Nano Avatars

(This blog post is re-published from an earlier blog of mine called “avatar puppetry” – the nonverbal internet. I’ll be phasing out that earlier blog, so I’m migrating a few of those earlier posts here before I trash it).

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The other day, Jeremy Owen Turner told me about NanoArt. Here’s a cool nano art piece by Yong Qing Fu, described in Chemistry World.

We started imagining a nano virtual world. Jeremy pontificates on avatars as works of art, avatars that can take on alternate forms, including nano art. I started thinking about what an avatar that consisted of a molecule might be like.

Some illustrations of the hemoglobin molecule look a bit like the flying spaghetti monster. Which reminds me, Cory Linden’s avatar in Second Life is based on the flying spaghetti monster.

We’ve seen avatars hanging out among virtual molecules…

but what about avatars that ARE molecules? Stephanie H. Chanteau and James M. Tour of Rice University created anthropomorphic molecules.

But I’m not so interested in how people make anthropomorphic molecules. I’m interested in avatars that live a molecule’s life. Check this out…

A scanning tunneling microscope (STM) is set up in a magnificent auditorium.

The microscope’s subject matter is projected onto a giant video screen. An audience of thousands watch as a team of five molecule-avatar controllers sit with computer mice and keyboards and mingle in a virtual world that is actually not virtual. In the middle of all the flamboyant machinery is a tiny nano-stage, a performance dance floor where five molecules show something rather strange and new

Since the STM can be used for atom manipulation as well as visioning (a consequence of the Observer Effect), the very technology for seeing the avatars is used to control them.

The audience collectively winces as the avatars try to, um, walk. Okay, maybe walking isn’t the right word. What exactly do these avatars do? They combine to form supermolecules. They jump and twitch. They split and reform. They blink and chirp. They fall off the edge of the stage and accidentally get stuck on carbon atoms. It may not be elegant. But hey it would be so cool to watch.

When the performance is done, the avatars take a bow…or something. The audience applauds with a standing ovation. A new genre is born. Constraints define creative boundaries and therefore creativity. And the limited repertoire of molecular interactions define the social vocabulary of these agents. Kind of reminds me of Flatland.

Avatars are embodiments of humans (or human intention) in virtual worlds.

“Seeing” a molecule is a problematic term, in the same sense that “seeing” a planet in a distant star system is a problematic term. It’s not “seeing” on a human scale. It’sprosthetic seeing. And so, just like a software-based virtual world, there must be arenderer.

Our most distant ancestor is a molecule that accidentally replicated and thus started the upward avalanche that is called Evolution. Dennett’s intentional stance can be applied on all levels of the biosphere. Molecular avatars represent the most basic and primitive expression of agentry. And unlike the constraints of C++, Havok, and OpenGL, in virtual world software programs, the constraints in this molecular world are real.

It may yield some insights about the fundamentals of interaction.

Just Because It’s Visual Doesn’t Mean It’s Better

I’ve been renting a lot of cars lately because my own car died. And so I get to see a lot of the interiors of American cars. Car design is generally more user-friendly than computer interfaces – for the simple reason that when you make a mistake on a computer interface and the computer crashes, you will not die.

As cars become increasingly computerized, the “body language” starts to get wonky, even in aspects that are purely mechanical.

In a car I recently rented, I was looking for the emergency brake. The body language of most of the cars I’ve used offers an emergency brake just to the right of my seat in the form of a lever that I pull up. Body language between human bodies is mostly unconscious. If a human-manufactured tool is designed well, its body langage is also mostly-unconscious: it is natural. Anyway…I could not find an emergency brake in the usual place in this particular car. So I looked in the next logical place: near the floor to the left of the foot pedals. There I saw the following THING:

I wanted to check to make sure it was the brake, so that I wouldn’t inadvertently pop open the hood or the cap of the gas tank. So I peered more closely at the symbol on this particular THING, and I asked myself the following question:

What the F?

Once I realized that this was indeed the emergency brake, I decided that a simple word would have sufficed.

In some cars, the “required action” is written on the brake:

Illiterate Icon Artists

I was reminded of an episode in one of the companies I was working for, where an “icon artist” was hired to build the visual symbols for several buttons on a computer interface. He had devised a series of icons that were meant to provide visual language counterparts to basic actions that we typically do on computer interfaces. He came up with novel and aesthetic symbols. But….UN-READABLE.

I suggested he just put the words on the icons, because the majority of computer users know English, and if they don’t know English, they could always open up a dictionary. Basically, this guy’s clever icons had no counterpart to the rest of the world. They were his own invention – they were UNDISCOVERABLE.

Moral of the story:

Designed body language should corresponds to “natural affordances”;  the expectations and readability of the natural world. If that is not possible, use historical conventions (by now there is plenty of reference material on visual symbols, and I would suspect that by now there are ways to check for the relative “universality” of certain symbols).

In both cases, whether using words or visuals, literacy is needed.

Put in another way:

It is impossible to invent a visual langage from scratch. Because the only one who can visually “read” it is the creator. If it does not commute, it is not language. This applies to visual icons as much as it does to words.

As technology becomes more and more computerized (like cars) we have less and less opportunity to take advantage of natural affordances. Eventually, it will be possible to set the emergency brake by touching a tiny red button, or by uttering a message into a microphone. Thankfully, emergency brakes are still very physical, and I get to FEEL the pressure of that brake as I push it in, or pop it off….

that is…if I can ever find the damn thing.

Voice as Puppeteer

(This blog post is re-published from an earlier blog of mine called “avatar puppetry” – the nonverbal internet. I’ll be phasing out that earlier blog, so I’m migrating a few of those earlier posts here before I trash it).

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According to Gestural Theory, verbal language emerged from the primal energy of the body, from physical and vocal gestures.

The human mind is at home in a world of abstract symbols – a virtual world separated from the gestural origins of those symbols. An evolution from the analog to the digital continues today with the flood of the internet over earth’s geocortex. Our thoughts are awash in the alphabet: a digital artifact that arose from a gestural past. It’s hard to imagine that the mind could have created the concepts of Self, God, Logic, and Math: belief structures so deep in our wiring – generated over millions of years of genetic, cultural, and neural evolution. I’m not even sure if I fully believe that these structures are non-eternal and human-fabricated. Since the Copernican Revolution yanked humans out from the center of the universe, it continues to progressively kick down the pedestals of hubris. But, being humans, we cannot stop this trajectory of virtuality, even as we become more aware of it as such.

I’ve observed something about the birth of online virtual worlds, and the foundational technologies involved. One of the earliest online virtual worlds was Onlive Traveler, which used realtime voice.

My colleague, Steve DiPaola invented some techniques for Traveler which cause the voice to animate the floating faces that served as avatars.

But as online virtual worlds started to proliferate, they incorporated the technology of chat rooms – textual conversations. One quirky side-effect of this was the collision of computergraphical humanoid 3D models with text-chat. These are strange bedfellows indeed – occupying vastly different cognitive dimensions.

Many of us worked our craft to make these bedfellows not so strange, such as the techniques that I invented with Chuck Clanton at There.com, called Avatar Centric Communication.

Later, voice was introduced to There.com. I invented a technique for There.com voice chat, and later re-implemented a variation for Second Life, for voice-triggered gesticulation.

Imagine the uncanny valley of hearing real voices coming from avatars with no associated animation. When I first witnessed this in a demo, the avatars came across as propped-up corpses with telephone speakers attached to their heads. Being so tuned-in to body language as I am, I got up on the gesticulation soap box and started a campaign to add voice-triggered animation. As an added visual aid, I created the sound wave animation that appears above avatar heads for both There and SL…

Gesticulation is the physical-visual counterpart to vocal energy – we gesticulate when we speak – moving our eyebrows, head, hands, etc. – and it’s almost entirely unconscious. Since humans are so verbally-oriented, and since we expect our bodies to produce natural body language to correspond to our spoken communications, we should expect the same of our avatars. This is the rationale for avatar gesticulation.

I think that a new form of puppeteering is on the horizon. It will use the voice. And it won’t just take sound signal amplitudes as input, as I did with voice-triggered gesticulation. It will parse the actual words and generate gestural emblems as well as gesticulations. And just as we will be able to layer filters onto our voices to mask our identities or role-play as certain characters, we will also be able to filter our body language to mimic the physical idiolects of Egyptians, Native Americans, Sicilians, four-year-old Chinese girls, and 90-year old Ethiopian men.

Digital-alphabetic-technological humanity reaches down to the gestural underbelly and invokes the primal energy of communication. It’s a reversal of the gesture-to-words vector of Gestural Theory.

And it’s the only choice we have for transmitting natural language over the geocortex, because we are sitting on top of a thousands-year-old heap of alphabetic evolution.

A Future Man Experiences Sex as a Female

I am a heterosexual male, happily married, and by most accounts, normal and healthy. This blog post is a what-if, extrapolating upon the idea of having a virtual body…..

THE MIND

Frank Zappa said that the dirtiest part of your body is your mind. It is hard to disagree with this. Your mind is capable of generating some serious filth (unless you never bathe, in which case, it is possible that parts of your body may actually be dirtier than your mind).

Obviously, the body has something to do with sex. But there is indeed a psychological, cognitive, emotional, imaginative dimension. It seems that these mental aspects of sex become more important as we get older. One obvious reason: aging. Entropy! Deteriorating, wrinkling, flabbifying, and weakening our bodies. But our aging minds are often as sharp as ever, and capable of higher dimensions of love and romance (and filth). It’s a shame that youth must be wasted on the young. I am referring to us in our earlier years when we had great bodies and great physical strength…but OH how immature we were.

Ray Kurzweil and other futurists suggest that virtual reality will be fully-integrated into our lives in the future. One could also assume that virtual sex will continue from its current occasional manifestations of phone sex, sexting, and avatar play in virtual worlds. There are already non-technological forms of virtual reality such as imaginative play, role-playing, etc. It’s only recently that technology has evolved enough to enhance the experience (or ruin it…depending on your vantage point).

Fantastic Sex at Age 100

The difference between mortality and immortality will become fuzzier in the future. Humans may achieve a certain kind of immortality by having their brains uploaded into a virtual reality when they are physically dead (or transformed into a cyborg, whichever comes first). This of course is based on the assumption that one can still experience a continuous life, having nothing left but a brain, and that this brain can be uploaded to some renewable medium…highly-debatable at this early juncture. But let’s roll with it anyway. I can imagine that a 100-year old future human might engage in sex with all the vigor and muscle tone associated with youth (think Jake Sully in Avatar who got his legs back as a Na’vi). Think of this youthful sex…but with the imagination, wisdom, and capacity for love that only a 100-year-old could possess.

I’m a software guy, not a hardware guy, so I can’t say much about nanobots and teledildonics and other technological enhancements of human physicality. But I can imagine that given the appropriate virtual reality enhancements, I could experience something akin to being a female. If nanobots are indeed a part of our future, they might be able to stimulate the brain chemistry and bodily sensation associated with female thoughts and feelings.

Is this a good thing? It is a bit creepy. But I say it is a good thing. Here’s why: human imagination has no limits. Human creativity knows no bounds. The desire to understand how others experience the world is based on empathy and natural social bonding. Technology can be used for this purpose.

An earlier blog post I wrote explores the question of how we might experience non-human embodiment, and body language, through future virtual reality technology. Within the realm of human society, there are still a lot of experiences and perspectives that can be shared. It might help us understand each other a bit better. Empathy could be technologically-enhanced; generated through simulation and virtuality.

And it might make for some awesome sex.

One can only imagine. (That’ll have to do for now).

Here’s a piece by Robert Weiss about the pros and cons of virtual sex.

Seven Hundred Puppet Strings

(This blog post is re-published from an earlier blog of mine called “avatar puppetry” – the nonverbal internet. I’ll be phasing out that earlier blog, so I’m migrating a few of those earlier posts here before I trash it).

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The human body has about seven hundred muscles. Some of them are in the digestive tract, and make their living by pushing food along from sphincter to sphincter. Yum! These muscles are part of the autonomic nervous system.

Other muscles are in charge of holding the head upright while walking. Others are in charge of furrowing the brow when a situation calls for worry. The majority of these muscles are controlled without conscious effort. Even when we do make a conscious movement (like waving a hand at Bonnie), the many arm muscles involved just do the right thing without our having to think about what each muscle is doing. The command region of the brain says, “wave at Bonnie”, and everything just happens like magic. Unless Bonnie scowls and looks the other way, in which case, the brow furrows, and is sometimes accompanied by grumbling vocalizations.

The avatar equivalent of unconscious muscle control is a pile of procedural software and animation scripts that are designed to “do the right thing” when the human avatar controller makes a high-level command, like <walk>, or <do_the_coy_shoulder_move>, or <wave_at, “Bonnie”>. Sometimes, an avatar controller might want to get a little more nuanced: <walk_like, “Alfred Hitchcock”>; <wave_wildly_at, “Bonnie”>. I have pontificated about the art of puppeteering avatars in the following two web sites:

www.Avatology.com
www.AvatarPuppeteering.com

Also this interview with me by Andrea Romeo discusses some of the ideas about avatar puppetry that he and I have been bantering around for about a year now.

The question of how much control to apply on your virtual self has been rolling around in my head ever since I started writing avatar code for There.com and Second Life. Avatar control code is like a complex marionette system, where every “muscle” of the avatar has a string attached to it. But instead of all strings having equal importance, these strings are arranged in a hierarchical structure.

The avatar controller may not necessarily want or need to have access to every muscle’s puppet string. The question is: which puppet strings do the avatar controller want to control at any given time, and…how?

I’ve been thinking about how to make a system that allows a user to shift up and down the hierarchy, in the same way that our brains shift focus among different motion regimes

MOTION-CAPTURE ALONE WILL NOT PROVIDE THE NECESSARY INPUTS FOR VIRTUAL BODY LANGUAGE.

The movements – communicative and otherwise – that our future avatars make in virtual spaces may be partially generated through live motion-capture, but in most cases, there will be substitutions, modifications, and deconstructions of direct motion capture. Brian Rotman sez:

“Motion capture technology, then, allows the communicational, instrumental, and affective traffic of the body in all its movements, openings, tensings, foldings, and rhythms into the orbit of “writing”.

–Becoming Beside Ourselves, page 47

Thus, body language will be alphabetized and textified for efficient traversal across the geocortex. This will give us the semantic knobs needed to puppeteer our virtual selves – at a distance. And to engage the semiotic process.

If I need my avatar to run up a hill to watch out for a hovercraft, or to walk into the next room to attend another business meeting, I don’t want to have to literally ambulate here in my tiny apartment to generate this movement in my avatar. I would be slamming myself against the walls and waking up the neighbors. The answer to generating the full repertoire of avatar behavior is hierarchical puppeteering. And on many levels. I may want my facial expressions, head movements, and hand movements to be captured while explaining something to my colleagues in remote places, but when I have to take a bio-break, or cough, or sneeze, I’ll not want that to be broadcast over the geocortex

And I expect the avatar code to do my virtual breathing for me.

And when my avatar eats ravioli, I will want its virtual digestive tract to just do its thing, and make a little avatar poop when it’s done digesting. These autonomic inner workings are best left to code. Everything else should have a string, and these strings should be clustered in many combinations for me to tug at many different semantic levels. I call this Hierarchical Puppetry.

Here’s a journal article I wrote called Hierarchical Puppetry.