West Portal Reflections #3, August 9, 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.
My trip to East Lansing in September is scheduled. I will be arriving on Monday, September 15, reaching campus by 1pm for a late CTL senior staff lunch beginning at 1pm. I will be in East Lansing through Friday, September 19, at which time I depart on a 2pm flight, therefore causing an hour early Friday potluck...
The Newton is working reasonably well -- am ready to get a modem for it. Handwriting recognition is excellent. The left image is of the Newton and optional keyboard, shown inside the massive carrying case. Most of the time I carry the Newton, the cell phone and the Casio digital camera in my purse (a purse so small you would be amazed!) Used it to take notes at SIGGRAPH, and am also using it for phone numbers, calendar, and expenses spreadsheets.
On Thursday another phone line will be installed, and on August 15 I will be ordering a 300MHz Pentium II with AGP card.
If you care about my opinion regarding Apple and Microsoft, I think Netscape is in big trouble and Sun's control over Java standards is going to disappear. I think I am tired of not being able to run all of the Windows only software and am ready to get a Windows machine and start using Internet Explorer. I think it is predictable and wise given the circumstances that Steve Jobs did something unexpected. I think it is a little too bad that the computer industry is maturing and being run by older people now. I think the amount Microsoft is investing is minute. I think anything beyond those observations is just talk, and I would prefer to wait 6 months and be shown real product and real software.
Sheldon and I had dinner Monday at the Esperepento Tapas restaurant in SF with Richard Grove (now with @Home) and Allison (now with Interval Research and hoping to move to Purple Moon with Brenda Laurel making games and appliances for girls). The photograph of Rich and Allison is silhouette only (sorry) but you can see his now short hair (left) and Allison's lovely long curly black hair. Both sounded homesick for New York City.
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I intend to approach Diba Corporation in Mountain View, just aquired by Sun Microsystems, to talk about their "information appliances" (simplified, special purpose devices: simple, inexpensive, and fun). I want to explore possibilities of designing telerelating technology appliances with them. Their white paper (http://www.diba.com/about/vision_white.html) describes 4 appliances they are currently developing:
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Sun Microsystems to Acquire Diba (excerpted from NYTimes 8/1/97 Seeking to broaden its reach in the consumer market, Sun Microsystems Inc. said Friday that it would acquire Diba Inc., a start-up company that is developing technology for small communications and computing devices called information appliances. Diba will become a new Sun business unit, the Consumer Technologies Group, within the company's microelectronics division. This group will work with major consumer-electronics companies, so-called OEMs, to provide technologies for building consumer products such as Internet-enabled TVs, set-top and satellite boxes, and smart phones, said Sun, which is based in Mountain View, Calif. Diba employs 79 people and is based in Menlo Park, Calif. "Information appliances represent an enormous opportunity for manufacturers who can deliver the right products at the right time," Scott McNealy, Sun's chairman, president and chief executive, said in a statement. "By leveraging the Java software platform and Java-enabled microprocessors with Diba's experience in assembling technology components into complete solutions, Sun hopes to enable OEMs to take advantage of the market's vast potential sooner rather than later." |
David Skole will be meeting again with Randy and Brian and me this Wednesday afternoon at 1:30. There is a possibility they will locate a VR sociologist in the CTL as part of our collaboration. The sociologist's name is Jason Goode. Feel free to stop by and meet him on Weds, and read the linked white paper on possible Skole-CTL collaborations at (http://commtechlab.msu.edu/humans/heeter/PortalReports/Skole.html)
SIGGRAPH was hectic and exciting, full of weird looking people with orange and green hair, geeks, and artists as well as suits, Hollywood types, and the military. I heard that 40,000 people attended.
Flying Colors, the travel agency that books for SIGGRAPH, scored again by supplying a $150/night hotel 1 hour in a shuttle from the convention center, in response to my request for a $70 room in walking distance from the conference. The shuttle bus driver was unusually sadistic -- he would wait only long enough to let someone standing at the bus stop get onto the shuttle, and then would hurry away. Each time he left someone behind who had been waiting at least 20 minutes and obviously was aware that he was doing so.
Pay attention to DirectX, Liquid Motion Pro and VRML -- all pretty much Windows only.
The most striking exhibit was in the Electronic Garden. An artist had violated expections for interface and safety, designing an experience where you roll under the monitor like a mechanic lying under a car working on the bottom of it. The monitor above you shakes and roars violently, showing things falling on you, water bubbling over your face, road construction and jack hammers. On another side of the room, you sit under a large cement block held up by a thick rope while you watch video of a large rope fraying and breaking. Differently physical and differently involving than sitting in front of a nonthreatening monitor...
Michael Miller has given me permission to link the CTL/VU to his observations from the show (http://commtechlab.msu.edu/humans/heeter/PortalReports/sigReport.html)
This report is organized chronologically, by the people and organizations I encountered. The key outcomes of the trip for me that transcend this chronology are threefold:
I will be developing an outline for the Telerelating book this week. Please send me references and suggestions as I begin the research process. I expect it to involve some experiments as well as learning what industry and academics are doing in the area.
I feel that I am starting to experience the professional benefits of being located out here. It is so much easier to say to people I meet "let's have lunch sometime this week or next" rather than writing to them from Lansing...
On Tuesday night I of this week I will go to the Bay Area SIGCHI (Computer Human Interactions) interest group meeting at Xerox Parc. On Friday night I will go to the SFSU Multimedia Extension reception downtown SF. I will also be meeting John Johnson (interning at Broderbund) for lunch and trying to connect with Affiliated Labels at Broderbund about marketing the Personal Communicator and perhaps funding development of Brian Winn's "My Signer and Me" project.
The Savannah School of Art and Design has 15 faculty slots to fill. Pericles was dressed as a Dean and was traveling with the Provost and President to interview 110 people and hire many of them. Savannah had a paid booth in the Trade Show at SIGGRAPH. Admissions people and Placement people were there to actively recruite students and to place them in internships and jobs. Pericles talked about the interesting perspectives his is gaining on administration and on the industry. In California, he hired Bill Klomcheck (spelling is probably wrong), a former MSU Art Department faculty member who went on to produce the Toy Story CD-ROM. To his surprise, his division was eliminated last month, despite the success of the CD. Savannah is interviewing many newly-unemployed professionals.
Dean Gomes is shown here at an Italian restaurant outside of the Beverely Hills Center. It was a pleasure to eat with PG when he was starving (he did a little of what we once thought was Brasilian deep breathing to be able to consume more food, but have since learned is idiosyncratic to him...) I believe he intends to apply when we post the full time tenure stream Digital Media Artists position at MSU.
It wouldn't be a VR show if I didn't run into Frank on the first day. Only now he has joined Michigan State! He was covering the Trade Show at whirlwind speed making great connections and deciding what to buy for the lab.
I proposed to Frank the idea of starting an "Industry Mentor Program" in which we get MSU alumni and other friendly, interesting professionals to agree to become an industry mentor for MSU digital media arts students. We would take their picture, put a few paragraphs on the web about what they do in their profession, include links to the corporate web site and to their email address. They would be available to answer questions about what life is like in the "real world."
Sandra Helsel, organizer of the VR and Web conferences for Meckler and columnist, agreed to be a part of the Industry Mentors program.
Galen Brandt, VR dancer and artist, will be giving talks at the Whole Health Conference in San Francisco in early November, and wants copies of Breast Cancer Lighthouse and other CTL health care CDs that might be available to include in her talks. Hopefully we will have lunch sometime this week while she is in the Bay area
Ben Delaney, former editor of CyberEdge Journal and one time speaker in East Lansing for TC 446, is now in private consulting, no longer publishing his newsletter.
Bob Voiers, MSU grad and former Director of the EDS Virtual Reality Center in Detroit, is now a private consultant in VR in the Detroit area. He is shown here in the red glow of the Electric Garden.
Linda Jacobson of SGI is being transferred to the Medical Imaging Branch of SGI. She will continue to run the VERGE Bay Area Virtual Reality Interest Group.
Kelly of SGI (Linda Jacobson's assistant) will be sending us an SGI videotape of Virtual Reality Applications.
Francis McDougal is now CEO of the Vivid Group which develops third person VR Mandala software and experiences (www.vividgroup.com.). This year at SIGGRAPH they introduced a new twist on Mandala in the form of a new game called "Big Head Racer" which is selling very well in Japan. They have a prototype installation which includes a wide chair, control joystick/triggers and a screen, with a camera built in above the screen. You drive by moving your head, and your live face appears on the game in several places.
In discussing telerelating with Francis, he suggested that I contact Craig Hubley for his work on multi-user project managment tools using facial expressions to give managers a quick perspective on how close to being on schedule multiple projects are on a particular day. And Graham Smith of Telebotics for his work using half mirrors and robotic camera movement to create eye contact.
He also suggested that I talk with Sue Wyshinsky to explore possibilities of having Logitech manufacture a serial port-based picture frame for my concept of an addressable, networked picture frame that sits on a friend's (real) desktop and automatically updates when I upload digital photos to that person. Sue is based in Sausalito, and I hope to meet with her soon. I need to talk with Lori and Paul about how to handle MSU's intellectual property rights but still interest a company in manufacturing and selling this product.
Dinner at an Indian restaurant with Frank Biocca, Pericles and Michael felt like we were going back home to East Lansing after SIGGRAPH... They offered helpful input on the Telerelating book, suggesting that I make my lab/office out here and the CTL/VU a showcase for telerelating technologies, and try to get companies to donate at least two of each of software/hardware solutions. They described what I want to do as "walking the chalk," meaning that I would be living what I was studying. Real life weird experiences (I need you to have these with me!) can provide opening scenerios for book chapters.
Cati LaPorte of Bell Labs is an artist working on a "shared spaces" project for Lucent Technologies. She was very interested in our work on telerelating, and wants to keep in touch.
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" In the Metaphorium we have created a Web arena for experimenting with visual environments and the new types of interaction they support. Here you can explore metaphorical environments which use real world analogies to facilitate unconventional Web communications. " |
I was intrigued to see the project, because it parallels some of what I have been thinking of. It is encouraging to see others thinking along these lines and actually implementing some software tools for telerelating. It is fortunate that she showed my drawings, because with a 56K connection, it took too long to download things, and I might have lost interest.
One of the three Bell Labs online Metaphoriums uses a beach metaphor. You can leave public messages for the world in general by using a skywriter airplane. You can leave personal, targetted messages by using the sand typewriter. Users scroll along the beach to find their messages.
In a different experience, you can leave a message in a bottle for others to find on desserted islands. "Messages are written with no assurance that they will ever be read, and if read, their authors may never see the responses to their own messages." The server decides who has access to what messages, and when.
The third experience involves navigating the New York Subway to see photographs of each stop. What is interesting about these metaphors is how compeltely they affect communication behaviors. There is an associated white paper titled "The Message is the Medium." ( http://proceedings.www6conf.org/HyperNews/get/PAPER119.html)
This was a big disappointment. I stopped by the PacBell booth to determine who to meet with about telerelating technology. Turns out they have just been acquired by SBC (Souther Bell Communications) and all of their innovation labs have just moved to Houston. The person I talked to said that Nynex would be aquiring Ameritech today or tomorrow...
Tim Childs, formerly with Virtual i-O (3D headsets) in Seattle and now co-founder with MSU alum Don Howe of the San Francisco-based new media design company, Curve, was demo-ing a VRML CD-ROM Curve had produced at the Microsoft Booth. Don has expressed interest in having interns from MSU. Tim and I plan to meet for lunch sometime in the next two weeks. I picked up two copies of the CD, and am mailing one to the CTL, to share with VU.
Eric Paulos and John Canny at UCBerkeley are working on "space browsers" to remotely occupy a physical space and interact with people there. They showed video of an internet-driven blimp with wireless audio and video display and reception boarding an elevator in a crowded mall... This is important to telerelating. They are working to create forms of "tele-mobots" to provide a way for individuals, no matter how far away, to participate in a rich and natural way.
We will be getting together soon to discuss possibilities for collaboration.(http://vive.cs.berkeley.edu/blimp) and (http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/`fbarr/behaviors.html)
Sony's 3D multiuser Theme Park for virtual community
Streaming 3D, Cosmos World Builder
Young people share art, visions, experiences and adventures through creative efforts and dialog in multimedia and telecommunications.
Arthur Zwern is CEO of General Reality, a San Jose-based company funded largely by military SBIR contracts but also supplying the entertainment industry with inexpensive, high quality 3D headsets, data gloves, and other VR-related technologies. (http://www.genreality.com) At the show, they exhibited a wireless data glove, controlling VRML over the Internet. Behind the scenes, he showed me ground-breaking software they are just starting that takes video sequences and quickly creates 3D texture-mapped models. He demo-ed modeling a small plastic dinosaur, and a large gothic house. I was shown the demo along with the technology director for Turner Broadcasting, who was extremely impressed and wanted to start using it immediately for virtual sets. It is the fastest, easiest and best modeler of real spaces that I have seen. It emerges from more complex modeling they are doing for the military. By reducing the number of nodes and loosening some of the parameters, they have a fast and easy surface modeler. There is a possibility for CTL involvement with design of the user interface for this software.
Flavia Duarte drove me through rush hour LA traffic like a native LA rush hour driver, to meet the 9 month old Amanda. Going to SIGGRAPH on her own for the afternoon was the first time she had left Amanda alone with Luiz since Amanda was born. Flavia apologized for not having baby pictures in her purse, but normally they are together and there is no need. The Duartes happen to live about 2 blocks from the Tanners, a strange coincidence in the sprawling megalopolis of LA. Luiz is looking forward to more challenges in his career and less day to day operational management. A move to the headquarters of Direct TV in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, may be in their future for January.
I flew back to San Jose next to NetPower President, David Ludvigson (www.netpower.com) through a lovely Pacific sunset. Out the plane window, there were firey-looking clouds above and below us.
NetPower develops customized web browsers and streaming video using NetPower VExtreme. They have a transparent white board that sounds very appealing for our own telerelating. He thinks there are opportunities with various NetPower technologies for distance learning with their technology. He gave me phone numbers for 2 of his employees to contact and set up a meeting to discuss my interest in Telerelating and their products for education. They are developing cable modem boxes.
Todd Hinders 800 801 0900 abd Skip Stritter , VP Technology , 800 801 0900
This report isn't really done yet, but it is time to start a new week.
