November 2008 Archives

In a grand new tradition of using Universe as lodging for really interesting "supplemental material," I present to you the history (and mystery) of g-speak, an incredible new spatial operating environment, as told to me by John Underkoffler, chief scientist at Oblong Industries. Underkoffler designed the fantasy computer systems in Minority Report, then made g-speak, an almost frighteningly futuristic interface that will throw the proverbial brick through the computer screen. Check out the video above to get a sense of it in its full, dizzying glory.

My full article about g-speak is over at GOOD Magazine.

"We've built g-speak from the ground up to be a completely general computing environment -- the idea is that anything you might want to do with a computer can be done as a dialog between you and g-speak. The really interesting thing is that what it looks like on screen, what it feels like to your hands and your mind, is radically different from the GUI [Graphical User Interface] that you're used to."

"Every bit of the on-screen experience that we've all come to regard as basic or elemental over the last twenty-five years is predicated on one thing: the mouse. The whole semi-overlapping-windows scheme, and all the little gewgaws that come along with it (pulldown menus, little nubs you click on to close or bloat windows, sliders, scrollbars, etc.) were designed to accommodate the mouse. Once you replace the mouse with something vastly more capable -- i.e. unfettered human hands -- the stuff that's usually on screen is immediately inappropriate. One of the exciting breakthroughs for us has been to show that many of those artifacts are necessary because you can't see enough at one time: consider what a scrollbar does and why that's necessary. But if you can imbue the operating environment with a more fundamental way of navigating around, a way that's implicit in how you already interact with the world, then it's not like you replace the scrollbar with a gestural equivalent. You fundamentally don't need the scrollbar any longer."

"I'm afraid that I'm the Minority Report culprit. I'd been building human-machine interface stuff like this for years as part of my work at MIT (in the Media Laboratory), and when a kind of advance team (principally Alex McDowell, the brilliant production designer) showed up at the lab to "scout" technology ideas for the movie, the HMI [Human Machine Interface] work seemed to resonate. So I became the science advisor for the film and slightly adapted what I'd been building at MIT -- and that's what you see in the various scenes in which the characters are doing police forensics work on giant screens. The screens were blank for shooting (we didn't have time to actually build the system), but the actors really knew the gestural language, so when we shot the gestural scenes they weren't making anything up. In a way, they were genuinely operating a g-speak system. There's no question for me that that shows vividly when you watch the movie."

"Once the movie came out, we'd built g-speak twice: once in an academic lab, which has certain constraints and lacks others, and once in an extremely visible piece of popular media, which works a completely different way. Audiences really responded to those scenes -- you could tell, talking to people about it, that they felt like they'd seen something that either was real or should be. And since we're most of us engineers and couldn't stop building things if we wanted to, it was inevitable that we'd return to the lab and the workbench and build this stuff a third time. This time, though, it was clear it had to be in the context of a company making a commercial product. That's the only way to get the stuff out there into the world as broadly as we intend. We sincerely believe that the entire world will use their computers this way at some point down the line. Could be six years; could be ten; but it has to come. The interface we've been using for a quarter of a century just isn't keeping up, mainly because of the giant gap that's opened between what the computer (with its incredible processors, giant memory, profound graphics, and networked view of the world) can express and what the mouse and windows GUI allows us humans to express."

"For some information problems, there's no real alternative to g-speak. To comprehend and then be able (in real time) to act on such volumes of data takes more than visualization alone; eyes aren't enough. You have to enlist another giant chunk of the human brain, the part that deals with muscles and muscle memory and proprioception and all that. That chunk of brain knows as much about space as the human visual system does, and they're actually evolved to work together. That's why were all such experts at getting around and manipulating the real world. So it seems clear to us that computers should work the same way -- and that's what g-speak is. It engages both parts of your brain to let you get at digital information the same way you get at the real world. That means reaching into data; stretching it; pointing at it and poking it; spinning it around."

Science, as a discipline, is driven by the desire to understand everything. The immensity of such a project necessitates that science be undertaken not by one group of men and women in one time, but all men and women for all time. However, the final goal always eludes us: to understand this, we must first understand this, but to understand that, we must understand this, ad infinitum. In fact, the very notion of there being a final point in science has become so abstract as to be almost irrelevant; the more we know, the more we know that we do not know, and the end of the game is nowhere to be seen. And, perhaps, there is no end to the game.

Still, we seek out answers to questions. What is the Universe made of, and how did it come to exist? What is the difference between life and death? Where and how did life emerge? The bottom line: how can something come from nothing?

I think, ultimately, that "something from nothing" is the driving force behind most, if not all, human pursuits: art, reproduction, creation mythology, even the American Dream. It's also the question behind the famous Miller-Urey experiments at the University of Chicago in 1953.

The Miller-Urey experiment is Frankenstein to the max: Stanley Miller and Harold Urey filled glass vials with materials present in primordial soup days -- water, methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and carbon monoxide -- and then they shot sparks at the whole set-up continuously for a week. By the end of the week, the vials were full of a brown sludge rich in amino acids, which are, of course, the building blocks of life. Check out the video above (an excerpt from the phenomenal Cosmos series) to see the experiment in action. It has become something of a classic, albeit dated, experiment simulating one possibility of the origins of life on Earth -- the possibility that life, as Charles Darwin wrote, originated from a "warm little pond."

A recent re-evaluation of the work after Stanley Miller's death has found handfuls of new amino acids in the now-dried, vialed, boxed-up remnants of the experiments; 22 amino acids, 10 of which had never before been identified. The experiment, which had lost relevance after the discovery of amino acids in meteorites suggested, exotically, that life might have come from elsewhere, has suddenly become relevant again.

There's something wonderfully alchemical about it; from nothing, something. From metal, gold. From slime, life. And still, after over 50 years, new ingredients for the potion.

For over six months, Veronica McGregor has been Twittering from Mars.

Of course, she's not living among the wind storms and dirt of the red planet herself, but she is the voice of MarsPhoenix, the strangely compelling, first-person, lonely robot Twitter feed that somehow became the official mouthpiece of NASA's Phoenix mission and has catalyzed an entirely new kind of public involvement in science.

MarsPhoenix is followed by over 37,000 people online, and provides daily updates on Martian weather conditions, scientific discoveries, as well as pithy observations about our role in the Universe. It's a rare feat of conviviality for an agency more known for its bureaucracy than its cunning P.R. moves, but such is the power of new media. Today, as the Mars Phoenix mission winds down, NASA's experiment in social networking is not going unrecognized: with recent accolades from Wired and Gizmodo, and a handful of "Twitty" awards under its, err, metal belt, MarsPhoenix is setting the standard for how government agencies like NASA can engage the public.

In conjunction with my most recent article for GOOD Magazine on the subject, I spoke to Veronica McGregor, the "real" MarsPhoenix, about the Internet, WALL-E, and the cinema of micro-blogging.

Universe: How long have you been writing Twitters for JPL missions, and how did they come about?

McGregor: We started the Twitter account in early May, about three weeks before we [the Mars Phoenix mission] landed. My office [the JPL News Office] was trying to do more and more with new media. We've been on iTunes for a while, and we have a channel on YouTube, and we're always trying to push out our material to all these venues. We started doing mission blogs on our own website, and they took up a lot of time -- for those writing it, and then there were the editors, and the web posters. It took three or four people to post one entry on a blog. Not very efficient. But it was very well received, and we got a lot of comments back on our blog.

So, when we got ready for the Phoenix landing, we started thinking about what venues we should use, and someone mentioned Twitter. That was one of my newer employees on staff, actually. She had started her own account, and she wasn't quite sure how to use it, but she mentioned it, and we looked into it. The thing that appealed to us the most about Twitter was that people could actually receive the updates on their mobile devices, and our landing on Mars was going to take place over the three-day holiday weekend, over Memorial Day. I knew from being a former journalist that during a three-day weekend, readership and viewership of news just plummets. People are on vacation, they're not paying attention. So one of the appeals of Twitter was the fact that we could actually post updates for the landing and people could get those anywhere they were, even if they were at a picnic.

Barack Obama's achievement of the American presidency is significant for an endless litany of reasons, but here's a few more.

The lives that will be saved due to his support of stem cell research. All those ideological, anti-science Bush cronies that are going to be booted off scientific advisory boards. The as-yet-unknown discoveries that will come from his promised investments in basic science research. The school kids that are going to get a huge boost in STEM education. No more wildly upsetting dismissals of science in policy speeches. No more censorship of climate change research. A new, demure space policy that encourages international cooperation. The restoration of the Presidential Science Advisor. The appointment of a Chief Technology Officer. Someone in the White House who knows what net neutrality means. The end of the war on science.

Learn more about President-Elect Barack Obama's plan for science here.

And welcome to the future.