Wednesday 12 August 2015

SYNCING FEELING

Dick Pountain/Idealog 248 /05 March 2015 15:29

Astute readers may have noticed that I'm deeply interested in (a nicer way of saying obsessed by) note-taking. This is no coincidence, because all my main occupations - editing the Real World section, writing this column, writing and reviewing books - involve reading the work of others and gathering together important points. Anything that reduces the amount of re-typing required is a bit like the difference between weeding a field of beans using a tea-spoon and using a tractor. Just few years ago my desk groaned under thick hard-back books that bristled like porcupines with small yellow Post-It notes to mark those pages I needed quotes from, or had pencilled margin notes on.

Making notes on a tablet that could sync with my laptop removed the need for those yellow flags, but still left me the job of re-typing the quotes into my own text. (Over the years I'd tried several of those pen-like or roller-like handheld scanners, but none was effective enough to be worth the hassle). No, the logical final step is for the source material I'm reading to be online too, but it's taken until now to arrive there. For the very first time I'm reviewing a book in its Kindle rather than paper edition, which means I can search its full text for relevant phrases and cut-and-paste all the resulting notes and quotes. In theory that is, because it turns out not be quite so simple.

Amazon's Kindle reader software certainly enables you to place bookmarks, highlight passages and make notes, but none of these functions is without its quirks, and the way they work varies between versions. I like to use an actual hardware Kindle when outdoors because it's light, readable in sunlight and has great battery life. Indoors I prefer to read and note-take on my Android tablet, but I write the actual review on my Windows laptop, and all these platforms run different versions of the reader.

First quirk is that the granularity of Kindle bookmarks is too broad, working only to whole page boundaries. When I view Notes & Marks the short extract presented is only the top few lines of that *page*, though my interest might lie further down. Highlights are more useful because then the extract is from the start of the highlighted area, not the whole page. I can attach a note to any single word on a page, but in Notes & Marks only its text appears, so I end up with a cryptic list like "yes", "no", "good", "really?" with no idea what each refers to until I click it and go to that page, which becomes dizzying after a while. The best compromise is to highlight a sentence or paragraph and then attach a note to its first word.

Next quirk: notes, highlights and bookmarks should sync automatically between Kindle, tablet and desktop readers, but notes made on my tablet weren't showing up on the laptop. This matters because I can only cut and paste highlighted quotes from the laptop version, as  Kindle and tablet versions have no copy function. Solving this required a stiff yomp through the forums, where sure enough I found an answer - you have to manually sync by hitting that little curly-arrows icon. Still didn't work. More forums and the real answer. You have to hit *not* the sync icon inside the book in question, but the one on the home screen with all books closed. Doh! But it does work.

The last quirk is that you can't run multiple instances of Kindle reader on the same device. It so happens I have another book on my Kindle that's relevant to this review and I'd like to quote from it: have to go out into the library, open other book, find quote, cut-and-paste (but  on laptop version only). It would be nice to keep two books open in two instances of Kindle reader on same machine. I really shouldn't grouse too much though, because merely being able to search, make notes and cut-and-paste them has hugely reduced the amount of tedious re-typing involved in the reviewing process, and I also need to remember that Amazon is obliged by copyright and fair-usage to restrict some of these functions (a copyright notice gets placed on every quote I paste, which I delete).

Nevertheless I do believe that Amazon is missing a trick here, and that just making a few fairly minor tweaks would establish a really effective collaborative network for students and researchers to share notes and quotes, which wouldn't need to carry advertising since the product has already been paid for. That would of course grant Amazon the sort of dominance that the US courts have already refused to Google, but let's not go there...
 

SLEEPY HOLO?

Dick Pountain/  /08 February 2015 12:20/ Idealog237

With the TV news full of crashing airliners, beheadings and artillery bombardments it's hardly surprising that a lot of people wish to escape into a virtual reality that's under their own control, which is becoming ever more possible thanks to recent technology. As Paul Ockenden explained in a recent column, the miniaturised components required for smartphones are precisely those whose lack has been holding back virtual reality for the last couple of decades: displays, graphics processors, high-bandwidth comms and batteries. The embarassing withdrawal of Google's Glass project (no-one wanted to be a glasshole) suggests that gaming remains the principal application for this technology and Microsoft's HoloLens goggles, announced at the Windows 10 launch, merely confirm that Redmond is thinking the same way.

The HoloLens employs unprecedented amounts of mobile GPU power to mix 3D holographic images into your normal field of view, creating an augmented, rather than virtual, reality effect: you see what's really there combined seamlessly with whatever someone wants to insert. It's an exciting development with many implications for future UI design, but it might create some unprecedented problems too, and that's because we already live in a naturally augmented reality. You might think that everything you're seeing right this second is what's "really" there, but in fact much of the peripheral stuff outside your central zone of attention is a semi-static reconstruction of what was there a few seconds ago: like yesterday's TV sets, your eyes lack sufficient bandwidth to live stream HD across their whole field of view. That's because poor old Evolution had no access to silicon, gallium arsenide or metallic conductors and had to make do with warm salty water.

But that's the least of it, because *everything* you see is actually a reconstruction and none of it is directly "live". Your visual cortex reads data from the rods and cones of your retinas, filters this data for light, shade, edges and other features and uses these to identify separate objects. The objects it finds get inserted into a constantly-updated model of the world stored in your brain, and that model is what you're seeing as "really" there, not the raw sense data. Everything is already a reconstruction, which is why we're occasionally prone to see things that aren't there, to hallucinations and optical illusions. (If you're interested, all this stuff is brilliantly explained in Chris Frith's "Making Up The Mind", Blackwell 2007 ).

There's even more. These objects that get accepted into the world model aren't neutral, but like all your memories get a tag indicating your emotional state, in the strict biochemical sense of hormone and neurotransmitter levels, when they were added. This world map in your brain is value-ridden, full of nicer and nastier places and things. You maintain a similar brain model of your own body and its functions, and the US neuroscientist Antonio Damasio believes the mystery of consciousness will one day be solved in the way these twin mappings get superimposed and differentially analysed in the brain. (We're still a long, long way from such a solution and the hard road toward it might conceivably just stop, or worse still become a Möbius strip that circles for ever).

Neuroscientists aren't the only people who understand this stuff. Painters, sculptors and movie makers, at least the good ones, know very perfectly well how visual representations and emotions are connected: some spaces like dungeons are just creepy, some faces are admirable, others irritating. A horror movie - let's say Sleepy Hollow, to validate the weak pun in my column title - is already a primitive form of augmented reality. Most of what appears on the screen depicts real stuff like trees, sky, people, furniture, buildings and only a few parts are unnatural CGI creations, but since all are only two-dimensional the brain has no trouble distinguishing them from "real" objects. That will longer be the case with the new holographic 3D augmented reality systems.

The cruder kinds of early VR system I used to write about years ago - those ones where you staggered around in circles wearing a coal-scuttle on your head - suffered noticeable problems with motion-sickness, because the entirely artificial and laggardly background scenery violated the physics of people's inner world models and upset their inner-ear balance. It seems likely that augmented reality systems of the calibre of HoloLens may escape such problems, being utterly physically convincing because their backdrop is reality itself. But what completely unknown disorders might AR provoke? Could AR objects stray out of the perceptual model into memory and become permanent residents of the psyche, like ghosts that people will in effect be haunted by? Will we see epidemics of PLSD (Post-Ludic Stress Disorder)? And as for AR porn, the potential for embarassing encounters doesn't bear thinking about...

SOCIAL UNEASE

Dick Pountain /Idealog 350/ 07 Sep 2023 10:58 Ten years ago this column might have listed a handful of online apps that assist my everyday...