A Vision of New Age with Alan Kay (1988)

[Applause]

well when I said the title as a little

bit concerned because in Kevin's massage

and channeling I was willing to say

something about massage therapy but I've never tried channeling I asked me what

do you do fellow I've never known quite the

cartoon a couple of weeks they had a

bunch of people vaguely dressed as

standing around and one was another this

is Alan mr. pure be it's a reality and

transcendent truth in order to make a buck probably the second bit world when

they just funds you well you know in a

short talk like this try and broad-brush

to my future and why ocean of G's of

representing things sending message all

there and why grand collision in the

midst of right now the way with the

medium is going to be at least as important as the way the medium

communicates with us and by that I mean that what's one of the things that is

happening the media is fairly passive

stuff and very soon for a lot of us now it's

already a very strong what we call the

media are going to stop that is going to

interact with us directly McLuhan who is

sort of the great early warning system for all of this stuff said that man is

the animal that learned to shape tools and then the tools shaped man and we're

very aware of the first part of ourselves as being tool shapers but

we're very unaware of how the tools come back and shape us now when we're looking

ahead into the future it's fairly easy to predict uninteresting things these

are the kinds of things that most marketing people predict there's all the

things that actually aren't going to be very important because they're

extracting from the present past the

most important thing about the future I think for most people are what are those things that aren't easily predictable

that are going to affect us very deeply for instance 10 years ago most people in

your industry did not think heavily about using computers because where they

were and where you were we're very far apart now computers are not being just

being used as word processors but people are doing their advertising on them most

of the special effects are being done using computers what's next well I think

part of it part of this grand collision is going to include an enormous

communications net that is just starting to be set up now very hard to see in the

United States but much easier to see if you go to Europe or Japan that

communications net is going to take us from a situation where we use computers

from the outside to a situation where in effect we will be living inside of one

vast computer and that sounds awful

but in fact we already live inside of a number of grids one of which you have

created we live inside a power grid now that we wouldn't know what to do with if

it were taken away we live inside of communications grid created by you

people and soon we're going to be living inside of an information and knowledge

grid such that wherever we go we're always going to be in contact with power

to make things happen communication to get people to do things

and ways of processing the information that comes around now if we take a look

at the normal ways of predicting the future we come up with some very funny

predictions one of my favorite ones is

can imagine somebody in 1903 saying you

know electric motors are a wonderful thing every home should have one that conjures

up visions to me of a vast electric motor up in the attic of a house with belts running down from it all over the

house to drive the different appliances because electric motors back then we're

big and if you wanted to share one you had to do it mechanically whereas today the electric motors in a

house probably number somewhere between 50 and 100 and none of them are visible

so a better prediction for where computers are going to go came from my

friend Gordon Bell who was the main designer for Digital Equipment Corporation for many years he said in 15

years computers are just going to be bumps and cables we won't see them well

they'll be part of this fabric that we're going to be living in another

interesting example is a survey the railroads did almost 75 years ago to

predict the future and they decided that in the future of the past 1950s 1980s or

so that there are three things that were abundantly clear one was that there

would be railroads still by that time that the railroads would run a lot

faster than they did back in 1918

and that rail transportation would always be less expensive than any other

transfer form of transportation including airplanes and in fact all

three of those predictions came true there are railroads around today they

run faster than they used to and railroad transportation is still less

expensive than airplane transportation the only thing they didn't think to ask

was whether they were still going to be in business by 1988 and the answer is

they almost aren't because in fact cost was not the driving thing that put the

the airplane ahead and the railroads

behind but value was and we're going to explore that a little bit now we are

just in the computer business have

witnessed a transition from sort of the first age of computing into the second

age of computing and I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the Third Age of computing which is going to come

about sort of around 1995 but just to

give you a feeling the first age of computing the computers existed in big

what we used to call the glass houses these are big rooms with glass walls and

people walking around in white coats and lots of air conditioning so that the

millions of instructions per second that you wanted to use from a computer were

existed centrally and the big revolution that just happened put all of those

millions of instructions per deck per second on a single person's desk and

seven years from now the millions of instructions for person will be in

people's pockets or here in California woven into our t-shirts

that change is going to be just as profound as the one we're just going

through in the 60s and 70s the user was told what to do by the people who owned

the computer when they could submit their jobs when they could pick them up in the revolution that we're just in now

the user does it when they want to huge change in the 90s the user is going to

delegate much of what they want to do to computer processes that will carry it

out for him in the 60s and 70s we were

unconnected the computers were big standalone things here in the 80s we're

getting connected up and the big issue in the 90s is going to be transparency

because you don't want to be able to see the connections you shouldn't have to

feel the telephone system now we we saw

that same thing happened with the telephone system as we went from the 50s to the 60s and to the 70s when we went

from two automatic dialing and especially automatic long-distance and

overseas calls where now we may have to dial a few more digits but we don't feel

that there's any network there whatsoever we don't have to go through

people most of the time we don't have to worry about how far the the distance is

the way we interacted with computers in the 60s and 70s was remember and type

remember in type big thick manuals with all of the different commands in them

the revolution now is see end point

Macintosh is sort of the most famous example of that and it's being well

imitated at this point in fact the joke in Silicon Valley right now is that the

the letters IBM stand for I'm building a Macintosh

[Applause] and from seeing point that we're

enjoying right now the metaphor in the 90s will be asked and tell so we will be

we will be shifting our way of dealing

with the machine we had mechanical printing in the 60s

and 70s in the 1980s we have laser printing high-resolution laser printing

in the 90s the late 90s will have no printing printing is one of the things

that is destined to go away and it will go away as soon as everybody has their

own little machine that is so portable

they can carry other things too in other words 0.5 herniation per block is not

portability but as soon as we have that

thing that can keep the information and knowledge alive structured and

manipulable it will immediately become more valuable than paper because paper

after wall is just a way of embalming knowledge in a way that so you can't do

anything but look at it afterwards it's interesting it's a full circle because

Socrates complained in one of the Platonic dialogues was he had a

complaint about writing that we often voice against television he said writing

forces you to follow an argument rather than participate in it so he thought

writing was incredibly alienating technology and in fact we're just about

ready to swing back into a form of

communication in which we can participate directly as well as simply

having to follow the points of others professional professional programmers

did all of the programming in the 60s and 70s in the era when now lots of the

programming is done by experienced users and the majority of the programming in

the 90s will be done end users that's gonna be an enormous

change and finally the point of this whole conference I think is that the

stuff we fooled around with in computers in the 60s and 70s were texts and

numbers now we're doing graphical icons

graphics and icons and in the 90s it's going to be all media the reason for

this is that all of the media that we've ever invented on earth that can be simulated to a very high degree of

precision on the computer and so for most practical purposes and particularly

for purposes that don't require great art most of that media is going to be

replaced sometimes to the detriment of our ability to appreciable is to think

about the three ways people choose to invent things

the first two are kind of mundane the first one is the brainstorming approach

which is essentially getting everything you know in a single room squishing it

together painting it and trying to sell it and you can invent things that way

lots of stuff in the broadcast industry

I understand is invented that way my favorite example is if you take all of

the obnoxious things in a 12 year olds room and concatenate them together you

wind up with a boombox ghettoblaster which you can sell lots of so you can

come up with products that way better way is the way they tell you in the MBA

books which is fine to need and fill it go out and see what people want and do

something that's kind of a goal-oriented approach and the problem with that is

when you go out and ask people they usually want something that's 10% faster 10% more features and 10% cheaper than

what they already have it's very very difficult this is one of the reasons why

the Japanese are beating our brains in because they don't do market surveys what they do instead is test marketing

of products that they've thought of them sells then they want to see how people

like them after they see them which is a much much better way of doing it because

it leads us to the third way of inventing thing things and that is come

up with something that creates a need only it can fill all the big hitters in

the twentieth century have been of that kind the Xerox machine the telephone

itself I have the minutes of an 1895

Western Union Telegraph Board meeting there's a fact there's a book of such

famous you know that the book called famous last words that my favorite one

from there is the the English explorer in Africa saying nonsense they couldn't

hit an elephant at this dis

and that's what's happened to a lot of corporations in this century Western

unions quote that was particularly memorable about when they were thinking about investing in the telephone was no

sane person would conduct business through such a contrivance the reason

they believe that is that the telegraph in 1895 produced a written record of the

transaction and they thought that was just the most fantastic way of doing business and they forgot that it was

inconvenient and the telephone just blew them out of the water by going back to

something more primitive and even in some sense less businesslike but much

more convenient much more natural to use now when I think about predicting the

future I have four rules of thumb that I

use when I think about it and the first one is very simple and direct and it

came about during the early days of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center which

was in Palo Alto was as far away from the corporate headquarters in

Connecticut as you could possibly be and still be on the continental US and for

some reason we had lots of executives who would come out and visit us in January in February we can never figure

in that out but when we could get these guys off the courts they would come into

the lab and look to see what we were

doing and pester us about the future they would say what's going to happen to

us what's the future going to do how can we defend about it and I finally got so

pissed off that I said to one of these guys look the best way to predict the

future is to invent it let's not worry about what the other guys are going to

do let's come up with a vision this is the century within which if you have a

vision the technologies are there to realize it if you don't break too many

of Newton's laws in the in the process and that took them aback is the idea of

being proactive about the future was something that never had occurred to

them they were caretakers thinking about defending against all these other people

that were going to be doing interesting things in the in the future so the best

way to predict it is to invent it the second way

to think about the futures to realize that it takes at least 10 years to get

something out of a research lab into commercial life and often it takes as

long as 20 so almost every technology that's going to affect you in the next

five to seven years is in somebody's laboratory right now and simply paying

attention to what people at Bell Labs and MIT and Carnegie Mellon and Stanford

and so forth are doing will give you a tremendous leap forward on thinking

about what's going to happen you have to sort of decide which ones are probably

going to make it and which ones aren't but it still gives you the panorama of

what's going to happen that's not the same as extrapolating from the present because those technologies aren't in the

present but it it's a way of selectively

extrapolating from by going to the places where the technology is sourced

third way is to ask whether something

that couldn't possibly be a factor in the future could be one if you simply

change the context and a couple of good

lines there McLuhan said I don't know

who discovered water but it wasn't a fish so and what he meant by that is if

you're embedded in a context or a particular way of thinking for all your life you're not even aware of it you

don't know that you have blinders on and simply finding a way of rotating the

context or getting into some other context can make an enormous difference

so for instance when a few years ago some of us predicted that desktop

publishing was going to be the next multi-billion dollar business

we got an enormous amount of flack from

the media because they said look at the way electronic publishing is being done

now as hundreds of people hunched over vt100 terminals with thick manuals and

only being able to get proofs every 30 minutes from this is ridiculous no

conceivable extrapolation that would

allow this technology to go on people's desks and the answer is yes that's right

no conceivable extrapolation but in fact a whole change of context

like going instead of doing things by remote control going to a user interface

that shows you what's going to happen as you make each change and throwing in

another few tricks let the Japanese invent cheap laser printing and all of a

sudden desktop publishing this last year in 87 was about a four and a half

billion dollar business in the US alone and that went from zero just a few years

before there was there are no revenues from desktop publishing in 1985 so what

I'm saying is that these changes happen explosively when something important

changes and you can go right back to something that looks completely intractable and just by changing the

point of view you can make it different just as what happened when we went from

Roman numerals to Arabic notation you

had to be a genius in 60 BC Rome to multiply two numbers together because

only geniuses could remember all the partial products that Roman numerals

generated now any of us today although according to USA Today only half of us

today can actually multiply that's still better than the Romans

you see that question and there's unbelievable apparently 51.5% of American teenagers

could not tell that 87% of 10 was less

than 10

that is pretty unbelievable but still changing our representations can help

and the motto there is point of view is worth ad IQ points you can simply find

the point of view in which week thinking can produce powerful results you're in

great shape and then finally I think the big driver for this idea of create

something that creates a need only it can fill comes from out of a story that

was current around Xerox when I first went there in the early 70s and this is

the story told in John destler's book des hour was a hey Lloyd vice-president

back in the days before it became Xerox and his book was called my years with

Xerox the billions nobody wanted and it's a great book to read about how

people almost successfully fight the future every time it's presented to them

reminds me of McLuhan's great line says innovation for the holders of

conventional wisdom is not novelty but annihilation and the story he tells is a

perfect example of that the 1956 they had come up with the first practical

plain paper copier which was called the 914 many of us in the room are old

enough to remember that machine and they didn't have enough money at Haloid to

develop factories and to market the machine so they took it down the road

from Rochester to IBM and set the IBM

here take this machine build factories go out and sell it we just wanted a

modest royalty and IBM did what it most

large companies do when they don't know what to do which is to go out and hire

some consultants and my friend Mike Hammer is a professor

at MIT has a great definition of consultants he says consultant is a

person who knows a hundred ways to make love but doesn't have a girlfriend my

favorite definition eye consultant jokes ism so what's the difference between a

Boy Scout Troop and the consulting firm the Boy Scout Troop has adult leadership

[Laughter] my favorite one is the consultant steals

from the smart and sells to the stupid

but anyway the consulting firm that IBM was using back then I think this is

their last venture with IBM was Arthur D little in Cambridge Mass and Arthur T

little did a bang-up study that lasted more than a year that came up with six

inches thick of paper conclusively proving there was no market for plain

paper copying and the proof rested on

two main bases the first was that there was no copy volume people weren't

copying right so that extrapolation didn't get

you anywhere it's people since people weren't copying and the other one was is that plain

paper copying it was about ten times as expensive as the a B dick mimeograph

process and so that the our thirty

little people concluded there was a cost problem and IBM after all of this

foot-dragging finally turned down the hey Lloyd people and this got them so

angry that they went out and raised the money for their first factory using

their life insurance for security and that was about a hundred and ninety billion dollars ago that all that

happened now that's a perfect example of

a number of things one of them is that IBM simply couldn't understand that this

thing was an amplifier for one of the most important human traits which is

communications we are communications junkies we don't know how to be Hermits

every time somebody has come along with the communications amplifier and the

airplane is one of them people have gone after it even though it has hosted more

on almost every case than what has been driven out by it so an amplifier for a

deep human trait is one of the ways of making something that creates a need

only it can fill and there have been many many of them in this century

personal computer was one of them people predicted against it the HP pocket

calculator was another favorite one that

HP marketing people said nobody will do it because of course nobody is

calculating and so forth and fortunately Bill Hewlett the Hewlett and Hewlett

Packard wanted one really so badly he could taste it in fact he gave the

Hewlett Packard engineers one of his shirts because he wanted that calculator

to be able to fit in that shirt pocket and I know some of the people who built

that calculator and there are stories of midnight tailoring sessions [Laughter]

and they definitely gave him a calculator that would fit in his shirt

pocket so this idea of making something

that amplifies a basic human trait is tremendously important your entire

industry is based on it that's what I call fantasy amplifier now I have to

tell people that fantasy is the California word for simulation because

fantasy extends beyond just the idea of

putting ourselves in human situations

that are safe and interesting and very

intriguing it also has to do with all the other things that we use santé

fantasy for science is all about fantasy because it's a way of creating models

and dealing with those models as though we're dealing with the real world we're

just being as fantastic as anybody else and when we think about human traits we

have to think about the way people have tried to extend themselves over the

centuries I think there are two main ways the first way is what I call the

amplifying tools way amplifying tool

being like a lever or a wheel or it could be non-physical it could be like

language or mathematics or a new number system all of these things are

manipulative they all have the ability

to manipulate something better a math sounds very abstract but in fact what

math is as a way of making the abstract concrete so it can be manipulated so the

M word for this first kind of human extension is manipulation then there's

another way that we have extended

ourselves over the centuries and that is what Lewis Mumford calls Gould cloning

Gould cloning or the sometimes calls at the mega machine the mega machine is a

machine in which all of its constituent parts are made up of people so every

time we form a society or a group or a business or a company or a country

we're making a mega machine it's an entity that has fewer goals than it has

participants or if it doesn't it doesn't last for long so one of the things that

we found is a way of extending ourselves is ways of convincing other people to

take on our goal structure so we can have hundreds and thousands millions all

devoted to a single end and the M word

for this kind of extension is called management and I want to explore both of

those and to give you a an example of

those I'd like to do two things if we can have the lights up for for just a

minute sort of two interesting

experiments to do these have to do with

understanding something about the human mind of how different the human mind

actually is from our common sense

versions of it so the first thing I what I'd like everybody to do is without

poking the person in front of you is if you can hold up your arm like this with

your thumb up and then put your other thumb about half as close to halfway in

between as you can and just compare the sizes of those two thumbs okay yeah one

smaller now when you when you look at it

question is how much smaller most people will say that the further one away is

about 80% the size or so right now on

your retina the image of that far away

thumb is exactly 1/2 the size of the one

that is close to you so when you hold it up like that it should look like a

pencil I'll try it with a couple of quarters also but doesn't look like a

pencil and with the court when you do with the quarters the further away quarter doesn't look like a dime and the

reason is that what you're perceiving when you look with your eyes is not what

your eyes see at all but in fact what you're perceiving is a dining

a McCree construction a constrained

hallucination of the input that you're

taking in from the world most people think that seeing is believing but in

fact it's believing is seeing what you believe is what you see and

different people on earth believe different things and then they see different things okay we take the lights

down so that's the first big idea about

human mentalities is that we're one step

removed from the objective world because we live in a construction this is one of

the reasons we love movies and so forth

because they're just a simpler extension of the fantasies that we already live in

now the other example I'm going to show you

if we can go to the first slide and look

at this slide and see if you can see what's wrong with this slide who sees

mouth is upside down and what else the eyes are upside down okay so let me give

you an English sentence that tells you exactly what has been done to this slide

what we've done is we've taken a picture of a young girl extracted her eyes and

mouth turned them upside down put them back in with an airbrush and then turned

the entire picture upside down so that's the way you would have this information explained to you in school by an English

sentence but now let's take a look and see what it looks like writes it up you

should be completely prepared for it so let's go to the next one

now I'm gonna I'm gonna let's go to the next one have to do the X I've

discovered nobody will listen to me when it's on the other way

now this is the best way I know of illustrating to a large audience how

different the different channels of information that that we take in and the

different parts of the brain that the information goes to actually are that in

fact not only is believing seeing but the we now can see that there are

different reactions first to an English sentence and then to a picture of

exactly the same thing and now we want to try and explain what's actually

fooling the visual system here the answer is known on this particular

effect physiologically that on the under right hand side of the brain where we do

face recognition there are two pieces of brain tissue about an inch apart and one

of them is an expert at face like things it's a thing that allows you to see

faces and Twilight in clouds that scares children with menacing shadows and so

forth and here it's reporting an upside-down face like thing about an

inch away is another piece of brain tissue that is an expert only on eyes

and mouth and what it's reporting is

that's a good-looking mouth and those are okay eyes and there's no real

dissonance between those two reports those pieces of brain tissue are two

little separate mentalities going about their business and simply reporting up

to a higher level and there's no conflict between them when we go to the

next thing though what's what's

happening is that the face recognizer is saying that's a right-side up face like

thing and the eyes and mouth guy is saying something is terribly wrong here

[Laughter]

you can imagine why nature might have

wanted you to be startled by seeing a face like this up close because it might mean you're going to die in the next 10

seconds

in fact this is not a learned response this is built into every mammal by our

genes so if you try this experiment out on a dog I suggest you pick a small one

okay so that's the second big idea about

human mentalities is that the mentalities aren't unitary so two big

ideas are that we basically live in a fantasy world a fantasy world so tenuous

that eight hours in an isolation tank will cause us to start hallucinating we

use that word as though it's something we aren't doing all the time in fact what we're doing in reality is

hallucinating but we have unless we're completely paranoid schizophrenic

we have evidence from the outside to try

and straighten up our hallucination as much as possible as we go through the

day deprive us of reality for eight hours and the brain goes off in its own

because the brain can't know from birth what the world is actually like there

isn't enough information in human DNA then the second idea is because it's

very complicated the mentalities actually broken up into something much

more like a patchwork quilt and there are mechanisms that very cleverly jump

us from one patch to another without seeing the seams most of the time until

I show a demonstration like this that actually exposes the seams and there are

many others so with those two ideas in a

way of thinking about human mentality is possible to design some very powerful

ways of communicating with computers we take all of the ideas that I mentioned

up to now let's take a look at two way

these two ways of extending the first of doing a manipulative tool and let's take

a look at the first videotape so this is

a 22-month year-old young girl two months shy of

her second birthday her mother is my accountant and both of her mother and

father work at home

each of her parents has a Macintosh so she has never lived in a world that

wasn't densely populated by Macintosh's when I found she was interested in

computers I gave her an Apple to which she

rejected

she wanted a Mac just like her folks remember technology is all that stuff

that wasn't around when you were born when we grew up we didn't think pencils

and watches and so forth were technology she doesn't think the Mac is technology

she thinks it's just material and in

fact we discovered that she vastly prefers personal computers with installed hard disks

so given all that it's not too surprising that because she's in a very

muscular manipulative stage of life it's not too surprising that she can hit

visible come in menu commands here in macpaint so when I saw this I was

intrigued by it but I wasn't till too amazed till I saw what happened next she

wants a clean sheet of paper so she goes to the clothes box on the window saves

her old drawing with a pop-up and goes

to the pulldown to get a new one and she's off and rolling again okay that's

enough of that and that user interface that we designed

at Xerox PARC was designed for children but not this not this young and we since

have taken many hours of video tape of her using the Mac and discovered she's

about 70% literate in the entire Macintosh user interface that means she

can start up any application including a complicated one like page maker make

some marks print out stuff save her work

get multiple windows and all of those things about 70% of the standard

repertoire on any any Mac application so

here's an example of point of view is worth ad IQ points by simply coming up

with a user interface that is much more directed directly connected to the human

psyche not only she but people of all

ages all of a sudden find themselves acting like computer experts where they

didn't think they could do it at all before simple change of representation

does that now let's look at the other side the management side and think about

what that might mean what does goal cloning mean in the context of a computer well it means

something like having an entity maybe

not totally intelligent I mean the simplest agent a person could have at

home I a puppy that's trained to go get the newspaper every morning and nine times

out of ten is able to do it and you feel good about it and because because you

don't expect the puppy to do relativistic physics you're quite happy

with the puppy just getting the newspaper so this idea of agents of

having computer processes that can help you in a number of ways especially when

there is an enormous number of information such as we have now in the

Library of Congress and such as we will have with the networking of the all of

the media over the next few years we're going to start to need agents so this

next tape I'm going to show is set

starts in 1988 with a hyper card information system that we did for ABC

TV for the Winter Olympics and they use this for all of their facts and

information in Calgary and then what we

do is we take a jump from 1988 to the 1992 Winter Olympics and see what this

fusion of media new user interface techniques and so forth might might

bring for it so this is a four year ahead look in the future we did it for

John Sculley the CEO of Apple and he's the one who narrates it so let's run that number two

actually we created this hyper card stack as a guide to the 1988 Winter

Olympics ABC television used to let their guests call up information about

the various events it begins with this animation here running in real-time on a

Macintosh - as soon as someone clicks the mouse it dissolves to a map of

Calgary if you click on any Olympic site

you see a list of the events scheduled for that site you can get more

information about any event by clicking on the name let's say Ski Jumping you

can get background information about that sport you can branch back to the

list of events or the main map and then

continue exploring here at the University of Calgary I see

the figure skating events are running now that's a sport my family's

interested in so I'd like to learn more about it the previous Winter Olympics

took place at Sarajevo in 1984 when Macintosh was barely a month old

imagine what Macintosh together with hypercard will allow us to

do in another four years by the time of the next Olympics

we will require powerful techniques to help us find and manipulate volumes of

images text music video and applications

we might by that time see the beginnings of intelligent agents or perhaps by then

there'll be only semi-intelligent Phil

today is March 3rd 1992 you have several

data service articles ready and you have men this is my agent I call him Phil

Phil open the 1992 Olympic stacked

the 1992 Winter Games are being held in ALP RV France let's get a closer look at

the town let's look at ski jumping again

we can play the video [Music]

we could learn more about the sport or go back to the map let's look at figure

skating I'd like to see who's on the USA

team and I'd like to see Debbie Thomas

I'm looking for a spin like that

[Music]

let's go back alan kay was explaining

why skaters go faster as they tuck their arms in he showed me a simulation to illustrate

the underlying principles let me call that up Phil add the physics draw

toolbox which tool box physics draw

let's see I'll need a counter we can

make the window translucent let's step

through the spin and count the frames

okay that's one complete rotation now

I'll draw a model representing a skater with her arms extended select the center

axis and rotate to rotate this speed

and here's an overhead view of the figure let's hold onto that earlier

Allen and I created a similar model where the skater has tucked her arms in

and appears to be spinning faster Phil displayed skater a model one let's

compare these two models

a small one the one with the shorter radius seems to run faster but let's

check that I'll set them both to run for three tenths of a second the small one

turns farther around the circle but let's see how much distance is actually

covered I'll straighten out the curb paths to measure them both paths are the

same length even though spin increases the distance

traveled is the same the luge event is about to begin

show it live or record it no I'm not interested in luge I don't understand

I like skating I don't understand don't

show luge don't record it I understand

I'd like to say this simulation Phil start a link Phil show the stack map

too far okay show recent link to this

background now anytime I'm on a skating

card I can link to my physics simulation by the time the Winter Olympics come to

a BIR V in 1992 CD media will be well

established each of us will be able to choose our own path through Worlds of

entertainment and information the tools like those that we've been seen will

allow us to integrate the full range of sound video and text information this

demo ends here John should I show the

pre-recorded speech or will you give it live [Music]

so the basic idea here is that the computer isn't a box it's actually a

little world they were just starting to learn how to enter the user interfaces

that we've done so far are a lot like experiments and radioactive chemistry

it's like there's three feet of lead between you and the good stuff we've got

a few little tongs and a few little television camera ways of seeing all

that all that stuff that's in there and we still worry about something awful

happening if we make a mistake but we think of the computer as a world then we

eventually start thinking about gee what would it be like to get into that world

instead of just probing at the world we want to get into it because of our

natural tendency to explore so here's a

here's one way that people are starting to do that now and I want to go to the

tape marked five skip the next couple go to the tape mark five and here's a

system being developed by one of my former colleagues who wasn't he was now

at NASA in which you can actually get inside the computer to a considerable

extent so roll that tape marked five so

he's wearing a helmet on his head and

the computer knows where he's looking

and he has a glove on his hand and you

can and you can see his glove in the

computer graphics display so what we're seeing there is what he's seeing

simultaneously was seeing him physically and he can interact with the things that

are in there as he puts his finger inside the underneath the box they're

sure to get a lift on the synthesizer that's the way

I walk over to the escalator

and stand on it as I would a real escalator

and it takes me up to the second floor [Music]

and then walk over to down escalator that takes me back to him

[Music] and using a special glove and speech

input and a person can interact with a synthesized environment

the system also recognizes gestures in this case if I have ten fingers it's

recognized as a gesture to fly through the database flying out the doors

[Music]

[Music]

[Music]

so how do you interact well you can interact by calling up menus that just

float in space a gesture brings up the

menu and then you can just point to the item that you want so the display here

is a virtual display the display is as large as your field of view as you can

swing your head around here they're

doing sort of spacestation kinds of things one of the things you can do with

this is to superimpose the help assist

help manual for the help manual for

electronic components you open the drawer it knows you're looking into the drawer and it can superimpose right over

the surface of the thing what you're supposed to do with it so put you into

one-to-one correspondence with the world

so let's let's stop that one now of

course the the graphics they are kind of crude this is a system that's just

starting to work and what we want to do is to go to a world that doesn't look

like green wireframe graphics we want a

world that is created dynamically in 3d

and most of you are familiar with the use of 3d graphics to do special effects

for television and occasionally movies but the problem with those graphics is

it takes sometimes hours to compute each frame so it's it doesn't have the

immediacy it's a little bit like playing a flute concerto and coming back two

hours later to hear what you sounded like doesn't have the same feeling but

there are a class of 3d graphics engines

that do everything in real time and these are the flight simulators I

actually worked on the very first 3d graphics project where 3d graphics was

invented and the guy who is the head of the department Dave Evans formed the

company called Evans & Sutherland they make the best flight simulators the world let's take a

look at one of those looks like so if we go to the the next tape mark six here's

a real pilot is flying this plane and

the job of this thing is wherever you go at Mach 2 or Mach 3 wherever you steer

the plane it instantly has to create the world that you would see if you're going that way so the database here is

hundreds and even thousands of miles and extent and the scene detail can be

rather large if you notice the individual leaves on the trees this is

just one part of a database that is hundreds and hundreds of miles in extent

you see some Harrier Jump Jets coming in these jump Jets are actually being flown

by real pilots and we're looking into this simulated world from a point of

view about a hundred feet above the ground the pilots are looking out their

windows at their own points of view simultaneously

[Music]

now we take a look at the same very same thing going on simultaneously from about

ten feet above the ground [Music]

you see the shadow being computed there's actually a real son

this would be actually easy if God hadn't put so many photons into the

universe so this takes okay so let's stop that

and buy here's the is the final point of

view okay so let's quit that tape

and the computing power of about eight

Cray supercomputers is used to do this and this would be very uninteresting and

interesting to show you this except that in the next five to seven years this

kind of graphics dynamic graphics is going to come to the desktop and it's

going to be a big surprise to everybody because it's been so long away because

of these immense computational problems but the the change in packaging that's

coming about the the cliche of being able to double the number of transistors

on a chip every year is finally catching up with problems like this and the an

enormous computing engine like this will be reduced down to the size of a couple

of cards in about five years and it will change the way we do computer graphics

everywhere including in broadcasting because it's going to be have the same

impact as desktop publishing no longer will you be going out to special effects

houses for most of your special effects you can actually manufacture them in

real time and even do things with them on the air now we use these in our

educational project that we're doing at Apple which is called the vivarium to

create a simulated world for simulated

animals around under their own power and under their own thought so these this is

a completely simulated world where we took the animal behavior patterns from

books written by ethologists made little animal mentalities put in the animal

bodies created a huge environment for them to go around in and we can take a

look at the the result of the kind of future you'll be able to deal in in the next five to seven years this next tape

there's actually some sound on this you might try the other channel

so this is a decorator crab and it has a

symbiotic relationship with some of several of the animals

you know it's in the simulation you can see the changing light patterns coming

from the surface above so this this is

not something that took hours to do this two minutes of tape I'm showing you took

exactly two minutes to compute in fact

it computes twice as many frames as no ordinary television does so this computes 60 full frame and the animals

here are not directly under our control they're sensing each other and reacting

appropriately but we didn't script them to do that what we did was we put in

general behavior patterns such as the animals have and we under around vast

aquarium like structure this is what is called self-motivated

animation which is going to be the next big thing in computer graphics which

amazingly has exactly this coloration I couldn't believe it when I first saw one

is it look so artificial fact steel

venomous spines from the cien enemies that they absorb without hurting

themselves to use on other animals

as they wander around the bottom now we get an idea as to the size of

this simulation here

[Music]

to wind up the our future really lies

and being able to rotate our contexts so

that even when things look impossible now we very few possible the next few

years way of God and that the computer

but we're going to actually get inside of it's going to be in a respondents

with our cellular telephone is starting

to be that our power in using it is

going to be in our ability to simulate and connect the transcendent is you have

to do that is the one between our ears providing it's loaded thank you very

much [Applause]