Escaping the Trunk

Remember this?

Jon lay on a white leather divan, utterly unaware. The two girls who sat beside him every day in literature class were drawing on him with calligraphy brushes. They had duct taped tracked pens to each brush. A little remote infrared camera sat atop a humming portable projector. Another camera sat on a tripod beside it. On a monitor at their feet, Violet watched a digital iteration of Jon’s supine body slowly acquiring each mark, each brushstroke. The girls had made him into an infoboard, and seemed to be broadcasting the result. Both versions of Jon wore only swimming trunks.

That was inspired by Johnny Lee’s work on Wii-mote cameras. Check out what Mr. Lee is doing now:

This “vision video” indicates what Mr. Lee and his fellow designers would like to make possible with Project Natal, an extension of the Xbox technologies. He describes it better than I can:

The 3D sensor itself is a pretty incredible piece of equipment providing detailed 3D information about the environment similar to very expensive laser range finding systems but at a tiny fraction of the cost. Depth cameras provide you with a point cloud of the surface of objects that is fairly insensitive to various lighting conditions allowing you to do things that are simply impossible with a normal camera.

I post this because my friend Jerry told me he would be running into Mr. Lee Saturday evening (a fact that makes me positively green with envy), and I gave him explicit orders to corner the man and tell him that he had inspired a beginner science fiction writer. Given the publicity and utter coolness of Project Natal, I’m sure I won’t be the only one.

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Further to Mr. Stross’ point about the future collapsing wave-like into the present, this evening I used Google Video Chat to talk to Boston for free, at which point my interlocutor said, slowly drawing his spoon free of his mouth, “You know, every day, we’re waking up in the world we read about in books as children.”

“That’s true, we are.”

“I want to cover this wall in screens. I want to talk to everyone in those screens.”

“Like The Family,” I said, referencing Bradbury.

“I mean, I carry my life with me in this little piece of metal. Everything’s there.”

“Hey, at least you haven’t implanted something that’s bound to leak out inside you,” I said, referencing Gibson.

“…That’s what she said.”

(This is exactly why we’re friends. That right there. Well, that, and a bunch of other things. But you get the gist.) 

But it does make me think — depending on how many little windows there are, I could organize dinner parties across time zones. I could have my boys with me again, from Seattle to New York and all points in between. The interface is that simple. My camera and mic are that good. I’d just have to make sure that my meal was relatively un-messy, so as to avoid strategically-crippling spills. The more I think about this, the more desperately I want it, especially as American Thanksgiving draws near. 

Where was this feature on election night?

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