Information Tunnels to Virtual Worlds.

From my brain to your brain. My brain is the world’s best information processing system, so is yours by the way, so are 6 billion other brains, and a few billion monkey or ape brains aren’t doing that bad either. My dog of course is the brainiest of all. Naturally, he has probably the same set of mirror neurons I have. I know instantly when he is in a bad mood, and so does he …and it all happens without saying a word. How mirror neurons do that you can find out on this fascinating video.

But back to brain – the human one - talking to brain. The 'in-between' the two or more is a problem. A couple of miles of distance between two brains requires technology for transferring information. There is a bottleneck that leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation. For example the Google ads on this page. Google responded “cleverly" to the keyword “container”, yet took it entirely out of context. No, I’m not dealing with shipping containers. I’m dealing with containers for information and there is one we all know so well and of which Preston Austin and Julian Lombardi, two of the key architects of the Croquet project, say it sucks. We're talking about the World Wide Web.

They point out that over the last 20 years our communication “container” on the Internet was a flat “document” inside of which were other flat documents that we then could shuffle around, and replace with even more flat documents and now and again some flashing lights and animations. Browser developers try to do so much these days, but in the end browsers still do the same thing as 20 years ago, shuffle around flat documents on a flat desktop.

Internet chat was 'flat’ too. Scrolling panes of texts. But although at the time our 2D world was flat it still sort of worked. Our brains compensated well on what was missing with a lot of fantasy. In the late nineties I would spend hours in what was called “The Palace". Wiki: “The Palace is a software program used to access two-dimensional virtual communities, also called palaces. A typical palace is represented as a series of flat backgrounds with one or more clickable areas, or doors, and players represented by either the default spherical avatar or a user-created avatar up to 132×132 pixels large, with an 8-bit color palette.”

It was great, I still have overseas friends from that time. But nevertheless it was rather limited and limiting. “Rooms” were small pictures of “rooms”, doors were “holes” in the pictures you would click on and jump into a new room or to a different palace. And chat happened with these wonderful "cartoonish" speech bubble clouds above the avatar’s head. Bandwidth and computing power didn’t allow for much more. But it was cool and it was free!

Then came 3D and broadband and today we’re playing over the Internet in “virtual worlds” such as Second Life, Entropia, Everquest and others. A lot of people put a lot of money, skill and computing power into these 3D worlds also known as Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG), and they cost massive dollars for users. Certainly more than for example educational institutions, non-government organizations, clubs, user groups etc. could afford. These wouldn’t be much interested in role playing games anyway. But what about having meetings, lectures, discussions, work shops, business presentations in a 3D enviroment with VoIP, video, and all the bells and whistles where you and your avatar could walk around, shake hands, sit in a virtual café and just simply talk? This is what the croquet project (Wiki) is all about.

So what is croquet ?

“The Croquet project is an effort to develop a new open source computer operating system built from the ground up to enable deep collaboration between teams of users. To do this, the project seeks to define and develop a system that is focused on the simulation and communication of complex ideas. We call this "communication enhancement" - the direct extension of the abilities of humans to develop, understand, and describe even the most complex simulations. Croquet enables this communication by acting as the equivalent of a broadband conferencing system built on top of a 3D user interface and a peer-to-peer network architecture. Through the public release of this software technology, we are seeking to harness the creative power of thousands of software developers and seed the development of transformative technologies.”

Simply put your screen is not a flat document on your flat desktop anymore but a 3D space, a room or even a whole world. Croquet is what I’ve been waiting for since my days in “The Palace”.

Picture: 1998 Palace screenshots in a current Croquet based 3D gallery (Citris Gallery Builder).

Information Tunnels

Headlines. I come across them everyday. “MySQL to Adopt Solid Storage Engine”. I read this headline and something happens in my brain. I am either interested and become conscious of the headline, or, hardly noticing, I skip over it.

I decide quickly whether I want to continue reading the whole article. Actually I’m not really aware that I’m deciding. When reading an online headline for instance, I just click. Some process inside my brain must have made made me click, a conglomerate of past memories maybe, a current technological interest, or something.

My brain is deciding for me, it knows why and how. Some of its structures have decided to twitch my finger and also have let me know that they have clicked. This is how Wegner sees it anyway (Wegner, D M 2002, The Illusion of Conscious Will MIT Press, Cambridge).

But going back to the click and the headline. I plug into a data stream, virtually, conceptually and physically.

I connect to the machine because of my inner thought pattern - call it interest in the topic - to the communication machine. It could be a printed newspaper as well as a networked computer screen. I read the headline and possibly continue reading the whole article. I could also go to the new web page of course. In both cases I open up something like a conceptual tunnel linking my inner thoughts to the machine's thoughts. Or should I say my thoughts become the machine’s thoughts?

As I read I emulate the headline in my brain. The headline that someone else wrote, or another machine wrote. A machine spitting out headlines.

So the headline I tunnel into does things in my brain. I react emotionally. I like it or I don't. I can get upset, or curious, ecstatic or simply indifferent. We always already have some emotion (Heidegger). Indifference is an emotion too.

But I may not only react emotionally I can also take action. If the headline reads: “WAR BROKEN OUT” I might ring my family, talk to my neighbour in the café next to me. I become engaged in this way or that way. But not only me. I do what probably in this moment thousands of other people do that read that same headline and article.

The headline controls the pattern generator in my brain, memory banks are tapped, new memory loops generated, enforced, depending on the conceptual power of the headline. The phrase “WAR BROKEN OUT” I will not forget for the rest of my life. “MySQL to Adopt storage Engine” will probably only remain in memory if I’m a MySQL developer.

Now imagine your web browser as a container, or better an array of containers, clicking tabs open container after container. Each container is filled with headlines, each headline is pumped into your container as soon as it appears from the source. It can be a news service, a discussion forum, a web log, a weather channel, sports news, science and technology news and more.

Your container's wriggly headlines finger your brain. You scan over them, focus on this one or that one. Most you ignore. Some trigger some response and you click. You feel like clicking on the Peanuts cartoons, the weather channel, or the world's news wires. Fingers pulling and pushing, waving and luring. In minutes you have scanned the entire page, you go to the next tab, and the next.

In a couple of minutes you can scan a few hundred headlines. It may take some practice but once you start realizing how effortless it is to scan hundreds of information chunks for their usefulness this thing becomes incredibly valuable. A true thinking machine. You find stuff you normally would never come across.

These new web tools are literary machines Ted Nelson might have never dreamed of, consisting of modules that you can assemble according to your own taste, desire, belief, interest or need. Check out Netvibes, a Web 2.0 application. I wouldn't want to live without it anymore.

Doisneau's Kiss

“Scan courtesy of Masters of Photography”

Saturday morning I usually sit with friends in The Byronian cafe in Byron Bay. A weekly ritual! Usually we're quite laid back, unless something catches our eyes.

This morning for example, there was the Good Weekend section from the Sydney Morning Herald flying around with the cover photo of “The Kiss”. I recognised it instantly, in the sixties and seventies it hung in every European poster shop, in students' flats and bed rooms. However, I couldn’t remember the photographer.

Discussing the image with friends, I elaborated on how spot-on the shot reflected Paris in 1950. The people, still under war shock, yet daring to step out and there in the centre this spontaneous impulse, this intensity bringing Paris back to life.

But then, reading the SMH article I learned that the photographer was Robert Doisneau and as that the kiss was fake, staged.

According to BBC News "the woman featured in Robert Doisneau’s classic photograph of a couple kissing outside Paris city hall has sold her original print at auction.” and “Francoise Bornet and her then boyfriend agreed to pose for the seemingly spontaneous photo in 1950. The photo went on to become a poster icon around the world…..Romantics like to believe the young lovers were captured in a spontaneous moment of bliss, but the pose was staged.”

I was such a romantic.

But then, thinking about it, does that reduce its cultural or aesthetic value? What is the labouriously crafted moment of intense experience cast in an artistic medium such as a photograph that seems so light, so casual, so coincidental? We call it art. It makes our world stand still for one moment capturing our imagination, passion, or sorrow, even capturing the spirit of an entire generation. There are not many images that do this.

What else became apparent curiously enough was that my Australian friends did not know the poster. It was European thing. Later at home I found apart from BBC article a rich repository on information about Doisneau. The most interesting one Masters of Photography even give kind permission to use the images for non-commercial purposes.

The relevance and usefulness of this kind of “open source style” policy became apparent, combining sharing and fair use with some commercial solution for interested parties.

Then our discussions turned towards, images and metaphors and that’s when we touched on George Lakoff’s “Philosophy in the Flesh” … But that’s another story.

Writely headaches ..

Ok..got some probs posting to the blog ..

Where is the text ...? Ah ..here we go ...

What a mess...

Writing with Writely is cool. Blogging with Writely even cooler !

But getting to the point ..Dion Hinchcliffe dreams about Ajax’s Disruptive Influences..

"The End of Software Upgrades, Fixes, and Security Patches" ...

"Since Ajax software delivers an application fresh to your browser each time you load the URL, you’re always getting the latest version, with all fixes and updates, automatically."

Provided that I really always want the latest version! Quite often I don't want to upgrade at all, or upgrade when I'm really ready. Sophisticated programs do have a learning curve to master. I would prefer deciding for myself when and how I want to upgrade. Minor upgrades for rather "simple" programs like Writely don't matter so much, but what about more complex programs?

In terms of complexity of features. I can't see Photoshop, Maya or similar as a web-based application, in a few years maybe, something the big guys should think about, which they probably do. If they don't others will.

" Software and Data Available Wherever You Go" ...

Hinchliffe: "How many of us are tired of synchronizing their personal, work, and family computers with the latest software and files?"

This is a bonus, no doubt. An important one too. This currently is the niche where I see Writely working for me. I can continue working from where I left off when shifting places. Crashes? Let the world crash, my Writely docs are safe...well backing up is never wrong of course ..

"Isolated Software Can’t Compete with Connected Software" ...

Hinchcliffe: "The best software is now highly integrated into the Web and leverages the rich landscape of services that can be found there."

I disagree. It's far away from highly integrated. In general, considering IT developments over the last 20 years complexity has continually increased. Using computers has become more difficult, no easier. (Remember the good old days of Windows 3.1?) Of course, it is also because we can do more with computers, but who is "we"?

The Microsoft aficiados are still working their way through XP and can't wait to wade through another 500 pop-up windows after installing Vista, while OS X addicts sweat in horror while waiting for the Apocalyptic Intel chip ... and the LINUX dudes are hailing every new Dr Mabuse Linux quick release as the final death knell for Windows.

The current desktop environments stink, and ye all know it.

Sun's Jonathan Schwartz was completely correct when he said while introducing "Project Looking Glass" that we need to look beyond reproducing paper office metaphors on computer screens. Not that he was the first. Ted Nelson once said

"Computer people don’t understand computers. Oh, they understand the technicalities all right, but they don’t understand the possibilities. Most of all, they don’t understand that the computer world is entirely built out of artificial, arbitrary constructs. Word processing, spreadsheet, database aren’t fundamental, they’re just different ideas that different guys have whomped up, ideas that could be totally different in their structure. But these ideas have a plausible air that has set like concrete into a seeming reality. Macintosh and Windows look alike, therefore that must be reality, right? Wrong. Apple and Windows are like Ford and Chevrolet (or perhaps Tweedledum and Tweedledee), who in their co-imitation create a stereo illusion that seems like reality."

And Linux desperately attempts to emulate, imitate and simulate both.
We need a re-metaphorization of the GUI. Maybe the 3D gamers can help us. Maybe we should start dancing on our desktops instead of staring at them. Maybe we can reach inside one day, walk through, open it from the top. X-Ray the HD, or CAT scan, or zoom in and out and left and right. Why do I need a boundary between my computer and the Internet?
I need conceptual boundaries, levels of intimacy and security, not Windows to simuated sheets of papers residing on a piece of hardware that is already junk by the time I unpack it.

We have no sense for information architecture and structure, only for nested folders and believe it or not, the majority of my customers don't even have that! They don't know where their stuff is on their hard drives. We can't see the threads that link...the clouds of metaphors that create meaning, history and reach out.

Nevertheless Web 2.0 is a promising first step in the right direction ..

Hot Stuff

I'm in the process of preparing some lectures about current developments in multimedia and Internet technologies. After investigating a large number of documents and statistics it seems evident that employment and industry perspectives are good, possibly getting even better month by month, unless major disasters strike.

The current evolution of Web 2.0 seems to be turning into a revolution with a Pandora's box full of new apps hitting the market almost daily.

The Web is re-inventing itself ....

Testing Writely again !

I'm finally getting around to write a few notes about Writely. As a typical Web 2.0 environment you work on the web from whatever available computer.

Writely is more than just an online word processor. It's a universal publishing tool across various formats (html, doc, pdf etc) that can be shared with other collaborators.

Currently I'm developing a "slideshow" for a small lecture series on Multimedia Industry Perspectives, using Writely as as production and presentation tool.

What I love best? I can keep working on my file after leaving work from my computer at home without even having to open an application on my home computer. That baby is connected and logged in to Writely already, automatically through mypersonalised "porta"l, provided by Netvibes. But that's another story...

Testing Writely

Testing Writely ... and lots of other cool stuff. There's lots of information on WEB 2.0 BLOG