Holograms - Projecting Soon

I think Holograms are the next big thing.

This example of a hologram on an an iPhone App is pretty amazing as an early version of what is to come.

Just wait for hologram phone calls and meetings and integration with everything social media.

I see things like avatars--graphical representations of users-- as a precursor to actual 3-D projected images of ourselves that will be sitting in the classroom, going to the office, and even interacting socially like going on dates with our favorite other.

This is going to make things like Skype, Facetime, and Telepresence just baby steps in our ability to project ourselves across space and time and "be there" in ever more realistic ways participating and interacting with others.

As part of a training class a number of year ago already, I had the opportunity to see a spatial hologram that was very cool. So holograms are not limited to only people but entire environments that can be virtualized and this gives us the opportunity to test new ways of behaving and model and simulate new worlds.

This iPhone App is just a teaser of what is coming.

Holograms - Projecting Soon

Singular Future Or Nightmare Scenario

Time Magazine (10 February 2011) has an interesting article called “2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal.”

No, this is not about the typical quest of man for immortality, but rather it is a deep dive on The Singularity—Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge’s concept of technological change becoming so rapid (through exponential growth) that there will be a “rupture in the fabric of human history.”

In astrophysics, the term Singularity refers to the point in the space-time continuum (such as in a black hole) where the normal rules of nature (i.e. physics) do not apply.

In terms of technology, the notion of The Singularity is that computing gets faster and faster (related to Moore’s Law) until finally the radical change brought about by the development of “superintelligent” computers make it incredibly difficult for us to even predict the future.

Yet predictions are exactly what these futurists attempt to provide us for the post-Singularity era, and while science fiction for now, these are viewed as serious contenders for human-kinds’ future.

Here are some possibilities posited:

- Human-Machine Blending—“maybe we’ll merge with them [the computers] to become super-intelligent cyborgs.”

- Physical Life Extension (or Even Immortality!)—“maybe the artificial intelligences will help us treat the effects of old-age and prolong our life span indefinitely.”

- Living In Virtual Reality—“maybe we’ll scan our consciousnesses into computers and live inside them as software, forever.”

- Man-Machine At War—“maybe the computers will turn on humanity and annihilate us.”

Whether you can believe these specific predictions or not, Kurzweilians all seem to adhere to a common belief “in the power of technology to shape history.”

Certainly technology enables us to do amazing things, which we would never have seriously dreamed of not so very long ago—I am still trying to get my mind around a computer, smartphones, the Internet, and more.

Yet, I worry too about the overreliance on technology and the overlooking of the hand of G-d guiding our journey towards a purpose with technology being the means and not the ends.

Often I marvel at both the pace of technological change and the capabilities that these advancements bring us. But at the same time, I think of these great technological leaps for mankind the same way as I do a Beethoven symphony or Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece—that it is inspired by a higher source, it is a gift from above.

So in this light, as I think about the four Kurzweilian predictions, I must essentially discount them all, since I do not believe that in G-d’s love for us that his intent is to turn us into either cyborgs, aimless immortals, virtual human beings, or to be utterly annihilated by a race of machines.

Nevertheless, these predictions are still valuable, because they do provide a “north-star” for us to guide us to constructive improvements in the human condition through robotics, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, virtual reality as well as warnings of the potential destructive power of technology unconstrained.

One thing is certain about Kurzweil and the other futurists, they have my admiration for taking a strategic, big picture view on where we’re headed and making us think in new and unconventional ways.

Singular Future Or Nightmare Scenario

"Your Brain On Google"

 
Amazing video called "Digital Nation."

Some great points from the interviewees at MIT, Stanford, and more:

- "We are immersed in technology all the time."

- "Technology is like oxygen."

- "Well over half our lives exist in the digital world now."

- "We are constantly multitasking and distracted."

- "The world has sped up."

- "We just want to push the pause button."

- "The Internet has changed from things one does to how one lives."

- "We are changing what it means to be human."

- "We are rewriting the rules of interaction for human beings."

- "Can we solve the alienation that technology has created with more technology?

- "Does increasing use of technology have diminishing returns at some points?"

These questions and thoughts really resonate with me.

Looking back in my own life, things seemed so much simpler 10, 20, and 30 years ago.

Then we were less connected online and maybe a lot stupider intellectually, but more connected in real ways--doing real things with family, friends, and community.

Life is certainly faster now, but are we happier as human beings?

Are we losing ourselves and becoming part of the vast interconnected cyberspace almost as half-humans and half-machines ourselves?

"Your Brain On Google"

The Humanization of Computers

The Wall Street Journal recently reviewed (Sept. 10, 2010) “The Man Who Lied to His Laptop,” by Clifford Nass.

The book examines human-computer interactions in order to “teach us about human relationships.”

The reviewer, David Robinson, sums up with a question about computers (and relationships): “do we really think it’s just a machine?”

Answer: “A new field of research says no. The CASA paradigm-short for ‘computers as social actors’—takes its starting point the observation that although we deny that we interact with a computer as we would with a human being, many of us actually do.”

The book review sums up human-computer interaction, as follows:

“Our brains can't fundamentally distinguish between interacting with people and interacting with devices. We will ‘protect’ a computer's feelings, feel flattered by a brown-nosing piece of software, and even do favors for technology that has been "nice" to us. All without even realizing it.”

Some interesting examples of how we treat computers like people:

- Having a heart for your computer: People in studies giving feedback on computer software have shown themselves to “be afraid to offend the machine” if they are using their own computers for the evaluation rather than a separate ‘evaluation computer.’

- Sexualizing your computer: People sexualize computer voices lauding a male sounding tutor voice as better at teaching ‘technical subjects,’ and a female sounding voice as better at teaching ‘love and relationship’ material.

- A little empathy from your computer goes a long way: People are more forthcoming in typing messages about their own mistakes “if the computer first ‘apologizes’ for crashing so often.”

It seems to me that attributing human attributes (feelings, sexuality, and camaraderie) to an inanimate object like a computer is a social ill that we should all be concerned about.

Sure, we all spend a lot of time going back and forth between our physical realities, virtual realities, and now augmented realities, but in the process we seem to be losing perspective of what is real and what is not.

Perhaps to too many people, their computers have become their best friends, closest allies, and likely the biggest time hog of everything they do. They are:

- Doing their work at arms length from computers rather than seriously working together with other people to solve large and complex problems facing us all.

- Interacting virtually on social networks rather than with friends in real life, and similarly gaming online rather than meeting at the ballpark for some swings at the bat.

- Blogging and tweeting their thoughts and feelings on their keyboards and screens, rather than with loved ones who care and really want to share.

We have taken shelter behind our computers and to some extent are in love with our computers—both of these are hugely problematic. Computers are tools and not hideaways or surrogate lovers!

Of course, the risk of treating computers as people is that we in turn treat people as inanimate computers—or maybe we already have?

This is a dangerous game of mistaken reality we are playing.

[Photo Source: http://www.wilsoninfo.com/computerclipart.shtml]

The Humanization of Computers

Reality Trumps Virtuality

What a crazy news story (reported through South Korean news media)—and true. This South Korean couple, addicted to a video game, ends up starving their 3-month old child to death.

The video game that the couple was addicted to happened to be about raising a virtual child—of all things.

The couple—a 41 year old father and 25 year old mother were both unemployed—and fed their child only once a day, while they spent 4-6 hours a day playing games at the Internet café.

When the child died, the couple was playing video games all night long.

This is an unbelievably tragic story that defies logic, where troubled parents caught in the web of the virtual world, abrogate their responsibilities to themselves and their child in the real world.

So are these two parents just a bunch of whack jobs…an oddity that we shake our heads at disapproving or is this something more?

While the American Medical Association has so far declined to include Internet Addiction Disorder in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual, pending further study, we know that we as a society have become in a sense obsessed (although maybe not yet clinically) with everything online—getting information, communicating, networking, shopping, and gaming—and for the most part, we love it!

Some programs like Second Life even go so far as to create virtual worlds where people interact with each other through avatars. They meet, socialize, and participate in activities in a world of only composed of 3-D models—where reality is what programmers make of it—in a coding sense.

Social networks, like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and numerous specialized online communities—for all sorts of shared interests from books to music, dating to investing, and philanthropy to travel—are available to chose from and are widely popular destinations.

It seems truly that many people have become more comfortable living in the IP address on the World Wide Web than at their street address within their true day-to-day realities. Their chosen avatars, pseudo-names, and online profiles often far more exciting then the persons, occupations, and lifestyle they physically inhabit. The virtual world has become an escape for many, and a place many are all too happy to engross themselves in 2, 4, 6 or more hours a day.

What happens to the occupants of our real world, when we choose to retreat to virtual worlds?

Well at the extreme is the fate of the 3-month old baby who died of neglect and hunger. More common are spouses and children, and others—family, friends and associates—who are increasingly physically and emotionally distant.

Our connection to people in real life—around us—are traded in for long-distance, abstract, and virtual relationships with people we often hardly know on the Internet.

We routinely trade emails, instant messages, tweets, and blog comments, with people who we hardly know—often do not even know people’s real names and cannot pronounce their presumed cities of residence.

While the Internet is in many ways miraculous in its ability to bring us together—across time and space, in other ways it can potentially substitute the surreal for the real, the meaningless for the meaningful, and empty chatter with people we barely know and never really will for true giving with people we absolutely care about.

At the extreme, we cannot let real children die because we are hiding in cyberspace feeding our virtual addiction. In more common terms, we must not trade our most important real world relationships and activities for those that are phantom experiences in cyberspace.

It is great to extend our reach with the Internet, but it is not okay to do so at the expense of those that are truly at arms reach. We must find a balance between the two worlds we now live in—real and virtual!

While there is every reason to love the Internet—communication, connection, and convenience—it has also become a retreat from people’s very real world problems.

When Online, people are not hungry, not sick, not unemployed, not lonely, not judged—instead they are in a sense one with everybody else in a common pool of bite and bytes—where no one knows them or their situations. Online, they are anonymous, no ones and at the same time anyone they want to be.

The Internet is a great place to be—to escape to—sort of the like the Holodeck on the Star Trek. Choose your program—and you can be in any time and at any place—interacting with anybody. It is not real, but it feels real when you are there.

I remember when I used to watch Star Trek and be fascinated by the experiences the characters had when they went into the Holodeck’s alternate reality. At the same time (and I think this was the intention of the show), after awhile I found myself wanting the characters to get back to reality and deal with the issues that they truly had to face. Somehow watching them escape “too much” wasn’t very satisfying.

To me, real relationships, even with and maybe because of their inherent challenges and tests, is more satisfying than virtuality, because of the deeper impact of the actions and interactions. Cyberspace is a great augmented reality, but it cannot replace reality.

In the end, being online is a nice place to visit (and there are a lot of benefits to being there), but I wouldn’t want to live there all the time and miss the real fun.

Reality Trumps Virtuality

Seeing things Differently with Augmented Reality

One of the most exciting emerging technologies out there is Augmented Reality (AR). While the term has been around since approximately 1990, the technology is only really beginning to take off now for consumer uses.

In augmented reality, you layer computer-generated information over real world physical environment. This computer generated imagery is seen through special eye wear such as contacts, glasses, monocles, or perhaps even projected as a 3-D image display in front off you.

With the overlay of computer information, important context can be added to everyday content that you are sensing. This takes place when names and other information are layered over people, places, and things to give them meaning and greater value to us.

Augmented reality is really a form of mashups, where information is combined (i.e. content aggregration) from multiple sources to create a higher order of information with enhanced end-user value.

In AR, multiple layers of information can be available and users can switch between them easily at the press of a button, swipe of a screen, or even a verbal command.

Fast Company, November 2009, provides some modern day examples of how this AR technology is being used:

Yelp’s iPhone App—“Let’s viewers point there phone down a street and get Yelp star ratings for merchants.”

Trulia for Android—“The real-estate search site user Layar’s Reality Browser to overlay listings on top of a Google phone’s camera view. Scan a neighborhood’s available properties and even connect to realtors.”

TAT’s Augmented ID— “Point your Android phone at a long-lost acquaintance for his Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube activity.”

Michael Zollner, an AR researcher, puts it this way: “We have a vast amount of data on the Web, but today we see it on a flat screen. It’s only a small step to see all of it superimposed on our lives.”

Maarteen Lens-FitzGerald, a cofounder of Layar, said: “As the technology improves, AR apps will be able to recognize faces and physical objects [i.e. facial and object recognition] and render detailed 3-D animation sequences.”

According to Fast Company, it will be like having “Terminator eyes,” that see everything, but with all the information about it in real time running over or alongside the image.

AR has been in use for fighter pilots and museum exhibits and trade shows for a number of years, but with the explosive growth of the data available on the Internet, mobile communication devices, and wireless technology, we now have a much greater capability to superimpose data on everything, everywhere.

The need to “get online” and “look things up” will soon be supplanted by the real time linkage of information and imagery. We will soon be walking around in a combined real and virtual reality, rather than coming home from the real world and sitting down at a computer to enter a virtual world. The demarcation will disappear to a great extent.

Augmented reality will bring us to a new level of efficiency and effectiveness in using information to act faster, smarter, and more decisively in all our daily activities personally and professionally and in matters of commerce and war.

With AR, we will never see things the same way again!

Seeing things Differently with Augmented Reality

Testing EA in Virtual Reality

In enterprise architecture, we develop IT targets and plans for the organization, but these are usually not tested in any meaningful or significant way, since they are “future tense”.

Wouldn’t it be incredible to be able to actually test EA hypotheses, targets, and plans in a virtual environment before actually setting off the organization in a specific direction that can have huge implications for its ability to conduct business and achieve results?

MIT Technology Review, in an article entitled “The Fleecing of the Avatars” (Jan/Feb 2008) addresses how virtual reality is being used to a greater extent to mimic and test reality.

One example of the booming virtual world is Second Life, run by Linden Labs. It has 10,000,000 subscribers and “about 50,000 are online at any one time.” In this virtual world, subscribers playing roles as avatars “gather to role-play reenactments of obscure digital Star Trek cartoon episodes, build and buy digital homes and furniture, and hang out on digital beaches.”

However, more and more virtual worlds, like Second Life, are being used by real world mainstream businesses. For example, many companies are developing a presence in the virtual world, such as Dell with a sales office in Second Life, Reebok a store, and IBM maintains business centers in this virtual world. Further, “the World Bank presented a report in Second Life about business development.”

“But big companies like Sun, Reebok, and IBM don’t really do business in virtual worlds; they ‘tunnel’ into them. [In other words,] To close a deal, you need to step out of the ‘sim’ and into the traditional Sun or Reebok or IBM website.”

The development of company’s virtual presence online and their connection back to the real world is potentially a precursor to planning disciplines like EA testing out hypotheses of targets and plans in virtual reality and then actually implementing these back in the real organization.

Others are actually planning to use virtual worlds to test and conduct research. So there is precedent for other disciplines such as EA. For example, Cornell’s Robert Bloomfield, an experimental economist, “conducts lab research—allowing 20 students to make simulated stock trades using real money…and seeing how regulatory changes affect their behavior. He envisions a day when he can do larger studies by setting up parallel virtual worlds. ‘I could create two virtual worlds, one with legal structure, one with another, and compare them…I might lower the capital-gains tax in one and see how business responds. There are things I can’t do with 20 people in a classroom but I can do with 2,000 or 20,000 people in a virtual world.”

Could enterprise architecture do something similar in a virtual world? For example, could we test how business processes need to change when new technology is introduced or how information sharing improves with better architectures for discovering and exchanging data? How about testing people’s reactions and behavior to new systems in a broader virtual world instead of with a more limited number of customers in user acceptance testing? Another possibility is testing the effectiveness of new IT security in a virtual world of gamers and hackers?

Modeling and simulation (M&S) can improve enterprise architecture by testing plans before deploying them. We need to to hire and train people with knowledge, skills, and experience in the M&S discipline and with tools that support this. Then we can test hypothetical return on investment for new IT investments before we open our organizational wallets.

Testing EA in Virtual Reality

Virtual Relationships and Enterprise Architecture

User-centric EA is based on establishing relationships. There are relationships with stakeholders, which includes understanding their information and governance needs and working to fulfill those. There are also relationships with subject matter experts in both the business and technical areas of the enterprise -- since EA bridges the worlds of mission-business and technology, the chief Enterprise Architect must build relationships in both worlds and facilitate information flow (discovery and exchange) between them and into architecture and planning products for the organization.

EA relationships are real, not virtual

Virtual world online games, such as Second Life, have simulated seemingly all facets of human existence, even relationships. The Wall Street Journal, on August 10, 2007 reports that studies show that "virtual relationships mirror real life...people respond to interactive technology on social and emotional levels much more than we ever thought...on a neurological level, players may not distinguish between virtual and real world relationships studies suggest."

However virtual relationships are not real relationships, which is required for User-centric EA. EA requires building genuine real world relationships, gathering requirements, developing user-centric solutions, and communicating on all levels with stakeholders and partners.

Also, EA is not a game (obviously!). It has real world implications for an organization if done correctly (or not). The results of EA can be the difference between executing on mission and pretending to be fat and happy in Second Life.

How important are relationships to your EA program?

Virtual Relationships and Enterprise Architecture