West Portal Reflections #6, August 31, 1997
West Portal Director of the MSU Communication Technology Laboratory
West Portal Reflections document my experiences as I try to open a portal to Northern California for Michigan State University. They are targetted to my teams in the Comm Tech Lab and Virtual University, to my close colleagues and bosses throughout Michigan State University, and to close friends and family. These pages serve as ethnographic documentation of my participant-observation research on TeleRelating ("using technology to sustain and enhance close personal relationships"). The contents mix professional and personal life because I am reaching out 2500 miles to people I care about and work with. I hope my reflections help you to keep me in your hearts and make San Francisco a place that is yours. Thanks for journeying with me as I think, learn and experiment.
On Monday I visited Computer Science Professor John Canny at his Robotics Lab in Soda Hall on the Berkeley campus. Soda Hall is a beautiful new building with discussion areas at multiple points on each floor, each sponsored by a different corporate doner.
Based on my web exploring, Computer Science at Berkeley includes at least three professors with an unusual orientation to arts and technology. These include John Canny, Larry Rowe (Director of the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center), and Ken Goldberg of the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR) Department.
John has exhibited at SIGGRAPH for many years, and was in a crunch of preparing to exhibit at ARS ELECTRONICA in Europe. His lab is delightfully full of weird robots and pieces of machines. They developed the Blimps that were flying around SIGGRAPH, originally used to allow people to remotely explore museums. They found in their work that the most interesting thing about those trials was the way humans at the museums reacted to the blimps and interacted with the remote participants. This led them to their work on tele-embodiment and remote collaboration.
Currently John is directing 3DDI, a new project on 3D visualization and direct manipulation of virtual objects. It is a DoD MURI project (Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative) involving 7 faculty from Berkeley, two from MIT, and two from UCSF. John's involvement is with physically-based modeling of rigid and deformable objects, the real-time laser depth scanner and the volumetric display. His group is also very interested in human collaboration within the 3D environment. He described an avatar scheme in which participants could "look at" one another, and at a glance, see who was looking at who.
I am hopeful that we will meet again and that I can get involved in some of the human trials of this technology as it develops.
Unfortunately, you cannot see a photograph of either John or his cool lab. Sometimes being a photographer is more intrusive than I can muster. Somehow I could not point the camera at him, or get up the guts to ask permission to do so. Instead I treat you to a view of the entryway to Soda Hall (the Computer Science building) and to the view of a house in Berkeley you can see out of John's office window. Since intrusive photographers are not very popular just now following Princess Di's untimely and unfortunate demise, perhaps my reluctance has some value...
Recent MSU Grad Charlie Holiday is living in San Francisco and working in Berkeley for a Health web service. He and two friends from MSU arrived in San Francisco with a moving van full of belongings (impossible to park) and had to find a place to live in a day (impossible to find). This approach is not generally recommended -- housing is hard to come by and they got lucky. How they could even park a moving van in crowded SF is beyond me.
They ended up in an apartment on the edge of Alamo Square, near Haight-Asbury. Tour busses drive by every day and tourists get out to photograph three famous historic houses. Their apartment is high tech, multimedia, San Francisco. They have had 17 visitors in 2 months, and Charlie pointed to the couch and the floor where guests were currently sleeping.
Oddly enough, other MSU grad Richard Grove lives within one block of Charlie, and I think Sasha and Sheila also independently moved to within a few blocks of the same area.
Charlie has agreed to serve as a DMAT Industry Mentor and to do a West Portal guest interview for TC446 this semester, talking about life in the big city, finding jobs and internships, and preparing a portfolio. He mentioned that out here, everyone is always looking for a job -- even people who have a job. People are somewhat unnaturally nice to each other, even upon hiring, firing, or not hiring someone, because you never know when you might work with someone again.
For now he commutes from San Francisco to Berkeley almost every day, but says the commute grows tiresome. He is doing some Director and Shockwave contracting, for pay, in addition to his full time position.
PERICLES and DMATs
Speaking of moving vans, our hero Pericles Gomes is no longer at Savannah. He is now a tenure stream assistant professor starting a New Media program at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. The new interdisciplinary BFA multimedia program Pericles is starting has a strong visual component and integrates while coexisting with four existing colleges: College of Performing Arts, College of Art and Design, College of Communication and Writing for Media and Performance. The university has just purchased a 21 story building to house their DMAT program. Don't know what will go in it yet.
In typical Gomes style, Pericles passed through East Lansing after SIGGRAPH in LA to pick up a moving van and move all of his belongings from East Lansing. He stopped in Philadelphia on the way to Savannah where his family waited, to see how much he liked the job opportunity. Made the decision, placed their belongings in storage in Phili, and drove the van to Georgia as planned, with nothing but their paraquit in the back. Daughter Julia and son Victor rushed to greet Daddy, clamoring to unpack the van so they could finally play with their long lost toys. He opened the van to reveal the bird, and they realized something was up.
Hopefully they can get settled now, for at least a year. If MSU posts the DMAT position, there is a very strong likelihood Pericles will apply. But for now, he is a tenure stream assistant professor starting a new media program in Philadelphia.
The arrangements with Savannah made it clear that it was a one month trial, with no obligation to either stay or be kept on after that. While Savannah is much more established and well known, it was also a purely administrative position.
PG will live in New Jersey, 45 minutes from the Atlantic, 2 hours from Washington DC, 1 hour from New York.
JESSE JACKSON RALLY AGAINST PROPOSITION 209
At SFSU, Jesse Jackson came to speak the day before the march across Golden Gate Bridge. Being on a college campus again, surrounded by students, was most refreshing. But it was also a pleasure to return to the multicultural, age diverse, general SF population. I don't think I have seen multimedia that does a good job of conveying the experinece of being at a political rally.
On Thursday, Dick Group's research team from Geography came to the CTL, including Mike Lipsey and former TC446 star student Jill Halden. They are planning to create a State of Michigan Atlas over the next 5 years.
They are thinking of developing three prototypes to explore design concepts and demonstrate emerging approach to a digital atlas. The three areas are:
1.) Stuart Gage's Michigan maps of gypsy moth infestation
2.) Gary Manson's maps of migration in Michigan from 1800
3.) Remote sensing land use images and data
(Dick is also now the Director of the Center for Remote Sensing. They have access to myriad remote sensing photos of Michigan, much of which has been digitized.)
Two of the forms of map learning to be accomodated can include being a GOAL DIRECTED "DETECTIVE" (having a goal and seeking out that information/location) and DISCOVERY/EXPLORER (going to a place and being open to discovering things of interest)
Map making is an interesting skill to teach, enhancing appreciation and understanding of the atlas.
The CTL might be able to help with envisioning 3D interfaces to navigate within a map and between maps and concepts. We need to understand what is technically possible with VRML, RealSpace, and other technologies.
One possibility would be to create VRML maps with data turned into topography (i.e., if the meaningful measure is population size, peaks and valleys represent dense and sparse population). It might be interesting to be able to "stand" at a particular location in Michigan and look around to observe patterns of similar and diverse topography. I am curious what it would be like to identify a meaningful spot and look around from there -- whether new relationships might be observable when viewed from this perspective.
On the left as seem from the Virtual Carrie station, a few members of the visiting delegation watch intently as Brian demonstrates CTL software. On the right, seen from the WebCam, discussion continues.
We used the same setup for the Friday CTL potluck. On the left, Jesse holds up a demonstration Tamale. Brian appears to have 2 heads because the refresh rate is so slow that a visible line between previous and current image moves slowly across the screen...
The screen grab on the right was as potluck was just getting started. We had visual communication going on both cameras, but no one had gotten around to calling me yet. So, I typed into the webCam to have the computer voice ask if anyone was ever going to phone me. I assume it is strange to be in a room where the person you are talking with can look from different angles and speak from different voices. At least I hope so.
Nonetheless, we grow complacent with technology just because it is working well. But we are supposed to be on the bleeding edge so we need to move on to things that do not work once again. In addition, not instead, of what works. IChat Pager is working reasonably well for those of us who log on and use it. I would appreciate it if CTL and VU would download the software (http://www.IChat.com/), register, email me your userID (first or last name would be nice!) and log on in the background while you are at work, to the extent this does not interfere with what else you are doing. If it is unclear what to do, we'll ask Andy to demonstrate at the Wednesday VU meeting.
On the CTL bleeding edge side, let's also try to use Palace this week for a brainstorming session. Also, I need to try to get video working better on my end, even though I am not eager to be on camera.
On Friday I met with Galen Brandt, virtual reality artist, dancer and singer who is now working on virtual reality and the healing arts. We met at a State Park in a eucalyptus tree grove where the 38 bus on Geary turns around, looking out on the long stretch of ocean along Highway One. We walked down to the beach and along it while talking about a possible upcoming virtual reality conference panel on telerelating and healing. It's unfortunate that I did not have time or presence of mind to point the camera at Galen before rushing off to a meeting I was late for, because she is exotic and lovely, always covered in stars, suns and moons in her jewelry and clothing.
Galen had just visited the children's hospital in Palo Alto where an important VR and healing project partially funded by Steven Spielberg is underway called StarBright (http://www.starbright.org/). This is an important project because it is well funded and well done, and has many implications for telerelating. I hope to visit the installation and talk with people about research involvement. They are closely tied to Stanford, and have large research teams already. But perhaps there is room for another perspective. One advantage of having Spielberg heading your foundation is that they got to use ET as an avatar in the worlds...
"STARBRIGHT's teams of world-class pediatric health care professionals, technology experts, and leaders in the field of entertainment come together to address the profound healthcare challenges that seriously ill children face on a daily basis such as pain, stress, isolation, fear, anxiety, and low self-esteem.
STARBRIGHT applies the latest advancements in new technology to harness the power and potential of this new media to directly and positively affect sick children everywhere. Technology is used as a way to plug kids back into the world they left behind -- through the boundless reach of video and computer networks or the wizardry of electronic simulation. It's a way of bringing the vast expanse of everyday life to confined and physically limited children."
With a little more time to explore Chinatown, I ventured to the side streets where fewer toursts go. Most of the produce store displays included bins of live toads (with a cage on top) and large live sea turtles (no top needed). Electronics stores alternated with produce stores, restaurants, hair salons, and bazaars. Patrick, I examined the produce carefully for you... One store