Personal site of Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and VR pioneer who writes about technology, society, and music.
HN commenters cite him as a futurist and critic of social media and Silicon Valley, note he has no social accounts, and pass along his AI source-attribution idea.
Anybody remember Tom Demeyer's "Image/ine" that he developed in 1996 at STEIM (STudio for Electro Instrumental Music) in Amsterdam?
https://v2.nl/archive/works/image-ine
>Image/ine is a software for realtime video manipulation.
>Image/ine is a Macintosh program that allows a user to manipulate visual source material in a live performance environment. Video sampling and playback, keying, displacement and other effects are available with video (live and recorded), QuickTime movies, text, scanned images, image files with alpha channels. Unlike digital video editing programs such as Adobe Premiere, Image/ine works in real time. There is no compression slowdown, no rendering time - the digital filtering effects are immediate and controllable through Midi.
>The software instrument for realtime video manipulation was developed at STEIM by Steina Vasulka and Tom Demeyer (1996-2001).
https://image-ine.org/
>Image/ine, developed at STEIM from 1997, in close collaboration with Steina, was the first piece of software (for normal computers) that allowed users to manipulate uncompressed video in real time. Limited, at the time, to 320x240 pixels at some 10 frames per second (the Macintosh 8600 was the dream machine), it nevertheless proved a point: artistic quality and stage guts made lack of frame rate and image quality of secondary interest; real time video manipulation could be done! Soon others followed, all with their strengths and weaknesses. What set Image/ine apart, and sets…
I've been working on VR and AR stuff for about 8 years now. I started doing it full time about 4 years ago. A lot of what I know has been from just being in the zeitgeist as things develop, so unfortunately I don't have a "reading list" to get people started.
I have been trying to start a reading list, but it's woefully incomplete. I'll copy the content here (I don't have it publicly online yet). I'm primarily centered on VR, but I've also done a lot of AR work. I think good application design is very similar in both. or rather, all the "bad" apps I talked about out there are similarly bad in the failure to take the immersiveness of the experience into account. But I do think there is a lot of overlap in terms of needing to take less of a traditional, compartmentalized application mindset and start thinking about immersive software as more akin to clothing, overlays on top of the world.
Kent Bye's "Voices of VR" Podcast (Site: https://voicesofvr.com/, Twitter: https://twitter.com/kentbye?s=20). Kent Bye has been a singular voice in the VR and AR community for the entirety of the contemporary VR movement. He brings a philosophy and social impact perspective. I think a lot of application design--immersive or otherwise--doesn't take human factors into account often enough.
Road to VR (Site: https://www.roadtovr.com/, Twitter: https://twitter.com/RtoVR?s=20) is also a very long-standing blog on all things AR and VR. They are more focused on gaming, but they also cover…
Since there isn't a computer that seems conscious at this time, the idea of machine consciousness is supported by thought experiments. Here's one old chestnut: "What if you replaced your neurons one by one with neuron-sized and shaped substitutes made of silicon chips that perfectly mimicked the chemical and electric functions of the originals? If you just replaced one single neuron, surely you'd feel the same. As you proceed, as more and more neurons are replaced, you'd stay conscious. Why wouldn't you still be conscious at the end of the process, when you'd reside in a brain-shaped glob of silicon? And why couldn't the resulting replacement brain have been manufactured by some other means?"
http://www.jaronlanier.com/aichapter.html
I absolutely agree with the opinions Jaron Lanier has on Social Media, especially Facebook, and that it has not made interdependence any better but actually made it far, far worse. (For example I (factually) believe that radicalization, on both sides of the political spectrum, got completely out of control once Social Media became the most popular thing on the Internet due to the bubble effect and the ease of censorship).
So yes, please stop. And don't let the digital door hit you on your way out.
Additional reading:
http://www.jaronlanier.com/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/27/pioneer-delete-facebook-addiction-social-life
https://www.ted.com/talks/jaron_lanier_how_we_need_to_remake_the_internet
> If you gave someone who understood electricity but not computation a CPU they wouldn't be able to explain how it works. That wouldn't provide a good reason to say that computation must be the result of something other than electricity.
It would be a good reason to suppose that computation was something added culturally to understanding the CPU (as part of constructing a CPU), since physics alone doesn't explain it. The computation is something in addition to the physics. It's cultural (the meaning of the computation in terms of bit patterns, manipulations and input/outputs) as well as electrical. Otherwise, it's just moving electricity around and producing heat.
http://www.jaronlanier.com/zombie.html
I interned at VPL Research[1] in 1992 and they had a Mac-based VPL for controlling objects in VR called Body Electric[2] that was really fun to use - especially since I'd never seen anything like it. I implemented gravity for objects and a virtual arm using it. If I remember correctly, debugging could be a challenge. It was later interfaced with Macromedia Director[3] to control desktop apps.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPL_Research
[2] http://www.jaronlanier.com/vpl.html
[3] http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/bounce/bounce.html