Slices Tech Talk: Mouse On Mars

Soundcloud

What’s striking in both of these approaches (and several others you can find on the web) is that the scaling of the hand movement and the corresponding action visible on the screen is very inconsistent. In many cases, your hands have to travel a distance far greater than the perceived distance of the action on the screen. Sometimes, the relative distance is 5:1 – a 5 cm movement in the air results in a 1 cm change in the GUI. Compare this to the good old mouse and you will find that, for efficient human computer interaction, the relative distance of movement is often around 1:3, while a lot of people also use a dynamic multiplier that increases the effect of mouse movement as it gets faster. This matching of small gestures to large effects is the recipe for the user’s satisfying notion of having power over the machine.

A lot of inspiration for Kinect-based interfaces seems to come from the fictitious UI shown in the movie Minority Report. Check out the relevant scenes on YouTube, and you will find that there, the scales are actually quite consistent, and they also include small gestures having larger effects.

Surely, gesture control of software is only at its very early stages, but it would seem to help the development – and its acceptance – to pay some good attention to the scaling of gestures in relation to their effects.

Video: Kinect-based control of Windows 7
Video: Kinect and the Worldwide Telescope

Now, as desirable as social control for spammers and trolls may be (assuming they have any Facebook friends at all), the repercussions for the average Facebook users are grave. If they have to rely on Facebook comments to voice their opinion on, say, a political article, there’s no way to keep this opinion separated from individual or all of their Facebook friends. Gone are the days when you could simply enjoy meeting a relative for a holiday dinner; now you’ll be aggravated because you had to read their notorious ultra-conservative political statements all year. The One Identity scheme this propagates is a significant departure from the concept of identity as we know it: Typically, the only place where you had to fully integrate all the aspects of your identity was in your own consciousness. Even there, you could try to deceive yourself about things you didn’t like. Facebook now tries to make this impossible. If followed through with all consequences, every aspect of an identity would be kept in one place, visible to all, and searchable by all, indefinitely. The only other option: muteness.

TechCrunch Self-Observation: Troll Hunting
Engadget Editorial: The Single Identity

Strangely enough, although the author describes the benefits of biological and technological coevolution, he then ventures to favor technological taking over biological evolution by means of genetic and bioengineering. This is where I’d disagree, as it seems illogical, especially in the context of the book itself, to deliberately give up biological assets such as proven sustainability in conjunction with emergence, and fallback mechanisms that can help minimize risk for all parties involved.

However, this cannot be seen as the whole story, at least not at the moment or in the near future, as the Wired editors project it. Yes, consumers willingly give up freedom of choice in the act of consumption, but this is something they’ve always done, e.g. by entering a store with a limited selection of wares but with expert consultation at hand. And no, consumers do not seem willing to give up their freedom of choice altogether, just as they would not give up their right to leave a brick-and-mortar store and walk down the street to look at what other stores have to offer. In the landscape of the web today, there are always alternatives just around the corner. If the popular and successful offering’s grave drawbacks become visible, consumers can and will turn to the seemingly better alternative. That’s what happened between 2007 and 2009, when MySpace lost almost all of its social relevance to Facebook. But the users are aware of such shifts, and they use technologies to prepare for them. An artist with a presence on MySpace or Facebook would still keep on paying for a domain name and website and maintain an email list of an interested audience, and teenagers who organize 98% of their contacts through Facebook will still have backups of this data locally somewhere, if only in the address book of their phone that syncs with the online service.

Such fallbacks mark the ability to survive the shifts between dominating services, and therefore survive – stay connected! – in today’s world. The only way to control user behaviour entirely would be by controlling their access to the online data and merge the different, yet surely capitalist interests of networking services, content providers, and ISPs. But would the users, consumers, give up their freedom to chose which access to use just as willingly as they give up a simple buying decision? Maybe. Maybe a Facebook-only mobile device with heavy discounts on monthly payments but no access to anything else but Facebook could be successful. But would its users also give up their internet connection at home in order to use such a device? Would they give up their phone numbers and be reachable exclusively via their Facebook identity? I doubt it. And as long as there is freedom in the choice of access, there is freedom to leave one company’s cozy and convenient offerings and gather somewhere else.

On Saturday, July 24, Andreas Otto and I will play a live set at the “Darmstädter Ferienkurse”. We will play a mixture between a concert and a DJ set, with the archive of music published by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Elektroakustische Musik (DEGEM) as material. Some select works will take centerstage, while the crossfades between them will be enriched to become performance miniatures in their own right, adding material from other pieces into the mix. Cellist Andreas Otto will use his software-based “Fello”-setup as instrument, played only with the bow, relieved from the cello.

The concert takes place in the unique environment of the “Out of control” audio system, courtesy Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber Dresden and Prof. Franz Martin Olbrisch. The system is based upon a setup of electrostatic speakers and a control software that allows for dramatically fast movements of the sound positioning.
Concert info
“Fello” software project
“Out of control” audio system

As always, video streams of the full presentations will be available both live and in the archive.
Conference Website (in German)

The first example program, corresponding to arrangement E4

In chapter 11 of his Laws of Form, George Spencer Brown offers the notion of circuits as a way to interpret his calculus. He gives a few examples (p55 in the 2008 edition). Using Max/MSP as the programming environment, it is rather simple to reproduce these circuits. There are two different circuits in the chapter, both of which essentially do the same thing: divide the frequency of a pulse by two.

Download the example programs (Mac OS / Windows)

The circuit is built so that variable a changes between the marked and the unmarked state. The first example corresponds to arrangement E4 in chapter 11, while the second example operates with the imaginary state, thereby simplyfying the circuit. In the 2008 edition of the Laws of Form, Spencer Brown points out that the circuit can also work with four connections less than in the illustration, and asks the reader to find out which connections can be left out. The third example program presents a possible solution to this challenge.

The cross

Finally, the fourth example program is even simpler, with fewer connections than the other examples. However, this program seems to work profoundly different than Spencer Brown’s examples, and it does not keep the calculation’s phase as they do.