So today in class we were going over Ambient Displays, and although I’m not done with the reading, it seems like Keegan and I independently invented about the same thing several years ago. We asked each other what kind of place we wanted to live in, and came up with a house that would provide feedback through lighted walls, pressure-sensitive carpets woven with fiberoptic lights, an AI that would communicate through speakers installed throughout the house… that sort of thing.
But then I thought of a video that Shaun showed me the other week. In it you see someone using a portable screen to show a tabletop that had been converted into an environment shared with a room in Second Life. Pretty neat.
But it could be neater.
I couldn’t find a picture of it, but there was this neat table in either X-Men or X-2 that had little metal rods in it–you know, like the toy you used to make a relief of your face with–that changed with either motors moving underneath or with telekinetics. I thought that if you used this, you could allow people in the virtual room to manipulate a representation of the rods in the table that would then send a command to move the motors and thus the rods into new positions… which somebody walking by in the real world could then see and interact with by changing it themselves, ideally by hand, so the motors or whatever system one uses to keep the little rods in place would have to be robust. But the idea is, you wouldn’t need an electronic screen or ‘window’ to interact with virtuality. It would be right there, on the table.
I think this idea connects, by the nature of its origins, to this discussion we were having in Theories of Culture about how we incorporate science fiction both into the science we do and the folk understandings of science–including what we think of as valid information to create and pass on.
Ah, holism.
