK.
Frode Hegland: Awesome. Ok, so just try any old sentence, anything you like.
Brandel Zachernuk : Uh.
Frode Hegland: Yes, reading in the brain, OK? So after. Ok, so let’s make that a citation, so after that? Put your cursor off the shapes. So you could select the text if it was a quote, but just and then do commend T for citation and type in either his name or reading in the brain or whatever. Well, that’s not happening. Did you do command T? Yeah, I think so. Can you press the escape key? Uh. Ok. Just as a weirdness, go down and OK, go up the force down this low and add a few line breaks. And then go back and try to do it. Ok. Press the escape key now, please. Then, OK, now you’re full screen. Ok, let’s try it again. What in the world? Ok. Go at the top of the screen, you should find. This is very interesting, I’ll have to debug that under tag menu. Link and then citation. I think there’s a manual entry. Yeah. Oh, you know, I can’t. No, no. Just type, I can’t see the dialogue for some reason.
Brandel Zachernuk : All right. I’m only sharing this application, yeah, that makes sense. Ok, so do I click search books or manual entry
Frode Hegland: Search books just type in Stanislaus down or his last name or whatever thing you want?
Brandel Zachernuk : So this is actually hitting Google books.
Frode Hegland: Yes, yes. Ok, so now we’re going to double click on the word text. And to commend D for the fine. Oops! Yeah, there we go. And just right, any definition, any whatever. And now just select text again, just to be simple, select the word text. And to commend em for Map. So now it copied it into the map, you can put it wherever you want. And double click and right. Uh, words just. Yeah, that’s perfect words. Ok. And select one of those and make another definition, please. By doing just come on. Yeah, but make sure that that definition either includes the text, text concepts or words.
Brandel Zachernuk : Yeah, right.
Frode Hegland: So now when you click about a select all of them. Ok, so I’ve. Ok, so in the definition for type, can you just do select and select type and just do and make sure that that definition includes the word text? But yeah, their command now and text.
Brandel Zachernuk : All right. So that they’re linked together.
Frode Hegland: Yeah, but look at the difference between selecting text or type. If you select text, say what happens thin line, but type, strong line. Mm hmm. Right. So when you save that document now, that should be an AP list. Bob, you missed the mural bit, we went through that a short while ago.
Bob Horn: So, yeah, I just couldn’t make it this morning. Too many things on. Sorry, I left on Monday morning.
Frode Hegland: Don’t don’t worry at all. Ok, yeah. So go to the desktop, but let’s do your package contents of the sample document then.
Brandel Zachernuk : Ok. So why can’t I just.
Frode Hegland: Yeah. Yeah, there you go.
Brandel Zachernuk : And I call it, it’s a sample document. Ok.
Frode Hegland: You can just close that or I don’t know whatever.
Brandel Zachernuk : I see I cool so I can share, I’m sure, just there are things I probably shouldn’t allow people to see on my computer, so. We have this document, this file, this folder directory, and it’s got an author list. Maybe you’re not saying, Peter. Okay, cool, so
Frode Hegland: We can say it, yeah. Previous Good.
Brandel Zachernuk : Nasty. Ok, so.
Frode Hegland: Glossary. So have a look at that.
Brandel Zachernuk : So I had some new ideas, and it has. Uh. He doesn’t have any coordinate data, which is fine.
Frode Hegland: Hang on. Go to dynamic view dot Jason.
Brandel Zachernuk : There you go. Right. You got a bunch of coordinates. Yeah, now that’s that’s very easy. And then these new ideas presumably pertain to the definitions in some other.
Frode Hegland: Probably, yes. I mean, yes, that is why I actually have two definitions with the same name because it’s based on that and not just the text yet.
Brandel Zachernuk : Yeah. So you have that 37 I’d call. Yeah, yeah, that’s that’s all pretty straightforward. And I don’t know is there’s a file like this is a file like this a zip file actually, like
Frode Hegland: It’s not when you go up, it’s just that.
Brandel Zachernuk : Yeah, but is it like if I were to go? Oh, it is a folder. I’m just wondering what it is, sort of. Under the hood, if it’s
Frode Hegland: It’s a package,
Brandel Zachernuk : I don’t know what a package is
Frode Hegland: In this context, a package means that as long as it’s registered with Mac OS, the Dot author or Dot Liquid or JPEG or whatever it is shows up with a specific icon and double click and it does something right. But in terms of this delivery? Yeah.
Brandel Zachernuk : Yes, so. So it is a directory. Interesting. Ok. Well, I mean, so the thing that I’ll need to do is take an. Molested version of that, that kind of file format. See what it looks like when you just drag and drop it into the web. So I mean, I understand that it’s a collection of files, but whether that’s because it sort of exists as an archive like a zip file or if it’s literally just a directory that has some kind of special indication. So now I broke it. So that just looks like it’s a folder. No, I had it as an extension.
Frode Hegland: You should be able to if it go up. Rename that folder to dot liquid, and it should become that again.
Brandel Zachernuk : Oh, I see, so if it’s not liquid. And it turns that into it, and so if I were to change this to a liquid.
Frode Hegland: So Bob, what we’re talking about now is, of course, just the document. But it started with the idea of how someone can easily make a representation to go into VR, starting with the idea of a diagram or a mural. Because the coordinates in the Dynamic View map can be represented in that kind of a way.
Well, good, good.
Brandel Zachernuk : And.
Frode Hegland: All right, well, that’s kind of fun. I mean, one thing we can do because all of this should be in visual matter, but we could also do the poster on a specific iCloud thing and then we can start easily having an In-N-Out of VR if that is possible. And my program are Jacob is finally coming out of the woods with another project. So he will be able to make changes to make this process more useful. And of course, whatever we do here will be completely open. Um, so look at that.
Brandel Zachernuk : So this is. This is not necessarily helpful, but it was just a first sort of first budget sort of thinking about how to separate out the sort of the components of this. So what I what I’ve been thinking about is what? What is it like? Is it helpful to be able to walk along a wall of just one of these? What would be useful to be able to have above one’s eye line, you know, in terms of having those as aisles in a in a store or in a library? What are the what are the sort of the basic metaphors that we might use to understand these things because we might have it so that that, you know, because right now on on the mural, you the sort of structure of it is that you have the twenty ten to twenty studies. But what what way we may be like if you were to duplicate information or to have that the 2010s Area B, because if this isn’t necessarily chronological, maybe we have them as sort of. A line like arrangements in a space all together rather than linear or we might have, you know. The other thing is being able to use vastly different sort of type scales. So this headline about forests. Forestry like the fact that its forest as a as a set is more important than that subtitle, that kind of byline. And the same thing with the the global temperature. So how how you might sort of increase sharpen the contradictions of this big what, what, what type scales are doing in different places. So yeah. It was just also just the basic technical test of like, how do I go in with that single board and then start chopping it up and manipulating those things? Not with any particular a good idea of what, what kind of end to what I’m doing that chopping. But just as that starts, so. Yeah.
Bob Horn: Well, that’s that’s that’s amazing. I’m delighted to see it, to see how hard was it to extract these things?
Brandel Zachernuk : Oh, this is just so you have a JPEG on your site that looks like this. Yeah. And it’s just a matter of going in with basically a ruler and and cutting it. So here, I don’t know if you can see my yellow line, but I can go. I can go through the the thing basically in the same way that you might with a with a real knife. And then,
Bob Horn: All right, I don’t need it. I don’t need detail on that. I just wondered how how hard to answer your what I think, what I think I heard your question to be was was is it a value to have separate links like that? Well, you know, if we had this in two thousand ten, yes, because I in fact sent the separate long pathways the the the 40 year pathways to the agriculture people and to the forest, to the forestry subcommittee and to the manufacturing subcommittee. I didn’t bother you while we’re in, you know, we’re in draft and discussion and agreement mode in in the in the project. All this was done with, you know, twenty nine of us a strategist as well as a team of about six or seven who were helping administer all of this. So there was a lot of back and forthing. On specific, very specific items, so would be very valuable, you know, very valuable to be able to pull that out, show it, you know, to that part of the team without bothering the others.
Frode Hegland: Ok.
Bob Horn: Documents that were done in Microsoft Word generally or and sent around as PDFs or just as word documents, as how the. Different teams, the agriculture, manufacturing, energy, et cetera, teams were progressing with their back casting process. Here’s what we did this week. Here’s what we agreed. Here’s what we don’t agree. You know, here’s what we still have to find out. All of those kind of questions were behind each of the what you have been manipulating as the final thing, and I was always trying to get to the final, you know, to summarize, to summarize all of the the different committees that we’re working on this. So yes, it would be it would be sometimes useful to be able to take one of the little statements there. There’s there’s a statement in agriculture that says that Russia and Ukraine have to increase their food productivity by I forget how much percent within the first ten years within the 2010s. And it might, you know, it would be. Really useful to be able to link back from that hypertext back from that to the to the document that asserted that or to the end and or to the team teams memo that was using that evidence. So there are two. Those are two different things where we could very easily use the different ways that you’re chopping it up.
Brandel Zachernuk : That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, in terms of the sort of the purposes one might have for a document like this, it’s interesting to think about like whether whether it’s a gallery space like a large or like a museum that somebody would need to walk through in order to see enactments of various things. Or if it’s supposed to be a conversation space where people collect in order to be able to talk around those certain areas. Yeah, right. And part of that depends on on scale. I presume these were large, but you know, like. But I don’t know how large like, is this?
Bob Horn: Usually, they were about the smallest one we made was four foot by 12 to 14 feet.
Brandel Zachernuk : And so, so that was the smallest. Yeah, yeah, so so what if you had if you had like a hot 100 linear feet, what would you do differently or if you had a like a great big conference ballroom?
Bob Horn: Well, I had a ballroom like that for the poultry project because we had four of these this size. We had three scenarios each, you know, four feet by 12 and then one summary one putting a summary of the three scenarios together on one place in a somewhat more simplified fashion. So we’re always trying to, you know, we’re trying to aid human beings in there, getting to detail and getting to simplification. That’s one of the sort of major mental function functions that that we’re trying to aid with with this. And, you know, if I had if I had a ballroom, well, you know, you can make these bigger, probably have to adjust some type sizes and so forth so that people could stand in, you know, farther away. And larger groups could stand right now with the the sort of four by 12 it more than five or six people around it begins begins to be hard. Because people get in their way, each other’s way. You know, I want to go over to, I want to go over and see what what the objectives were over on the right hand side while somebody is want to see the detail down at 2010. So there’s a limit to the number of people that can comfortably over a period of time use them.
Bob Horn: Yes. Although it’s handy, you know, it’s also, as I think I mentioned in this group before, that the at least one company that I know about the forestry company had this in their boardroom, so the board had studied it. To begin with, they had had an hour long or so walk through of of not only the forestry part of it, but then its related ecological and agricultural aspects and building aspects. What’s what’s missing, what would what I would also put in that that that big warehouse room that you talk about would be what we were not able to do, which was to make a some kinds of linked networks of these different requirements. Requirements depend on other requirements. You know, I don’t think I have to. That’s an axiom. And which ones those are would require different people to agree on them and to have some evidence for that for that. And one would want to then as you were doing with lines and arrows and so forth just a few minutes ago, be able to link those and travel along those lines.
Brandel Zachernuk : Yes, so, so so in this in this body, there are specific sort of dependencies within and between these sort of drug.
Bob Horn: Yes, which we did not which which we only. Specified in a very limited way and did not, and I and I decided we couldn’t, you know, that was not what we wanted for the for the portrayal of the summary of the project because I had I had to make some decisions about just what we could do and what I could do with what I was given. I mean, I was up you up to the last minute, the last week I was still trying to get Toyota and and Volkswagen to agree on on the items in the transportation line. So, you know, so there’s always kind of dynamic going on with with it, which, you know, I was just managing like crazy.
Brandel Zachernuk : Yes, absolutely. And so it sort of I guess one of the things that is sort of intrinsic to it is is having an intention for use that sort of dictates the form. And so those conversations, I think it’s really interesting that the idea that there would be sort of clusters of people potentially sort of tracking things down. I also really like your sort of sort of description of the fact that you would want to be checking back with the measures of success, this kind of final rule, final column and the way in which that sort of similar to spreadsheets with frozen columns and frozen rows and whether there is a special equivalent of that so that you actually have each person potentially has a copy of of their measures of success actually following them along so that at any given moment, even if you’re over in the twenty thirties, then just your right as your measures of success such that you can kind of use it as a ruler to identify and see the way in which that sort of the these represent sort of causal planks, dependency, sort of dependency, things such that you can kind of and I guess, to fold them. If you if you had the ability to fold this space to be able to kind of see the dependencies as they become sort of closer to each other. An interesting thing, too.
Bob Horn: Yes. In other words, to slight, you know, it would be very you are you chopped off the the. Measures of success as as a column, yeah, it would be very, very handy to be able to slide that over to 20, 10 or 20 20 and see what the you know, for the people in charge of that, to see what the distances are. Yeah, we have to go. Those kind of comparative measures.
Brandel Zachernuk : Yeah, we have kind of moved this one over.
Bob Horn: I will also say that I think I’ve mentioned before that that this mural was part of the project was also to have a report, write a report written and there is a 40, 40 or so page report that that accompanies this and it to some degree, it expands on different chunks of information on the mural. And that’s another that, you know, one could put those pages in your big warehouse again. Yes. No. That one could link directly to the detail. Yeah. One of the things is, as I said, is always managing the same the simplifying task in order to to make some kind of judgments. And then also to get to the detail and to the evidence which. You know, that’s what everybody is working on in the in the projects I’ve been working on the last five years or six years or so, that is with with the intelligence analysis community. You know, it’s all all the stuff, all the research that we’re doing is open source, but it’s the same sort of problem. You know, how do you how do you simplify the narrative of how to understand Vladimir Putin and his psyche and his life history, his narrative life history? And how do you do that with some kind of judgment? About him and what he’ll do.
Brandel Zachernuk : Yeah, that that makes sense, that sort of relating of things. Yeah, that’s cool. I think those are a good start. So I like the idea of,
Bob Horn: Oh oh, you just splashed on the. Yes. You just flashed on the the the difficult, the difficult problems, the little black arrows pointing the other direction. Yes. Big risk. We call them the big risks. At the time, the project did not. The project managers did not choose to. Spend a lot of time, a lot of the team time when we all went all like 40 of us got together for five days, they spent very, very little time on big risks, although we did have a session or two that tried to itemize them and rank them in various ways. But I realized I had to. If I were going to put it in the summary, I had to put them all in one big mural, but put them in different places on the mural. And of course, some of those risks are risks to multiple pathways. So, you know, I just said, well, I can’t I can’t display that in this way, it would be too complex, you know, to try to put these in different places and so forth, because then people would say, Oh, you put you duplicate it or whatever. Yeah, they would get you. So but but but you know, the whole, the whole, you know, again in your warehouse question, it would be a it would be. There’s a whole serious study of big risks, which we did not do too seriously in this project. So you would say that we only noted them.
Brandel Zachernuk : So big risks were cross-cutting, there are
Frode Hegland: Causal
Brandel Zachernuk : Dependencies that were not portrayed. Yeah, they they and folding for it, those dependencies and showing the what did you call them that measures of success, the 2015. I also like the idea.
Bob Horn: Where are we? The question, you know, and I have, you know, if we want, you know, if we make a demo out of this for two years after making this mural, I gave a lot of lectures around the world to in Europe, to and around the U.S.. With different slides shows. First, just introducing the project, but then as we got out to the second year, people were saying, Well, how are we doing? You know, how are we doing because you got those, you got those 40 must haves that are the yellow boxes in in the 20 tens. How are we doing on the must haves? And so I would do a little bit of research when I could, and I wasn’t. By that time, I was not employed on the project any longer. So I, you know, I had to just depend on on time that I could devote to it. But I found, you know, maybe eight or 10 places that I could track some of the must haves and that was enough for for a slide deck, you know, to give a talk. Yeah. And those are, you know, I have those, you know, again, if we were to make a demo, we’d probably want to show how you would use this after it was made.
Bob Horn: Yes. Yeah. First, we did, nobody attempted to update it. I did not. Nobody did, although. The project, the poultry project certainly was in some sort of sense, this was a fundamental platform for starting to think on it. You didn’t have to start from the beginning all over again. You knew what you were going to be creating in the in the scenarios based on different sets of assumptions and and in the poultry project. There was it was not. The text that you see was not a set of requirements was a set of programs of different kinds. So we’re going to treat we’re going to treat climate change and sustainability this way by assuming that Europe will be the leader. We’re going to in another scenario we’re going to treat. We’re going to create a scenario where Europe is not the leader does not take the lead and civil society does not either. But we rely on the rest of the globe to do it. So. So there was know. So there was that kind of there is that kind of connection as well there. But but to, you know, ideally, you know, someday we’ll have updates of all of these things that are done, you know, in routine and automatic ways, I hope or mostly mostly.
Frode Hegland: It joined us is the authorship of this, how can people actually make this people who are not necessarily programmers, for instance, but it’s quarter past, I got to go. Would you guys like some more time? I can leave it running a bit, but
Brandel Zachernuk : I have to. I have to drop 10. I mean, I may be back. I may be free after, but I’ve but I’ve got a meeting, a work meeting, two minutes. But this has been really cool. Thank you. Thank you for your patience with the mural being chopped up like that. It’s pretty ungraceful, but it’s a but hopefully it sort of spurs what might be done with it. And I really like the sort of the duality of having the personally owned document or a sort of personal constellation versus the socially formal kind of space that people can reside within. And being able to contextualize between those two things is also a really interesting sort of job I think could be done. So, yeah, it’s really cool to hear about. I might throw a video of this up just privately between us so that you can see it and think a little bit more about what you would do with it. I think particularly sort of dwelling on those lectures and what what kind of social artifact like having a large spatial social artifact like that ballroom would be really cool to think about. And yeah, now that I have that document, I should be able to try to open it up past it and and with the simple thing that I have and then see what. And then, you know, after I’ve got that, you can throw me a more complex document and I can take a look at what it does to it, because that would be good.
Bob Horn: I haven’t thought about ballrooms. Most of the most of the experience that I’ve had is with smaller groups of of 12 to 15 and in sort of situation rooms or war rooms or whatever. Yeah, that’s right. Thank you very much and happy to get, you know, set up a private meeting, you know, for for debriefing on this.
Frode Hegland: I see you go. But at some point we should look at the authorship side of this, which will be very interesting. How to how to make anyone do the murals under Bob’s direction. All right. Bye, guys. Good to talk to you.
Brandel Zachernuk : Thanks a lot, guys. Yeah, yeah.
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