The choices we make today shape our world tomorrow.
Author mpescePosted on In the 1970s computers went from huge, expensive and difficult to cute, affordable and fun. Our world emerges from that transformation.
NYU professor Dr. Laine Nooney studies the culture of computing – its origins and how it became both “domestic”, as it entered the home, and “personal” – as it entered our lives.
Author mpescePosted on Over a billion seconds ago, sci-fi legend Vernor Vinge conceived of a “Technological Singularity”, when our machines outthink us. Should we worry?
Be sure to read Vernor’s 1993 paper, “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era” – it’s linked here.
9 December 1968.
Modern computing begins with a ‘Big Bang’ — visionary Douglas Engelbart’s demo of a system designed to make everyone smarter.
Read Vannevar Bush’s article “As We May Think” on the Atlantic Monthly’s website.
Read Douglas Engelbart’s mind-bending 1962 research proposal, “Augmenting Human Intellect”. Augmenting Human Intellect PDF
Here, in its full hundred-minute glory, is THE MOTHER OF ALL DEMOS:
Author mpescePosted on Like artificial intelligence, virtual reality is one of those twenty-year ‘overnight success’ stories. For longer than that, VR pioneer Tony Parisi has been probing the boundaries of computer graphics, interactivity and illusion to create the next generation of technologies that immerse us in experiences of new worlds.
Tony tells us why VR has finally come of age – and what’s coming next, as ‘augmented reality’ integrates ‘consensual hallucinations’ into our daily lives – influencing everything from entertainment to business to the design of our kitchens:
The show opens with a nod to Beyonce’s amazing performance at Coachella 2018 – which featured the largest livestream audience in history, nearly half a million viewers:
There’s a new technology – videogrammetry – that allows full performance capture in 3D. Videogrammetry was used to create a video by former Smashing Pumpkin’s frontman Billy Corigan, with amazing VR landscapes created by Tilt Brush virtuoso Danny Bitman (@DannyBittman on Twitter):
My own journey into VR began when a friend lent me his copy of issue #2 of MONDO 2000. The entire collection of MONDO 2000 is available on the Internet Archive, so here’s a link to the interview with Jaron Lanier that changed my life…
