Virtuality

For a anti-social reject like me trying to enjoy a sunny Saturday afternoon, which is more annoying? Is it the table on my left with four Korean teenage girls going on and on about whatever it is that airheads like that talk about in their silly-sounding language? Or could it be the middle-aged Kiwi redneck beauty at the table to my right, filling up two chairs with her enormous carcass, mouth-breathing like she just held her breath for 5 minutes and talking about equally pointless bullshit in between slices of chocolate cake.

Whatever. It's a pretty day outside.

I've been quite busy these past weeks, mostly working on my next programming task, which has required me to re-teach myself most of the mathematics that I already learned once in university back in the day. In fact, I've been working on it pretty much day and night, office and home, come hell or high water. My beard has already grown past the point where it would tickle my own face and girls have stopped complaining about it scratching their thighs, whenever they manage to pull me away from my computer.

It's good to be a geek. :)

Over the weeks, I've also attended to a lovely set of lectures on virtual reality back at the lab, given by Tom Furness, one of the Great Old Ones in this field of research. According to him, he is the only one of the three guys left alive, who studied the field already in 1960s.

It really shows: this guy is literally a gold mine of information. I consider myself very lucky to have been able to tap into his head like this.

Interesting thing he told us a couple of days ago:

He was working on a data glass tech that, instead of having miniature see-through displays on the lenses, utilize lasers to directly draw the images on the user's retina. The technology is maturing up quickly, and they can already produce very vivid, high-contrast VGA-resolution images that just seem to hover there, in front of your eyes.

The funny part: they were testing their prototype on some guy who just happened to be visiting their lab. The dude put on the glasses and looked at the images shot into his eyes, nodding his head in appreciation. Then he told them: “Impressive, especially considering that I'm blind in my left eye, and I can still see the images perfectly clear with it.”

It's a feature, not a bug!

Apparently the retina in the guy's left eye was still alive and kicking, it was just the rest of the eye that was messed up with large amounts of scar tissue, a result from some accident years back. Prosthetic eyes based on this are already being researched. :)

Onward.

An observation that I have made here.

Skateboards. Holy shit, half the people in the campus seem to use them as their primary means of transportation. They are actually considered cool. Every time I see someone skating, I start hearing the song, The Power of Love by Huey Lewis and the News (Back to the Future movies, come on...), play in my head.

It's driving me crazy. I swear, I can go to a toilet, and then, in the booth, start hearing the damn song approaching from the distance. The bathroom door opens and as the guy rolls past me, I'm exposed to the full blare of the music so that I automatically try to wipe aside the long curly locks of 80s hair from my face that I know never even were there.

The campus security zooming around on their Segways are cool, though.

And now for something completely different.

Towards the end of April and in the beginning of May, expect a change of scenery, as I travel north towards Auckland, and from there fly to Japan for a couple of weeks of historical sightseeing, beer gardens and hopefully not too many geishas (I really don't see the point in them). I haven't thought about it too much yet, but on the menu so far are Osaka (where my friends live), Kyoto and Nara (which are pretty), and perhaps Iga-Ueno (which is the home town of the legendary ninja, Hattori Hanzo, and the birth place of the entire culture of wearing your pyjamas around your head and totally flipping out for no reason, killing everybody in town.)

Cheers, eh.