Colin Ellard - You Are Here

I heart my webkinz

Ok, I'm coming out.  I've got a Webkinz.  His name is Koko.  He's a cuddly silverback gorilla.  But it's an academic interest.  No, really.  My fall into deep gorilla love began about two weeks ago, when a sharp young architect I know scolded me for failing to connect with the interests of my NetGen children.  I've watched my kids play in Webkinz world on our computer for a long time now, mostly just looking on from afar, being mildly annoyed at the sounds coming out of the arcade, but (the shame) not really paying much attention to the thing other than glancing over the rules of engagement to convince myself that it is safe for them.

Backing up-- Webkinz are fuzzy little stuffies with a twist -- with each critter comes a year's worth of access to a virtual world with real estate, an economy, social networks (albeit limited ones).  Kids (and, as it turns out, Very Big Kids) can log in, visit, chat with buddies, play games, do jobs to earn money, furnish their rooms, buy real estate, and much more.  

After my meeting with my architecture friend, I came home filled with new questions for my children, four of whom showed me their Webkinz worlds and explained things to me. The younger ones even handed over their passwords so that I could go in late at night and earn some Kinz dollars for them on the surprisingly engaging games.

Last week I celebrated my birthday and one of my children, with a smile big enough to swallow the whole room, handed me a bag full of gorilla.  And I have to tell you that Mr. Theoretician has been having a ball with him.  It's now gone slightly beyond just enjoying the games to feeling a slight bit of filial concern for my stuffie gorilla.  I don't like when I don't know where he is.  And when I hold him in my hand and my son holds one of his growing collection in his hand, we play together, surrendering ourselves to a goofy imaginary world that the virtual world connection makes more compelling in a way that I don't understand yet.  

It's a vastly different context to the kinds of cyber-real connections I've been writing about for the past few days, but it is definitely related.  Our ability to use technology to build virtual places and to make orderly connections between them and our real places is opening new possibilities for play as well as for more serious pursuits.  I'd love to tell you more, but Koko needs another banana.

Following the breath, virtually

I'm still waiting for my neural activator thingie from OCZ (I could really use it today --the coffee isn't working) and still thinking about novel ways of interacting with space via technology.  Here's one that I'd really like to try.  A breathing interface.  One floats through a beautiful virtual environment on movements guided by the breath.   It reminds me of a hard year I spent training in some Vipassana techniques I was trying to learn with a local Buddhist group.  There, the idea was more to use the breath as an instrument of calming though rather than as a navigational device.  However, the primal instruction was always to "follow the breath."  I wonder what kinds of interesting mental spaces we'll find as these new technologies make brain and machine connect in new ways.

I'm game for anything

I'm sure these brain-wave reading headsets will turn out to be a crude early version of what will be available in two or three years, but I'm nothing if not an early adopter,so I've just ordered one of the first of such devices to come to market.  The OCZ "neural impulse activator" -- a bit of a cheezy title for the product to be sure -- promises to allow me to find ways to manipulate my computer using my thoughts.  All this for a couple of hundred bucks -- how could I refuse?  I suspect that what's really happening here is a little self-training to control combinations of brow-furrowing and eye-popping, but cheap methods of measuring bio-signals have come along by leaps and bounds in recent years, so one never knows what little surprises might be in store for me.

Other than the joy of gaming, I've been thinking a lot about the role of a computer interface in mediating our connections with cyberspace.  In our lab, we think this is pretty important.  That's why, when we place people into virtual environments simulating big houses, we lug a big van load full of delicate gear from our lab space to a large gym -- so that rather than using a mouse or a joystick to move around a space, people can just walk naturally.

I don't know how far this OCZ device will take me -- I'm keeping my expectations on the low side -- but imagine being able to generate an immersive virtual environment and then being able to wander through it just by wanting to, but separating the intention from the action itself, or at least much of it.  Even if it begins to feel as though you're controlling your place with your thoughts, how is that going to affect your understanding of where you are?

And now back to my day job.  Wait!  This is my day job!

Mirrors

Here's something strange.  When you look into the mirror, how big is the image of your face?  Now, as you back away from the mirror, how does the size of the image change?  If you're like most people you'll say that the image is roughly the same size as your real face but as you back away, the image will become smaller.  Makes sense, right?  Except that's not what happens.  The image of your face will be exactly half the size of your actual face, no matter how far you are from the mirror.  Which means that as you back away from the mirror, the size of your face's image won't change.  This seems so counterintuitive that you may have to try it for yourself to believe it.  I had to.  I used a couple of small pieces of tape, at the top and bottom of my face image in the mirror.  As I walked away, the image of my face remained exactly within the tape marks.  And then, I had to demonstrate to every single one of my children, all of whom were awestruck except for one 10 year old who had such strong convictions about what would happen that she actually denied the evidence of her senses.

The physics behind this is not very complicated and is explained well here.  What's much more interesting is to reflect (sorry...) on the reason why what we see confounds our intuitions.  It's because what we see, when we look into the mirror, is not a reflection.  For all intents and purposes, we are acting as though we are seeing another person who looks just like us.  As we back away from real people, their images do get smaller, so we expect it of our reflected images as well.  No matter how hard we try, it seems, we just can't see the image as an image, rather than as the real thing.

Mirrors: the original virtual reality machines.

Vacation

It's been a very exciting week for me.  Not only did I catch the first glimpse of what will probably be the cover of my forthcoming book, but I had a chance to try my hand at making a video trailer for the book.  This was something entirely new for me.  I've been a reluctant feature in home movies, but I've never had to try to to project any kind of message using video images.  Like any beginner doing this, I learned all kinds of hard lessons about myself.  I talked too fast.  I dropped my volume at the end of sentences sometimes.  I don't swing my arms very much when I walk, which looks weird (my wife, at breakfast this morning, almost spewed her coffee in amusement at the idea that I hadn't really known this before this week).  What was most interesting, though, was having a chance to see myself from the outside.

Just after I earned my PhD, a dear friend of mine gave me a book:  The Personality Surgeon, by Colin Wilson.  I have no idea how she chose this particular book for me and didn't have a chance to ask her, but I've probably wondered more about this gift over the years than almost any other that I've ever received.  From my current perspective, it seems like a remarkable act of prescience.  The premise of the book is that a psychiatrist stumbles upon the idea that if we could only see ourselves as others see us, many personality problems would be solved.  This basic idea is spun off in classic Wilson style by the introduction of the idea that if we see ourselves as we're not, perhaps our personalities can be changed.

I'm not sure whether seeing my hulking presence on a screen will turn me into a new man (I suspect not), but Wilson's idea, and my own thoughts about embodiment, have a kind of resonance.  How much of what we are depends on having that third person point of view concealed from us?  And when we look on, as we do when we see video images of ourselves or avatars representing ourselves in virtual reality, how does that change who we are? 

Much of our understanding of ourselves must come from feedback from the outside world.  I know I've hurt your feelings when I see you cry.  I know I've pressed the elevator button when I see it light up.  Turning a mirror on ourselves using any number of different space-shifting technologies changes those feedback loops in all kinds of interesting ways.

I'm going on vacation for a few days -- going to take in some nature scenery at a campground.  I have an idea which book I'll take with me.

Wayfinding games

I had an email today from a clever young student asking me if I knew about the impending release of this parkour inspired game.  My answer, happily, was "yes" because I follow the Space and Culture blog (where I must once again applaud the noticeable uptick in great content on this site -- thoroughly recommended for those with an interest in, well space, culture, planning and design).  But it made me reflect again on how the times are full of playful interest in space both physical and virtual.  Not only will Mirror's Edge be a hit but so is Portal, a game in which it's possible to warp one's way through walls and floors by throwing down self-made openings between spaces, defying both Euclid and Newton.

The other side of the spatial divide, where we use technological aids like GPS to help us use real space in a playful way is also full of promise.  I like this idea, for example.  I suspect there is no end of clever ways to use this kind of gear both to help us reflect playfully and creatively on what space means to us, but perhaps also to get us off our bums and into the thick of the real stuff.  Time to buy a new computer.  And a new pair of running shoes.

Epiphanies

It was a bit less than two years ago that I found myself trudging down a narrow road beside the sea in Nova Scotia, with a thought trapped inside my head that was so large that I found it almost impossible to continue walking until I had somehow found a way to get it out into words.  Some part of me thought it might be important while another part feared it might be one of those strange mystical moments that makes perfect sense at the time, but later, in the sober light of morning, makes no sense at all and even seems a little silly.

I stopped by the side of the road and dug out my wallet to look for a scrap of paper to write down my idea.  My dog looked up with a half-cocked look of inquisition.  Here's what I wrote:

"Much of modern life's invention is designed to free our attention from the minutiae of existence. But what masquerades as liberation robs us of the exquisite particularity of life, in the service of a supposedly greater agenda."

I still remember the moment when I got home, soaking wet from rain and sea spray, having raced along a gravel beach short cut to get back to the house to etch the words into print before they faded away.  Those words seemed like a kind of turning point for me.  All of the months of isolation from big city life,all of the lonely walks along the shore, the silent mornings of meditation spent trying to understand how I had come to be and where I wanted to go next seemed to boil down to these few words.

I read them aloud to my dog.  I listened to each phrase, testing it for worth.  It all felt true.  One of the main constraints on how we think and act has to do with the attentional bottleneck that forces us to plod through life with one event after another vying for it's intimate moment with our consciousness.  Moment by moment, one thing wins out and captures our attention.  All else falls away and remains unnoticed.  The modern built environment, with its roadways brimming with signs, the carefully carpentered corners of office corridors, and the well-marked trails through urban parks collectively conspire to influence where, how and when we pay attention to things.  All of this is supposed to make life tractable, even easy for us.  Our minds are steered from one place, one goal, one object to another. 

How different we are when lost in a dense thicket of woods or wandering aimlessly along a beachy trail beside the ocean.  With no signs, no human designs, no engineered markers, there's a shift in how we see things which is at first subtle and then can become such a loud roar that it can almost bring one to one's knees, as it did to me that day.  Unseen worlds open up to our awareness.   We think and feel differently and, allowed to unfold the full extent of consciousness on our surroundings, we even become healthier.  Literally, our physiology changes.

I've spent much of today with a sharp student trying to figure out how we can understand some of this in the laboratory.  Like a Heisenberg phenomenon, it may be impossible to do this.  It may be that what we want to understand will shatter in our hands when we reach out to grab it. 

But maybe not.

In the land of the stereoblind, the one-eyed man is, well, stereoblind

I have to confess that I greet the news of a possible expansion of 3-d experiences in cinemas with a bit of chagrine.  The reason is -- deep personal confession here -- that like about 10% of the population, I'm stereoblind.  This isn't the same thing at all as not having vision in one eye.  Both eyes work, but they don't work well together.  Like Rembrandt, I can't fuse images from the two eyes together to get that pop-out of the third dimension.  I'll never "get" a Magic Eye picture.  I'll never really be able to enjoy these 3-d movies and in fact having to wear those glasses may even detract from my experiences. 

What's interesting about this, though, is that I  had no idea of my deficit until I had some vision testing at the age of 18 as part of an interview for a summer job at a glass factory (!!).  The company nurse, fearing that I wouldn't be able to detect huge slabs of sharp-edged window panes coming at me, wouldn't recommend me for a job.  When I tell people that I'm stereoblind, they often ask me why I don't bump into things or how I cope with a world that must look just like a picture.   But the truth is that we have lots of other sources of 3d information, especially different kinds of visual motion, so that I don't at all feel as though I'm trapped in Flatland (though I can have no idea of how the world might look different to me if I did have stereovision).

I have to tell you, though, that for a guy who works in a lab with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment designed to generate painstakingly realistic stereoscopic simulations of the world, there are days when I have to laugh a little at my own predicament.  Perhaps it even has something to do with my own penchant for getting lost.  But if so, the prevalence of stereoblindness must be much higher than we think because most of us spend some part of every day not really knowing where we are.

E-heckling

This morning I had cause to run up the aisles of the big lecture hall where I was teaching (admittedly to a smallish crowd of bleary-eyed souls who had braved the -22C temperatures and the first day of daylight savings to listen to me).  It's something I don't do enough.  In part I say that because it always makes me think of Phil Donahue, which itself brings back fond memories of high school days spent playing hookie, lying on the couch, watching the tube.  But a bigger reason is because, following the lead of a great tip given to me by my dean, I like to watch the reactions of students sitting behind laptops.  When it comes to minimizing windows, they have pretty wicked trigger fingers, sleep deprived or not.  It's something that professors have had to learn to live with (except for one lecturer of legend who climbs on a chair to unplug the wifi portal in his classroom before the beginning of each class).  I don't think it bothers us all that much.

This context made reading some of the accounts of the shenanigans at the SXSW conference all the more interesting for me tonight.  Mark Zuckerberg, wunderkind CEO of Facebook was scheduled to deliver a keynote, but the uber-technophile audience staged a kind of e-revolt, beginning with a mad bout of Twittering but then ending up the old-fashioned way with hoots and shouts.  They weren't happy with the questions that were being asked, and eventually took control of proceedings.  It seems clear that what in a conventional format might have amounted to nothing more than a dull murmur of discontent and perhaps a bit of an exodus to the coffee urn in the lobby was turned into something much more positive and productive by the priming presence of an extra layer or five of electronic communication in the room.

In another event, Meebo users expressed their boredom forcefully, electronically, and with all the maturity and wit of a gang of high school students.  The back channel chatter becomes the event, with multiple threads connecting the content of the presentation to the moods, expressions, and goofiness of the conference goers until the whole shebang becomes something like an act of swarm behaviour.  Not that this is a bad thing.  Swarm intelligence can generate some great stuff.  Look at termite mounds.  Look at great migrating flocks of Canada geese.

The potential for turning public speaking events like conference presentations, keynotes, and even humble little university lectures into something entirely different is something that interests me a lot.  It's as if we turn a physical location into the convergence zone of some kind of dynamic collaborative adventure.  I'm not even sure I understand the role of the speaker in such a setting.   The audience is the facilitator.  The "speaker" is just a kind of catalyst in an enzymatic reaction brought about by the occasion -- a space, a time, and a context mocked up by whomever happens to be in the audience and what they're thinking about on that particular day.

It would be really interesting to see more of this kind of interchange in a classroom setting.  At present, we can use things called "clickers" which can allow us to elicit simple push-button responses from an audience.  Imagine if they could give us much more than yes's and no's, abc's and 123's.  At times, the whole thing would dissolve into chaos.  But sometimes I bet things entirely new and unexpected could emerge.

One of the most interesting parts of all of this for me is that in a way it seems as though a new kind of cognition, a kind of freely floating unfocused attention would be needed to follow and understand proceedings like these. I wonder if we have it in us.

A virtual walk in the park

I've just been invited to speak at a local conference on "Health and the Built Environment."  This excites me but also scares me to death both because it will be my first chance to speak to the very broad implications of my work in psychology as I've only recently begun to understand them, but also because this is a conference combining academics, NGOs and politicians.  The intent of this conference, as I understand it, is not just for us to float lofty ideas at one another like great shining baubles in air but also to get some things started that will make a difference.

Happily, in addition to my usual rant about the psychological origins of our current state, I'm going to have some nice data to describe.  One of my students, Deltcho Valtchanov, has been working on a project in which he makes people feel all stressed and anxious (we're allowed to do that in psychology labs) and then gives them an opportunity to calm themselves down by wandering through a stunningly beautiful virtual environment filled with trees, ferns, meadows, waterfalls, and lovely little ponds.  We've been amazed at the intensity with which some of our participants have been able to immerse themselves in this environment (quite literally sometimes - they often ask permission to plunge into the healing waters for a swim, and sometimes seem confused about what might happen to them if they do so -- did they bring a change of clothes?).  We've also been very pleased by the extent to which it is possible to duplicate the benefits of a real walk in real woods with our simulations.  This is a tremendous advance for us.  It gives us a tool to begin to understand the sources of the healing benefits of nature so that perhaps we can focus and amplify them.  In cities, there isn't much greenspace to play around with.  It'd be a marvellous thing to know how to get it right.