Future Distribution

by Damon Gambuto     Department: Technology

Some things announce themselves as the future.  Blaise Aguera y Arcas' Photosynth software is one of those things.

I suspect it was experiences with technologies similarly robust to Photosynth that led William Gibson to famously remark: "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." 

For your reading pleasure (and my future biographers' research needs) I present you with the origin story of my (soon to be famous?) opening line of this blog entry.

I was surfing the internet - or as I like to call it, 'working' - when I found myself clicking through the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) website.   TED started out as a conference that brought together innovative thinkers to share their ideas and has grown into. . . well. . .  a bigger conference that brings together innovative thinkers to share their ideas.  The format asks these great thinkers (and doers) to explain their thoughts and/or work in 18 minutes or less.  That is to say, it's a yearly conference of innovative people alongside interested people who have inversely proportional attention spans and bank accounts (the pass to attend runs about $6K).  The upside for us is that TED distributes many of the talks on their website which you can find here gratis.  Or - if you have a thing for trashy '80's comedies - rent the DVD version hosted by Daphne Zuniga (yes, the woman from The Sure Thing). If you haven't seen a TED talk or visited the website before, I just made you cooler.  You're welcome.

Okay, back to seeing the future.  So I'm watching Blaise's talk on the recommendation of one of our superlative researchers, Margaret.  As narrates the various capacities of Seadragon (the software used in conjunction with Photosynth), and then the majestic capabilities of Photosynth itself, my mind starts spinning through the permutation tree of the possible futures it suggests.  Virtual tourism, visual information with crowd-sourced embedded data, photo-real 3-D maps of anywhere people take photographs.  In fewer than eighteen minutes my reality just went virtual (in a way that didn't seem lame!). 

So what do I do next as the WIRED Science producer responsible for finding the story in the science?  I email all of my friends the link, obviously.  After receiving the requisite number of replies filled with gratitude for having sent them such a great link, I dispense with the hedonics of websurfing and begin writing up the pitch (or what, as my boss likes to remind me, is actually 'working').  I pound away at my keyboard trying to describe what is so "urgent" and "surprising" about what I've stumbled upon.  (Okay, it feels a little disingenuous to say I stumbled upon it.  Blaise works for Microsoft.  They are kind of a big deal.  Also - he's been working with  Steve Seitz at the University of Washington who is amazing).
 
Oh, one other thing about that last bit: "urgent" and "surprising" are putative qualifying criteria for a WIRED Science story.  The powers that be also use things like interesting characters, a strong narrative thread, and some clear "scientific" content as ways of measuring the merits of a story.  Instead of this manifold litmus test, I suggested the more straightforward, monocultural story criterion of "is it cool?"  Apparently that's not rigorous enough.  Whatever.  My blog, my rules.  Photosynth is cool.  And by cool I mean awesome.  And by awesome I mean awesome like pizza, not like god.  That is to say, awesome like something that humans thought up, is real, and actually makes the world a better place. 

Alas, Photosynth wasn't quite the material we think of as a 'field piece' (more on that process in future installments) so we didn't send a producer up to Blaise's lab to see birthplace of his software.  However, nobody here at the show could deny that Photosynth is cool.  Everyone immediately saw the appeal of having Blaise come down and demonstrate his software.  So we called him. 

He came.  He demonstrated.  He rocked. 

The future, it seems, is here.  I'll continue to work on distributing it evenly.

Tags: behind the scenes, photosynth

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