I dreamed last night about having regions of space copied onto other spaces. The same way I can include an “iframe” in a webpage to have a window onto any another webpage, in my dream there were these community spaces that existed simultaneously in multiple locations around the world.

When I woke up I started looking for technology to implement this, specifically 3D hologram technology. I found this video of Cisco doing an on-stage 3D telepresence demo:

I was thrown off when the physically present Cisco CEO says he can see the hologrammed guy in front of him. He can’t! He’s pretending that he sees the other guy standing next to him.

This is a video showing how the illusion works:

I had to watch a few times to figure it out.

Hint: the “foil” is a one-way mirror, which means it’s both reflective and transparent depending on where the light is coming from. It’s like looking through a glass window at night in pitch black: you see your reflection. But if there’s light coming from outside then you see the outside.

This “hologram” is the same technology that’s used in Disney’s Haunted Mansion ride during the Ballroom scene.

Patrons ride across the track, looking down at the ballroom.

There’s a huge one-way mirror between the patrons and the ballroom. The ghosts are underneath the ride track. The patrons see the faint reflection of the ghosts, making them look transparent. By turning the lights on and off, the ghosts seem to appear and disappear.

The hitchhiking ghosts use a similar effect.

Patrons face a mirror (actually a one-way mirror) and see their reflection. The ghost is behind the mirror, moving on a track in sync with the ride.

Mirrors are folds in space. I’m excited for emerging technologies that can fold and rearrange space into “hyperspace” — the way that it is done on the web, with doors and windows leading you to new spaces unconstrained by physical geometry.

I’m reminded of the psychogeographer Constant Nieuwenhuys who would cut up and collage together maps of European cities to envision his utopic city, New Babylon.

I have in mind several projects exploring this theme:

1. Using mirrors to reverse gravity (interactive sculpture in progress)
2. Treadmill surrounded by projections, allowing you to physically walk through Google Streetview
3. Grids of cameras mounted to the ceiling of an indoor space, creating a live video “Google Map”

Bryan Newbold and I made a game for the 2010 Global Game Jam, a worldwide, 48-hour game making marathon.

The theme for the 2010 jam was deception. We decided to make a 3D game where the space was constantly changing due to datamoshing.

Read the whole story here.

Open source framework for selling music online

The (my?) problem with the online music marketplace is that almost all transactions go through a few large players (iTunes or Amazon, for example).

This state of affairs–the premise that large, centralized resources were needed to distribute music–is a legacy of the pre-Internet era.

I propose an open source project that makes it super simple to set up a self-hosted online music store.

There’s no reason this needs to be hard. Musician loads the software onto her website, opens up the admin UI. Uploads mp3s, graphics, etc. Sets prices. Save Changes and presto music store.

Now when her fans go to her website, they buy music directly from her. None of the money gets sucked into the vortex.

Well, there are still a few costs but there’s reason to believe these are trending toward minimal:

- She has to pay for bandwidth and web hosting.

- Out of convenience, she opts to use a third-party credit card processor. There is, after all, a plugin framework and a community of developers who make add-ons that let your music store integrate with other services.

Oh, and our musician is multi-media-talented, she also sells videos and other digits.

I want lightweight, low-power, cheap (!), thin screens that I can use to browse the internet. I think a good size would be about the size of a small, paperback math book. I should be able to use it in my hands while lying on my back. It should be as durable as a cordless telephone.

Extras:

A fingerprint scanner would allow users to load up their previous session or authenticate. In case personal RFIDs don’t catch on.

I don’t think a keyboard would be right. Instead perhaps you use a thumb to slide through a prefix tree where branches are bigger when they’re used more often (like autocomplete).

Additional accessories hook up various things in your house to your wifi so you can control/access them with the screen (music, lights, cameras, whatever).

Magnets so it sticks on the fridge. Maybe it could somehow draw power from the fridge also.

[Inspired by The Computer of the 21st Century (1991).]

We can only hope that the Obama administration will resuscitate long-term, nationally funded research in science and technology. I recently came across this collection of reports, Computing Research Initiatives for the 21st century, which will apparently be reviewed by Obama’s science policy staff [via Scott Aaronson's blog].

The common thread is clearly distributed systems: whether sensor networks, parallel processing, or power transmission.

Incidentally, I predict that the need for distributed computation will increase the importance of functional programming techniques, or at least share-nothing architectures.