The future still isn't what it used to be: Cyberspace

 In the previous post, I said 

Telecommuting and remote work exist, but they don't dominate, they only really make sense for some professions and they don't mean jacking into a Snow Crash or Neuromancer virtual world, even though one of the largest corporations in the world has rebranded itself around exactly that vision.

This very morning, I decided to add David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest to my reading list [not really my jam, but I wanted to see what all the fuss was about -- D.H. Apr 2025]. In the preface to the 20th anniversary edition (in 2015), Tom Bissell writes

Yes, William Gibson and Neal Stephenson may have gotten there first with Neuromancer and Snow Crash, whose Matrix and Metaverse, respectively, more accurately surmised what the internet would look and feel like.

Um, did they? Bissell goes on to say

(Wallace, among other things, failed to anticipate the break from cartridge- and disc- based entertainment)

Fair, but ...

Yes, there is a major difference between on-demand streaming and broadcast streaming, where a broadcaster puts out content according to its schedule. There is also a difference, though it seems like a smaller one, between obtaining a physical object that allows you to view something when you want to and being able to view something more or less instantly via an always-on connection (using "view" in a fairly general sense here that would include listening to audio).

Having the combination of "what you want" and "when you want it" without the friction of obtaining a physical artifact like a book, record, tape or disk does seem like something new and significant (more musings on that here), so in that sense, to the extent Wallace's world is limited to physical media which somehow include DRM that won't work in the real world, it's farther from our reality than one with data flowing freely over networks.

With one exception, though (which I'll get to) the modern web/internet that I'm familiar with has little to do with Neuromancer's matrix or Snow Crash's metaverse either.

Let's start with how you get there (one small disclaimer: While I finally got around to reading Snow Crash a couple of years ago, the last time I read Neuromancer was, um, closer to when it came out, so I'm relying on fairly old memories plus secondary sources for that one; for reference, Neuromancer was published in 1984, Snow Crash nearly a decade later in 1992, Infinite Jest in 1995). 

You get to Gibson's cyberspace by jacking in, that is, connecting your central nervous system to a computer interface that delivers a completely immersive experience. To access Stephenson's metaverse, you need a terminal and googles, either a high-quality private terminal or a free public one which provides only a grainy, black-and-white experience. In either case, the experience in Snow Crash is immersive in that you are generally not aware of the outside world, but it's not the full-sensory experience of Neuromancer.

Back in our world, of course, people generally access the web through their own computing devices, whether a phone, a tablet, a TV set, a laptop or even a desktop computer. There is no scarcity of devices. If you have access to any at all, you probably have easy access to several. You can even visit a public library and use a computer there. You do need an internet connection, but those are nearly everywhere, too. You can get on the internet in a cafe, for example, by connecting to their WiFi (as far as I can tell, actual internet cafes are nearly extinct).

In most cases, you're aware of the world around you, or at least, the internet experience doesn't take over your entire sensorium. The semi-exception is gaming, which in some cases makes an effort to be truly immersive, more or less along the lines of Snow Crash. VR headsets have been around  in some form since the 80s (if not before), and they're a natural fit for applications like FPS games, so this is not exactly a surprise.

Long story short, in much of the world the internet is easy to access with readily available equipment. Going online often means using your phone or watching TV, that is, using something that's recognizably derived from a technology that existed before the internet. Immersive experiences are only a bit harder to get to, but in any case they're not the norm.

In Neuromancer, jacking in requires special equipment on both the human and computer end (though Gibson does speak elsewhere of billions of people having access). The bar is lower in Snow Crash, but it's not something that most people spend much time on. It's interesting that the 1992 version is a bit more mundane than the 1984 version, almost as though computing in the real world had become more commonplace. It's also telling, I think, that access to the virtual worlds of the novels is difficult enough to hang a plot point on, particularly in Gibson's earlier version, almost as though stories were written by writers.

OK, once you're in the virtual world, how do you get around? I'll focus more on Snow Crash here, mainly because memories are fresher. The key point about Cyberspace is that it's a space. In particular, it's a three-dimensional construct centered around a 100-meter-wide road 2¹⁶ (65,536) kilometers long following a great circle on a  virtual sphere.

If you want to meet with someone else online, you arrange to go to the same space by moving your avatars. You can move your avatar around by walking or running, or use a vehicle, or take the transit system, which has 256 express ports, with 256 local ports in between each, at one kilometer intervals. There are special spaces within the metaverse, many with restricted access.

From an immersive gaming perspective, this makes perfect sense. From the perspective of the web, it makes no sense at all. If you chase a link from here to the Wikipedia article on Snow Crash, you just go. This page goes away and you see the Wikipedia page. Or it opens in a separate tab and you can flip back and forth, or whatever. You don't do anything even metaphorically like moving from this page to that. There's no concept of distance. At worst, one or the other of the pages might load slowly, but you don't have a sense of motion while that's happening (well, I don't, at least).

In other words, the key feature of Cyberspace, that it's a space, is at best completely irrelevant to the modern web, and at worst it's actually in the way. As I recall, Gibson's matrix is similar. For example, if you encounter ICE (Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics) you see an actual wall of ice or some other material that you have to get through.

Gibson's matrix, at least, is also spatial in another way: its contents are tied to physical computers in the real world. In particular, the two AIs Wintermute and Neuromancer are physically located in Bern and Rio de Janeiro, respectively. That is, they are presumably running on hardware located in those cities. Wintermute would like to be able to join with Neuromancer, its other half (Neuromancer is less concerned about this).

Data in today's internet is much more distributed. Not everything is in the cloud in the sense that there's no single well-defined physical location for data or the processors that process it, but a lot is, and even when a service or database is single-homed in a particular place, it usually doesn't matter exactly where that is. Even if two servers are located on different continents, they can still communicate easily because of the internet.

In the end, the technology of Neuromancer and Snow Crash isn't particularly prescient. The parts that are still around, such as a data-carrying network that's accessible across the world, or an immersive VR, were already under development in the 1980s. Gibson and Stephenson were drawing on cool and experimental, but real, technology as a jumping-off point for fiction. Moreover, they also copied some of the limitations of the technology of the time, particularly the need for specialized access terminals and on services being hosted on particular equipment located in particular places.

But in the end, Neuromancer and Snow Crash are not really about the technology. Snow Crash is more an exploration of Anarcho-Capitalism in a world where the official government has collapsed and ceded power to a collection of private entities. Neuromancer is in large part a conventional thriller, even including a physical ROM module as a MacGuffin (not withstanding what Bissell says about breaking away from physical media).

But for my money the computing technology and its relation -- or lack thereof -- to today's web isn't the interesting part of either book. Neuromancer is a ripping yarn set in a magical world whose magic happens to be presented narratively as a computerized virtual world. Snow Crash is a philosophical novel that uses an array of inventions, including but very much not limited to the metaverse, to frame its investigations. 

In both cases, the strange but also familiar technology is telling us that the novel's world is a different world from ours. The authors, particularly Stephenson, use those differences to explore our own world. As such, there's no particular need for them to have predicted the actual world of a generation later.

Another data point on immersion

A while ago I estimated the bandwidth required for 3-D Imax at 13GB/s, uncompressed. Today I got the latest newsletter from the California Academy of Sciences bragging about the new and improved Morrison Planetarium. They say this bad boy can blast 300 million pixels per second onto its hemispherical screen. At 32 bits per pixel, that's about 1.2GB/s, or about a tenth of my IMAX estimate (I think I used 32 bits per pixel to ensure a conservative estimate of the bandwidth required. 24 ought to be good enough).

Take out a factor of two since 3-D requires two images and assume that the frame rate is 24 frames/s in both cases. The remaining difference is down to spatial resolution. IMAX is about 10K by 7k, or 70 megapixels, so the Morrison is more like 14 megapixels. In the earlier article I guessed that the 13GB/s could probably be compressed down to 1GB/s, partly because the two 3-D images would be largely redundant. Planetarium-level 2-D video would also compress, but not quite as much. Bottom line, you're still looking at gigabits per second to be able to handle this stuff.

The Academy also claims that the panetarium would hold 2,402,494,700 M&Ms, but I'm skeptical about either the volume of an M&M or the planetarium, much less both, being known to a part in 10 million.

Steampunk writ large

It is said that sometime century-before-last, one Alexander Stanhope St. George had the notion of boring a tunnel from London to New York, affixing rather large lenses to either end and, with the aid of mirrors, allowing passersby in the two cities end to see each other as though they were face to face. It is also said that many of the workers who constructed the tunnel hailed from Liverpool.

And sure enough, if you go to the South Bank in London or the Fulton Ferry Landing in Brooklyn, there it is: an imposing Victorian-looking metal tube angling out of the ground, and sure enough, you can look into the lens and see across the Atlantic. The New York times has the full details; Auntie has a briefer, more bemused take. There's even a web page for making appointments to meet via Telectroscope, as the device is known.

For my money, the brilliant part of the concept is that there's no sound. The creator, Paul St. George, explains that if there were sound, people would likely just line up and use it as a telephone, but without sound, they actually have to move around and interact visually (or at least scrawl messages on a whiteboard.)

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide whether there is actually a purpose-built tunnel connecting the ends of the Telectroscope together.

Naughty Auties

Interacting with people via the web is much like interacting in the real world. To most of us, the differences are probably more interesting or annoying than anything else. E-mail doesn't convey tone of voice, so we invent smileys. Virtual worlds let us take on avatars and play with the way we present ourselves to others.

To those on the autism spectrum, however, the social cues most people take for granted in the real world are a confusing and arbitrary mess that must be painstakingly learned or otherwise dealt with. Having a smiley that says "that was a joke" can be more than just a convenience. The relatively pared-down and stylized social vocabulary of a virtual world can create a safer space than the cacophony of, say, a coffee shop or party.

At least, that's what I gather from this interesting CNN iReport on "Naughty Auties" and autism in Second Life. It's a beautiful thing to see people taking advantage of the quirks of the system to make life better. I wouldn't quite call it a "neat hack", but it's certainly what the old-fashioned hacker ethos (as opposed to the script-kiddie stuff that happens to have the "hacker" label attached to it) is all about.

IMAX 3D vs. broadband

Watching a concert film on IMAX 3D is an interesting experience. You get a much better view, for a stadium show, than anyone actually in the house -- sort of like you're somewhere close to the stage and really tall and able to float up level with or above the performers at random intervals. The sound is great, and perfectly synchronized, unlike sitting up in the nosebleeds with a slight-but-noticeable lag between the big screen and the speakers. You can hear the virtual crowd roar around you, even if the actual crowd around you is quiet.

The screen is big enough and close enough that you can't quite take it all in at once. If something darts forward off to one side, you have to turn (slightly) to see it in focus. You don't have to turn as far as you would in real life, another slight but unavoidable disconnect between being fully immersed and sitting in a theater with a huge screen and great speakers.

Note to directors: The 3-D cameras love the drum kit -- all those cylinders poised at various angles -- but don't overdo it. There's also another slight disconnect here. The drumsticks strobe noticeably since even IMAX is still 24 frames per second.

Now for the interesting question: How many bits?

IMAX film has a resolution of approximately 10,000 by 7,000. Assuming 32-bit color, 24 frames per second and 2 cameras, that comes out to about 13 gigabytes per second, uncompressed. There's ample room for compression, particularly in 3D since the two images are largely identical, but you're still talking on the order of a gigabyte per second. Picture throwing two blu-ray DVDs into the maw of the beast every minute and you're in the ballpark.

Leaving aside the small matter of installing an IMAX home theater, could you at least stream the bits into your house? If you happen to have 10-gigabit ethernet or better coming in, you're good to go. 75-year-old Sigbritt Löthberg of Karlstad, Sweden does, thanks to her son, Peter (see here for slightly more details). I don't, and you probably don't, either.

On the other hand, gigabytes are getting cheaper every day. Last I looked, hard drives were running around $0.30/GB. A 90-minute movie would require about 5TB of disk (5400GB at 1GB/second), over $1000 retail. That's probably viable for theaters now -- IMAX film reels are massive -- but not quite ready for home use.

Scented junk mail. Oh dear.

Apparently, the advent of email has reduced the volume of snail mail. I say "apparently" because my own mailbox never seems empty. In an effort to counteract this trend, the British Royal Mail has, on advice from an Oxford consulting firm, opted to try "reinventing" mail, taking it from a two-dimensional medium to a "three-, four- or five-dimensional medium."

I'm not making this up. You can read it here.

How to do this? Traditional mail is aimed at the visual system because, well, the visual system seems particularly well tuned to the kind of information we want to convey with mail. That's why we have text. But in this modern, digitized age, that's not enough. Modern mail must be enhanced by adding elements of sound, smell and taste

The Royal Mail is on the case with a sales force of 300 dedicated to helping businesses develop, and decide that they need to send "noisy, smelly junk mail" (That's probably not the designation the consultants at Brand Sense had in mind, but it seems apt).

As far as I can tell, the underlying rationale is that the mail needs to compete with email, and its unique advantage lies in being able to engage all the senses. Since email can send sound and video just fine -- more conveniently, one could argue -- that really leaves smell, taste and touch.

On the radio piece I heard, the Brand Sense spokesman described using scent not just in a literal way, as with perfume or dish soap, but more abstractly. Use citrus scents if you want to convey freshness and excitement, for example. Intriguing, to be sure, but just what need are we trying to fill here?

The whole idea of the state-run mails competing with email seems strange. If there's less need to send paper around thanks to email, that's a good thing, not a problem that needs to be solved by inventing new kinds of paper to send around, much less expending resources actively trying to convince people to do so.

Mind, I expect the consultants would have a different take.

Movie review, game review

While I'm on the VR theme ...

The other day I went to see Nightmare Before Christmas 3D. With its stop-motion animation, the original Tim Burton production of Nightmare might seem the perfect choice for a 3D adaptation. In fact, the 3D "remastering" added surprisingly little. Some in my party found it downright disappointing, having hoped for more dramatic 3D effects (which, IMHO, would have spoiled it). The high point for me wasn't the 3D, or even getting another look at director Henry Selick's visual inventiveness, but realizing what a fine score Danny Elfman had produced.

Don't get me wrong. Nightmare is a classic whichever way you look at it. But when the most notable feature of a 3D movie is the score, something is at least a little out of whack.

My experience with other 3D shows is similar (except for the Tim Burton/Elfman angle). Polarizing glasses are a great improvement over the classic red-green (both have been around for a while), but overall 3D just doesn't add that much.

There's a pretty likely explanation for this: We don't actually see in 3D. We do make use of the extra information from having a slightly offset pair of images to work with, but in a pinch we can make do with one. The image we construct either way isn't a full 3D rendering, but more of a "2.5D" schematic in which we are mainly concerned with things like what's in front of what, which way and how fast things are moving, and roughly how big and how far away things are.

The eye, that is, the massively complex machinery behind the eyes, can be fooled in any number of ways because of the assumptions it makes to construct that internal image. For example, it can be convinced that a flat canvas with paint on it is a three-dimensional space, or that a series of images quickly projected on a screen is a collection of objects moving in space.

That first illusion -- that a painting is the scene it represents -- is the big step. The rest is just refinement. That's why they called them "moving pictures". In all cases, the realism comes not from the fidelity of the image we present, but what the brain fills in. Which leads me to the game review.

With the very big caveat that my serious compugaming days are many years behind me, my nod for most immersive VR experience goes to .... NetHack. Yep, that one you might have seen somewhere with the ASCII-art rectangles connected with lines of #'s and an @ and a (usually) faithful d battling their way along.

Later versions got a bit baroque for my taste. Your mileage may vary, but somewhere along the line was a nearly perfectly-balanced concoction. What made the experience rich was the way the consequences were all worked out. If you tried something, you got a result that made sense, but not always the one you expected or wanted.

For example, there was the wand of polymorph. In the predecessor game Rogue, you could use one in desperation to try to zap the monster attacking you into something less deadly (a decent try against a xorn or umber hulk, not so good against a bat). In NetHack, you could still do that, but you could also zap a pile of rocks and sometimes get gems. You could zap anything and unless there was a good reason, it would change. Sometimes for the better, often not.

Much of the fun came from identifying all the magic items you came across. Every once in a while you might find a scroll of identify, but mostly you just had to try stuff and hope for the best. What does this wand do? I'll just zap it at that wall ... The lightning bolt bounces ... the lightning bolt hits you ... you die ... OK, next time I'll try zapping it at an angle ... Now what does this potion do?

That's not to mention the various ways of looting shops, or surviving the nearly-unsurvivable, or discovering what seemingly useless items did (why would I want to make the monster I'm fighting invisible?) or trying things like reading a scroll while confused.

It appears NetHack is still being actively developed. You hear maniacal laughter in the distance ...

Latency in a virtual stadium

Just to put a little perspective on my previous post on latency: Sound travels about 350 m/s. If the network round-trip time between the US and Australia is 200ms, then that's equivalent to a physical separation of about 35m, at least as far as sound is concerned. Being in a global virtual crowd is like being in a largish theater or small arena.

That's really not going to be a problem most of the time. The interesting thing to me is that there's a hard limit that is (just) humanly perceptible. For example, if you're assembling a virtual crowd, you'll hear the reactions from across the globe perceptibly later than those from your neighbors. The only way to even this out is to slow everybody down, which would have its own effects on the feedback loop.

Or consider a virtual marching band without any visual cues, which is effectively what you have if it takes just as long to see the baton as to hear the drum. Not impossible, but a bit more challenging.

Take me out with the crowd

Previously I described the currently popular setup of crowd, performer and large display and said there must be some basic human reasons why the experience remains popular despite the obvious inconvenience. Here are some guesses. I suspect the real answer is a combination of them and other obvious stuff I've missed:

• Not all senses virtualize well or easily. If you're at the venue, you don't just hear and see the show. You jostle with people. You smell all manner of interesting (and not-so-interesting) aromas. You feel sound in your entire body, not just your ears, even without a high-powered sound system.
  
• Meeting people in person. People still like to meet face-to-face, for a number of reasons, including the previous point, even if it's only in small groups. Sure you can invite your friends over to watch the game on TV, but you can't invite the vendors or the random people you'll be seated around or run into in the parking lot.
• Ambient noise. To my knowledge, there aren't a lot of (or any?) virtual experiences that provide the murmur of 50,000 people chatting before the house lights go down, or the roar when the stage lights go up, or the sudden hush when something dramatic happens.
• Spontaneous mass expressions. There's probably a better name for this, but I mean things like chants, songs, the wave, synchronized clapping and so forth. Ambient noise could be simulated, but that would break the feedback loop behind these.
  
• Sense of community. When thousands brave winter weather to watch a crucial away game on the big screen in their home stadium, it's clear that they're there (and not at home watching TV) largely because they want to show that they care and be with people who care the same way. This has a lot in common with a mass political demonstration.

There is definitely overlap among these, but each has its own effect. Some of the items have analogs in the virtual world. Current home theater systems can bring the noise reasonably well. The slashdot effect is not unlike a mass reaction to something on the screen and there are word-of-mouth phenomena similar to a chant or wave getting started. Not all reactions in real crowds are spontaneous -- think applause signs or the organist/PA at a sports event -- and neither are they on the web -- think viral marketing.

Nonetheless, the combined effect (together with whatever else I missed) remains unique, which is why the virtual element of the big screen is more an adjunct than the main show. As far as that goes, the big screen is just an extension of the amplified sound of the PA, which has been around considerably longer than the net. Neither is necessary for a large crowd experience. Those have been around forever.

The multimedia crowd experience

Sometime, quite a while ago, big sports events changed. Time was, you would sit in a stadium and watch a game. If you were up in the nosebleeds you'd bring a pair of binoculars. If you missed a play, well, you missed it.

Then they started putting big screens in parks and you could watch what you were watching. If they panned the camera into the crowd, you could even watch people watch what you were watching. If you missed a play, you could watch a replay.

The same concept works for concerts. Even people up in the cheap seats can see the sweat drip off the performer's nose. In fact, you might have a better experience there than someone on the floor of the arena too far away to see the stage well and without a clear view of the screen.

The same basic setup of crowd, performer and big screen is also used in megachurches and even in larger college classes.

OK, so if you're basically watching the show on TV, why bother to go to the arena, particularly if it's a sports event that's on TV anyway? Why not just sit comfortably at home, steps away from your kitchen and bathroom, skip the freeway or train trip and take in the commentary. If you have a DVR you can even pause and replay that close call yourself, as many times as you want.

Clearly, being part of the crowd is important. Being able to react and experience everyone else's reactions is worth a lot. So is being able to say you were there. There's something basically human going on here, along the lines of Mike Chwe's theme of common knowledge.

I have no direct experience of the latest generation of virtual worlds, but my impression is that they're not immersive enough to deliver quite the same experience. The virtual stadium (minus the long lines at the restroom) is probably quite a ways a way, not to mention the virtual moshpit.

Not so much to do with the web ...

... but this certainly seems like an interesting use of VR technology.