One thing that concerns me with nanotechnology is that the creation of all kinds of weird molecules that nature has no time to adapt to may leave us with some remarkably odd (and possibly pervasive) toxicity problems.
What if CNT's get widely adopted into clothing, tupperware, etc, and then 30 years down the line we find that the little fibers that inevitably break off when you handle such material get lodged in the lungs and induce cancer (like asbestos and other kinds of fibers do)?
I've heard of all kinds of interesting possible applications of CNT's (super strong fabrics and cables, conductive fabrics, electro-kinetic fabrics (generates electricity for your ipod just from you moving around)). But is anyone looking seriously into governing and exploring toxicity issues with these new synthetic molecules and materials?
I prefer the equally possible explanation -- that gravity is not linear, and performs differently at large distances than it does at small ones. This can explain the effect of dark matter without all the flubberyjubbery of matter that can't be seen and can't be detected.
You mean that our theory of gravity is flawed and this would explain the "dark matter"...
My understanding is that this possibility has lost favor because the different velocity dynamics that have been observed in a variety of galaxies would necessitate a different mathematical law of gravity for each one.
On the other hand, the varied velocity curves observed could be explained by the straight-forward presumption that each of the galaxies in question are clumped together with different distributions of dark matter.
Yes, it's been found that on a large scale, dark matter and normal matter seem to congeal together in similar places but don't necessarily exhibit the exact same distributions... Which does seem to indicate that dark matter is in fact matter separate from the stuff we can normally see.
One thing that is key here is that dark matter isn't just cold normal matter... Dust, rocks, gas, etc CAN be seen through absorption, scattering, and even very low temperature diffuse emissions. In fact, dark matter seems to be composed of something that quite simply has no affinity whatsoever for photons. That is, it is immune or invisible to the electromagnetic force. But it DOES have mass and would therefore interact quite "normally" with gravitons.
I've wondered then, would dark matter also be invisible to strong and weak forces?
Wild and crazy speculation mode:
And even, could dark matter have it's own forces (dark virtual particles to which it has an affinity)? Perhaps a dark form of electromagnetism/strong/weak forces? If so, could dark matter then form complex macroscopic structures like dark stars, dark galaxies, and even dark planets?
If so, could dark people be sitting around in their dark galaxies and wondering why the heck their dark stars orbit much faster than can be accounted for by the sum total gravitational mass of visible dark matter?
Actually, you're mistaken. It has infinite density not mass
It is not necessary for a black hole to be of infinite density... It merely needs to be of sufficient density to fit within it's own Schwarzchild Radius (the distance at which the gravitational field becomes strong enough to prevent all light from escaping).
All massive bodies have a Schwarzchild Radius... But most bodies are too "fluffy" to fit inside it and so they don't form an event horizon.
Matter can degenerate very far before it can fit inside it's SR... electron degeneracy, neutron degeneracy, and even quark degeneracy are all forms of superdense matter which is still too fluffy to form a black hole. (I believe a good candidate for a quark star supernova remnant was found a couple years ago.) It is possible that there is another level of degeneracy below quarks where matter crosses the "Schwarzchild Density", exposing an external event horizon, and yet stops condensing down to infinity...
One theory I've heard is that perhaps that level is string degeneracy... Maybe black holes are some solid condensate of strings (in some form other than quarks) beyond which matter can't condense any further. The idea is that the supernova remnant always ends up with a finite radius but one so small that it fits inside it's event horizon. We would never be able to see such a condensate because any chunk of it would always have an event horizon around it.
The whole "infinite density singularity" and "divide by zero" thing seems too sloppy for the actual universe to me. For one thing, it seems to me that it violates the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, mandating that the non-zero mass black hole have infinite energy.
On a side note... regarding the "infinite mass" thing, people seem to have this idea that if you get anywhere near a black hole, you will get sucked in... As if BH's are kind of gigantic vacuum cleaners or something. In actuality, black holes start out at about half the mass of their original star (those that form from supernovas). They don't have any more gravity than half of what their seed star had. So you can hang out in orbit around one just fine. The super gravity of black holes only comes to play when you get really really close to their center of mass... much closer than you could get when the BH was in it's original star form.
We HAVE detected dark matter... by it's gravitational signature.
This is done by examining the rotational velocity of stars around the galactic center of a galaxy in question. (If there is more mass inside a given star's orbit, the star will rotate faster.) When you form the velocity profile of a given galaxy you find that the stars orbit much faster than can be accounted for by summing up the gravitational influence of all the stars and dust in the galaxy. This deviation increases with distance from the center of the galaxy. The dark matter that is present is a huge amount, way more than can be accounted for by any reasonable distribution of black holes, neutron stars, white dwarfs, and planets.
Regarding whether gravity behaves differently over distance than our current mathemematics holds (inverse square law)... I think this would have been noticed long ago based on the orbital dynamics of our own solar system (which is understood to a very high degree of precision) as well as through the study of numerous nearby binary and trinary star systems.
I really like your idea of having the projection system in the headrest, minimizing neck motion!
However, I don't think you can get high resolution, high contrast image quality with a projector and shutter-glasses kind of setup. One thing you really need in your projected windows is a crisp opacity.
Incidentally, the holographic systems in the movies I mentioned would fail this condition too... the windows were all translucent which would impede resolution and ease of reading.
But then the interface in the Matrix wouldn't have caused RSI since the operator's limbs were all virtual!
Anyway, the direct-emission displays in VR goggles I think could pass the contrast and clarity problem, but they have the afore-mentioned physiological strain issues associated with them.
How about a compromise between the two ideas?: a chair with 3-5 LCD screens mounted in front of the headrest. As you swivel the chair about, the image on the LCD's pans as if they were windows on the virtual desktop surrounding your chair!
Now you have to worry about RSI problems in the feet, ankles and knees as the user strains them all the time just to swivel the chair about... LOL!
Ok, as other people have touched on, the demos so far don't actually add anything in terms of actually useful functionality. There is no paradigm shift here... it's just empty glitz. Once people get tired of the clunky, inefficient use of desktop space, they'll just dump it.
The problem is, the data we manipulate on computers is all fundamentally 2D in nature. Furthermore the screen is 2D. What in the world do they think they are going to add in terms of human factors benefit by faking 3D elements on a 2D screen to represent 2D data??
I mean, as far as I can tell, the 3D crap is just a clunky layer of indirection between the data and the display that actually impedes access and cognition efficiency.
2D page -> 3D lookingglass -> 2D monitor -> eyeball
Hyperlinking is one means of adding a kind of "depth" dimension to data navigation... The pages are 2D and the pages underlying each link represent a sort of z-axis of 2D data "slices". Hyperlinking is a nice way to enhance data organization so that access to related pieces is smoothed.
But why bother with graphical 3D when handling 2D data? There has got to be some rational reason to mess with this extra layer of complexity if you want your project to be adopted! The feature has got to buy you something real... not just "wow-whee". The wow-whee factor just doesn't last much longer than 30 seconds in the real world. From what I've seen of the demos, the looking glass stuff introduces no new fundamental efficiencies in terms of the access or cognition of data.
However, there is one kind of 3D mechanism I can think of that might actually improve computer interfaces... Have you guys seen the GUI interfaces in the movies Minority Report and Matrix Reloaded? The interfaces envisioned there used the space around the user as a kind of giant screen.
THAT kind of 3D desktop would actually buy you something useful.
Simply, the wide area enables better organization of windows! You can use your 3D spatial situation awareness to keep different kinds of data windows in different places around you. In essence, the extra "screen" real-estate with the added 3rd dimension enables you to organize your windows so that you can have more information right at hand at all times.
Of course, we don't have holographic displays yet, but we do have VR glasses.
If the quality of VR glasses were to improve dramatically, it might actually be feasible to implement something like a holographic desktop GUI.
Of course, the RSI issues here would become very serious. The neck and shoulder area is some of the most complicated and strain-vulnerable musculature on the human body. A lot of work would have to go into adapting a good chair and a minimum-motion 3D pointing device so that people could manipulate a holographic GUI for long hours in a day, many days in a week without repetative strain problems. And who knows what kind of headaches, eye strain, or motion sickness people might get from using VR glasses for so many hours in a day?
I fail to understand why there's suddenly this big kick to move desktops into 3D. (Microsoft's Avalon project is an effort along the same lines as LookingGlass, isn't it?) As far as I can tell, this is all just some kind of ill-thought-out attempt to invent the newest revolution in computing or something. But really, it just seems like a glitzy gimmick with no functional benefit that I can imagine.
There's a reason why 2D paper has been useful for thousands of years. It's space efficient and the vast bulk of information encoding schemes that we have devised are 2D in nature... The written word and the painted image convey the great bulk of information we need to exchange with one another in a concise and easily reviewable manner. Audio-visual info is easily conveyed on a 2D screen as well.
We don't write books on layered cubes because that's just an unecessarily complex form. Virtual 3D immersion might be useful in "face-to-face" social interactions perhaps, but that added socio-emotional dimension is completely unecessary most of the time when the goal is simply the concise transfer of information.
Hyperlinking is all the extra dimensionality we need really to convey topic forking between nuggets of 2D information. Hyperlinking works just fine in a 2D GUI.
Looking at the screenshots I wonder what kind of functionality do you get out of having a page that swivels like a stone tablet or something? You get a REALLY BIG icon, that's what. You can't really read the page while it's tilted and it takes up a heck of a lot more space than a plain old condensed 2D icon. You could use a zoomed-out image for a 2D icon if you wanted to keep that preview function that those tilted tablets have and you'd save a lot of screenspace that way too.
It all just seems like silly gimmickery to me.
Can anyone point out any good functional reasons for trying to force a paradigm shift to a 3D user interface?
I fail to understand why there's suddenly this big kick to move desktops into 3D. (Microsoft's Avalon project is an effort along the same lines as LookingGlass, isn't it?) As far as I can tell, this is all just some kind of ill-thought-out attempt to invent the newest revolution in computing or something. But really, it just seems like a glitzy gimmick with no functional benefit that I can imagine.
There's a reason why 2D paper has been useful for thousands of years. It's space efficient and the vast bulk of information encoding schemes that we have devised are 2D in nature... The written word and the painted image convey the great bulk of information we need to exchange with one another in a concise and easily reviewable manner. Audio-visual info is easily conveyed on a 2D screen as well.
We don't write books on layered cubes because that's just an unecessarily complex form. Virtual 3D immersion might be useful in "face-to-face" social interactions perhaps, but that added socio-emotional dimension is completely unecessary most of the time when the goal is simply the concise transfer of information.
Hyperlinking is all the extra dimensionality we need really to convey topic forking between nuggets of 2D information. Hyperlinking works just fine in a 2D GUI.
Looking at the screenshots I wonder what kind of functionality do you get out of having a page that swivels like a stone tablet or something? You get a REALLY BIG icon, that's what. You can't really read the page while it's tilted and it takes up a heck of a lot more space than a plain old condensed 2D icon. You could use a zoomed-out image for a 2D icon if you wanted to keep that preview function that those tilted tablets have and you'd save a lot of screenspace that way too.
It all just seems like silly gimmickery to me.
Can anyone point out any good functional reasons for trying to force a paradigm shift to a 3D user interface?
bif
Slashdot Mirror
One thing that concerns me with nanotechnology is that the creation of all kinds of weird molecules that nature has no time to adapt to may leave us with some remarkably odd (and possibly pervasive) toxicity problems.
What if CNT's get widely adopted into clothing, tupperware, etc, and then 30 years down the line we find that the little fibers that inevitably break off when you handle such material get lodged in the lungs and induce cancer (like asbestos and other kinds of fibers do)?
I've heard of all kinds of interesting possible applications of CNT's (super strong fabrics and cables, conductive fabrics, electro-kinetic fabrics (generates electricity for your ipod just from you moving around)). But is anyone looking seriously into governing and exploring toxicity issues with these new synthetic molecules and materials?
bif
You mean that our theory of gravity is flawed and this would explain the "dark matter"...
My understanding is that this possibility has lost favor because the different velocity dynamics that have been observed in a variety of galaxies would necessitate a different mathematical law of gravity for each one.
On the other hand, the varied velocity curves observed could be explained by the straight-forward presumption that each of the galaxies in question are clumped together with different distributions of dark matter.
One thing that is key here is that dark matter isn't just cold normal matter... Dust, rocks, gas, etc CAN be seen through absorption, scattering, and even very low temperature diffuse emissions. In fact, dark matter seems to be composed of something that quite simply has no affinity whatsoever for photons. That is, it is immune or invisible to the electromagnetic force. But it DOES have mass and would therefore interact quite "normally" with gravitons.
I've wondered then, would dark matter also be invisible to strong and weak forces?
Wild and crazy speculation mode:
And even, could dark matter have it's own forces (dark virtual particles to which it has an affinity)? Perhaps a dark form of electromagnetism/strong/weak forces? If so, could dark matter then form complex macroscopic structures like dark stars, dark galaxies, and even dark planets?
If so, could dark people be sitting around in their dark galaxies and wondering why the heck their dark stars orbit much faster than can be accounted for by the sum total gravitational mass of visible dark matter?
It is not necessary for a black hole to be of infinite density... It merely needs to be of sufficient density to fit within it's own Schwarzchild Radius (the distance at which the gravitational field becomes strong enough to prevent all light from escaping).
All massive bodies have a Schwarzchild Radius... But most bodies are too "fluffy" to fit inside it and so they don't form an event horizon.
Matter can degenerate very far before it can fit inside it's SR... electron degeneracy, neutron degeneracy, and even quark degeneracy are all forms of superdense matter which is still too fluffy to form a black hole. (I believe a good candidate for a quark star supernova remnant was found a couple years ago.) It is possible that there is another level of degeneracy below quarks where matter crosses the "Schwarzchild Density", exposing an external event horizon, and yet stops condensing down to infinity...
One theory I've heard is that perhaps that level is string degeneracy... Maybe black holes are some solid condensate of strings (in some form other than quarks) beyond which matter can't condense any further. The idea is that the supernova remnant always ends up with a finite radius but one so small that it fits inside it's event horizon. We would never be able to see such a condensate because any chunk of it would always have an event horizon around it.
The whole "infinite density singularity" and "divide by zero" thing seems too sloppy for the actual universe to me. For one thing, it seems to me that it violates the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, mandating that the non-zero mass black hole have infinite energy.
On a side note... regarding the "infinite mass" thing, people seem to have this idea that if you get anywhere near a black hole, you will get sucked in... As if BH's are kind of gigantic vacuum cleaners or something. In actuality, black holes start out at about half the mass of their original star (those that form from supernovas). They don't have any more gravity than half of what their seed star had. So you can hang out in orbit around one just fine. The super gravity of black holes only comes to play when you get really really close to their center of mass... much closer than you could get when the BH was in it's original star form.
We HAVE detected dark matter... by it's gravitational signature.
This is done by examining the rotational velocity of stars around the galactic center of a galaxy in question. (If there is more mass inside a given star's orbit, the star will rotate faster.) When you form the velocity profile of a given galaxy you find that the stars orbit much faster than can be accounted for by summing up the gravitational influence of all the stars and dust in the galaxy. This deviation increases with distance from the center of the galaxy. The dark matter that is present is a huge amount, way more than can be accounted for by any reasonable distribution of black holes, neutron stars, white dwarfs, and planets.
Regarding whether gravity behaves differently over distance than our current mathemematics holds (inverse square law)... I think this would have been noticed long ago based on the orbital dynamics of our own solar system (which is understood to a very high degree of precision) as well as through the study of numerous nearby binary and trinary star systems.
bif
However, I don't think you can get high resolution, high contrast image quality with a projector and shutter-glasses kind of setup. One thing you really need in your projected windows is a crisp opacity.
Incidentally, the holographic systems in the movies I mentioned would fail this condition too... the windows were all translucent which would impede resolution and ease of reading.
But then the interface in the Matrix wouldn't have caused RSI since the operator's limbs were all virtual!
Anyway, the direct-emission displays in VR goggles I think could pass the contrast and clarity problem, but they have the afore-mentioned physiological strain issues associated with them.
How about a compromise between the two ideas?: a chair with 3-5 LCD screens mounted in front of the headrest. As you swivel the chair about, the image on the LCD's pans as if they were windows on the virtual desktop surrounding your chair!
Now you have to worry about RSI problems in the feet, ankles and knees as the user strains them all the time just to swivel the chair about... LOL!
bif
Ok, as other people have touched on, the demos so far don't actually add anything in terms of actually useful functionality. There is no paradigm shift here... it's just empty glitz. Once people get tired of the clunky, inefficient use of desktop space, they'll just dump it.
The problem is, the data we manipulate on computers is all fundamentally 2D in nature. Furthermore the screen is 2D. What in the world do they think they are going to add in terms of human factors benefit by faking 3D elements on a 2D screen to represent 2D data??
I mean, as far as I can tell, the 3D crap is just a clunky layer of indirection between the data and the display that actually impedes access and cognition efficiency.
2D page -> 3D lookingglass -> 2D monitor -> eyeball
Hyperlinking is one means of adding a kind of "depth" dimension to data navigation... The pages are 2D and the pages underlying each link represent a sort of z-axis of 2D data "slices". Hyperlinking is a nice way to enhance data organization so that access to related pieces is smoothed.
But why bother with graphical 3D when handling 2D data? There has got to be some rational reason to mess with this extra layer of complexity if you want your project to be adopted! The feature has got to buy you something real... not just "wow-whee". The wow-whee factor just doesn't last much longer than 30 seconds in the real world. From what I've seen of the demos, the looking glass stuff introduces no new fundamental efficiencies in terms of the access or cognition of data.
However, there is one kind of 3D mechanism I can think of that might actually improve computer interfaces... Have you guys seen the GUI interfaces in the movies Minority Report and Matrix Reloaded? The interfaces envisioned there used the space around the user as a kind of giant screen. THAT kind of 3D desktop would actually buy you something useful. Simply, the wide area enables better organization of windows! You can use your 3D spatial situation awareness to keep different kinds of data windows in different places around you. In essence, the extra "screen" real-estate with the added 3rd dimension enables you to organize your windows so that you can have more information right at hand at all times.
Of course, we don't have holographic displays yet, but we do have VR glasses.
If the quality of VR glasses were to improve dramatically, it might actually be feasible to implement something like a holographic desktop GUI.
Of course, the RSI issues here would become very serious. The neck and shoulder area is some of the most complicated and strain-vulnerable musculature on the human body. A lot of work would have to go into adapting a good chair and a minimum-motion 3D pointing device so that people could manipulate a holographic GUI for long hours in a day, many days in a week without repetative strain problems. And who knows what kind of headaches, eye strain, or motion sickness people might get from using VR glasses for so many hours in a day?
bif
I fail to understand why there's suddenly this big kick to move desktops into 3D. (Microsoft's Avalon project is an effort along the same lines as LookingGlass, isn't it?) As far as I can tell, this is all just some kind of ill-thought-out attempt to invent the newest revolution in computing or something. But really, it just seems like a glitzy gimmick with no functional benefit that I can imagine.
There's a reason why 2D paper has been useful for thousands of years. It's space efficient and the vast bulk of information encoding schemes that we have devised are 2D in nature... The written word and the painted image convey the great bulk of information we need to exchange with one another in a concise and easily reviewable manner. Audio-visual info is easily conveyed on a 2D screen as well.
We don't write books on layered cubes because that's just an unecessarily complex form. Virtual 3D immersion might be useful in "face-to-face" social interactions perhaps, but that added socio-emotional dimension is completely unecessary most of the time when the goal is simply the concise transfer of information.
Hyperlinking is all the extra dimensionality we need really to convey topic forking between nuggets of 2D information. Hyperlinking works just fine in a 2D GUI.
Looking at the screenshots I wonder what kind of functionality do you get out of having a page that swivels like a stone tablet or something? You get a REALLY BIG icon, that's what. You can't really read the page while it's tilted and it takes up a heck of a lot more space than a plain old condensed 2D icon. You could use a zoomed-out image for a 2D icon if you wanted to keep that preview function that those tilted tablets have and you'd save a lot of screenspace that way too.
It all just seems like silly gimmickery to me.
Can anyone point out any good functional reasons for trying to force a paradigm shift to a 3D user interface?
bif
I fail to understand why there's suddenly this big kick to move desktops into 3D. (Microsoft's Avalon project is an effort along the same lines as LookingGlass, isn't it?) As far as I can tell, this is all just some kind of ill-thought-out attempt to invent the newest revolution in computing or something. But really, it just seems like a glitzy gimmick with no functional benefit that I can imagine. There's a reason why 2D paper has been useful for thousands of years. It's space efficient and the vast bulk of information encoding schemes that we have devised are 2D in nature... The written word and the painted image convey the great bulk of information we need to exchange with one another in a concise and easily reviewable manner. Audio-visual info is easily conveyed on a 2D screen as well. We don't write books on layered cubes because that's just an unecessarily complex form. Virtual 3D immersion might be useful in "face-to-face" social interactions perhaps, but that added socio-emotional dimension is completely unecessary most of the time when the goal is simply the concise transfer of information. Hyperlinking is all the extra dimensionality we need really to convey topic forking between nuggets of 2D information. Hyperlinking works just fine in a 2D GUI. Looking at the screenshots I wonder what kind of functionality do you get out of having a page that swivels like a stone tablet or something? You get a REALLY BIG icon, that's what. You can't really read the page while it's tilted and it takes up a heck of a lot more space than a plain old condensed 2D icon. You could use a zoomed-out image for a 2D icon if you wanted to keep that preview function that those tilted tablets have and you'd save a lot of screenspace that way too. It all just seems like silly gimmickery to me. Can anyone point out any good functional reasons for trying to force a paradigm shift to a 3D user interface? bif