[From The Wichita (Kansas) Eagle]
Posted on Sun, Jan. 31, 2010
Technology changing how we work, play, shop
BY ROY WENZL
The Wichita Eagle
Our avatars are coming. Those mobile and 3-D and interactive technologies being created around us are about to beam us into a new world, filled with workday holograms, avatars and stuff we called magic only a few years ago.
Some of the new magic is being created in Wichita. It’s going to enrich and disrupt our lives. It’s going to delight us and plague us.
In that augmented reality that may soon envelop us, in a world where we’ll soon control images and data with hand gestures rather than keyboards, you might soon meet Virtual Interactive Liz, who already exists in Old Town, who will pucker her lips and bat her long lashes at you from store fronts, from transparent kiosks, from interactive billboards.
***
Liz is a virtual saleswoman, a blue-tinged ghostly image with a beauty-pageant smile and come-hither finger wiggling invitingly. She was created in the cavernous Old Town workshop of Wichita entrepreneur Jason Opat, with the help of Wichitan and beauty pageant veteran Elizabeth Rizo, a former Miss Hooters Kansas and current Miss Planet Beach International.
In his IMG studio, Opat has done on-set graphics and animations for many big-name movies, but now he’s trying to virtualize the retail and advertising businesses. “Intead of a static painted sign, why not have a person talking to you?”
A virtual person, he said.
We’re about to be surrounded by them, he said.
* * *
When the real Liz’s avatar becomes the retail advertising sensation Opat hopes she will, she’ll be only a part of the world that technologists are creating.
It’s going to put helpful 3-D holograms all around us, and they respond when we talk to them.
It’s going to put magic wands in our hands, better than smartphones; and with “gesture technology” it’s going to make our hands magical — we’ll stand in a room, or stand anywhere, and point fingers and wave hands to manipulate data and images and the 3-D figures around us.
We’ll walk through a world of augmented reality, where on vacation or on a business trip we’ll walk past any building, hold up our mobile device, and know at a glance who is in there, what their phone numbers are, and what each person does. And then it’ll show the nearest coffee shop, and the way to the subway.
We’ll live and work at times in virtual reality rooms, where engineers will do their designing not on real cars or planes but on hologram planes and cars. Wichita’s National Institute for Aviation Research already has a Virtual Reality Center.
We’ll no longer store documents and family photos and company data on personal computers with hard drives. We’ll store it, as many people do now, in the “cloud,” as in cloud computing technology. Google Docs is an example — you can access your documents from anywhere, and you have unlimited storage.
We’re coming close also, technologists say, to a 3-D interactive Web, where we’ll have personalized Web sites. What “personalized” means is that when our computing devices acquire “semantically aware” applications, they will no longer merely search and sort and record and store stuff. They will for the first time achieve a primitive consciousness: They will watch what we write, and listen to what we say, then connect their mental dots, just as humans do, and understand us so that they can anticipate our wants and go get them before we even ask.
In other words, our computers will soon become… aware.
* * *
Apple’s new iPad, unveiled Wednesday, is only part of the next wave of mobile technology that will change everything from how we do our jobs to how we roast our Thanksgiving turkey. Though the iPad might not live up to its hype, it is certain that devices like it, and entrepreneurs like Opat, are creating a new way of working and living, filled with wonders, fraught with stress.
Our parents thought it was cool to have a remote device to control TV channels; we’re going to have a remote device to control life around us, real and virtual.
Ravi Pendse, a technologist from Wichita State University, loves the new world. He’s director of WSU’s Advanced Networking Research Center, recognized as an authority on routers and other technology.
Like Opat, he says there is a downside: Our new magic could endanger privacy, enhance the porn industry, enable child predators.
The other day at lunch, he pulled out his iPhone, opened a screen: It showed three or four nearby personal and local Internet networks within range of his iPhone, some of them labeled secure, some of them not. Anybody with an iPhone or a laptop, he said, can roll down a street and see which households have unsecured networks running all day and night. Those that are unsecured, you can piggyback on and use for yourself, even though you don’t pay for it. Or, he said, you could tap into someone’s computer and violate their privacy.
“To some people, their computer is their life,” he said. “People need to be more aware.”
So do parents, because of the social networking sites that predators can use to find children.
“Any parent who fails to pay attention to all of this technology, no matter how difficult it is for them to learn, is not doing their job as a parent,” Opat said.
The new world will create and destroy jobs at light speed. We’re all going to have to retrain for jobs constantly. “I worry about the people who won’t keep up,” Opat said.
The new world is already imposing an unsettling burden on the same schools that have suffered budget cuts.
It’s going to require us, as president Jackie Vietti’s Butler Community College is doing now, to rip up classrooms — put in Wi-Fi everywhere, put in plug-ins everywhere… and start over, creating a new system of education.
* * *
Technology grows fast; costs are dropping fast.
At the National Institute for Aviation Research in Wichita, director John Tomblin’s staff, with only $5,000 and a flat screen they bought at Best Buy, have created a Virtual Reality Center, where they can build 3-D airplane prototypes and see whether all the parts in a newly designed plane fit right. The reality center is phenomenally helpful to aerospace.
“We thought the technology for the center was going to cost $2 million until my guys went to Best Buy,” Tomblin said.
Plummeting costs will help Butler, and Wichita Area Technical College, which also endured budget cuts. Those cuts didn’t stop Vietti and her staff from studying how to rip up nearly every classroom, and replace them with flexible “reconfigured spaces” that can be expanded or contracted to keep pace with technology.
“One reason we went ahead with it is that we know we have to,” said Tom Erwin, Butler’s chief of information. “But we also knew that in some ways we didn’t have to buy technology. Students are walking in wired to the ears.”
At Butler, Vietti and Pedro Leite, the dean of the advanced technology center, have created a new degree program for 3-D interactive imaging, to design machine parts or other devices for the aircraft and other industries. Their program links to a four-year program at Kansas State University.
“This kind of 3-D work is becoming so widespread,” Leite said. “We work closely with industry, and you wouldn’t believe what some small companies here are doing now.”
At the new National Aviation Training Center, Wichita Area Technical College is installing virtual paint booths, which amount to a video-game-like technology that allows workers to virtually practice how to paint airplanes, a job requiring skill: The layers must be thin.
When the new training complex is finished, said Randy Roebuck, the technology director, it will include Wi-Fi throughout and a CATIA lab — CATIA stands for Computer-Aided Three-dimensional Interactive Applications — teaching how to make aircraft and their parts.
All this change has challenged public schools everywhere and created a divide between students who text-message and teachers who enforce policy by telling them to turn off their phones.
Pendse (and Roebuck from WATC) think Butler is right to embrace students’ technology.
They think schools need to let kids turn everything on. Technology is expensive, Pendse said, and creative teachers could get their students excited about education by asking them to, for example, text friends in other states, ask them about their states, their geography, their politics, their weather. In other words, make texting a teaching tool instead of a violation, he said.
Students who don’t have devices should be given access to them, he said.
The only problem with doing it, Roebuck said, is that the public schools, lacking bandwidth now, need to rewire themselves to be all Wi-Fi. But they need to go all Wi-Fi anyway, he said.
Lecturing from a podium is not going to work anymore, Roebuck said.
* * *
A Kansas kid, Opat made a name for himself in Hollywood on-set graphics, in movies like “Iron Man” and “Transformers” over the past few years.
“But I’m getting out of the movie business, and I’m looking now at retail,” he said.
He’s not just “looking at” it; he’s trying to reinvent it.
Virtuals don’t require wages, he said. That may sound like he’s trying to eliminate jobs, but businesspeople all over the country have told him they have a hard time hiring concierges and some salespeople. Employers have told him they lose them frequently, after spending a lot of time training them how to sell.
In contrast, a Virtual Liz would never quit on you, Opat said. She’d dress professionally, show up on time. “And in creating her, we’re creating jobs in businesses like mine.”
He’s been showing Liz all over the country, to hospitals, retailers, Intrust Bank Arena, casinos in Las Vegas, aircraft companies.
At IMG last week, Opat stepped up to a 6-foot-by-6-foot transparent screen and flicked his hand, inches from the glass. Virtual Liz popped up with a Star-Trek whooshing sound effect. “Welcome to IMG,” she said, smiling invitingly.
“Here are your choices!” She flicked her hands outward, as though sowing grain. Like magic, four boxes appeared below her chest, where her hands had flicked.
Opat pointed at (but did not touch) one of the boxes, and poof! Virtual Liz disappeared, then reappeared, this time talking about the specifics of the box Opat had pointed at.
Nearby, the real-life Liz Rizo stood grinning, arms folded, dressed in the same navy-blue business outfit worn by her avatar.
A 2001 graduate of Northwest High School and a single mother of two, she said she did not at first understand everything Opat wanted her to do in shooting the scenes that created her avatar.
“But I do now. And I think this really is the future.”
“He’s really smart,” she said of Opat. And she said he’s not just smart about technology, but people too.
Opat showed that now.
One thing he said he saw, when he set up his transparent Liz in other places, was that “people really were sucked in by the image before them, so much so that they wanted to interact.”
Little children came up to Virtual Liz and touched her nose playfully.
Men came forward.
And they touched her, too.
Opat, grinning, reached out and pointed at Virtual Liz’s nose.
Virtual Liz lit up with a smile and a giggle.
“That tickles!” she said.
Then Opat pointed at her shoulder.
Which was not exactly where the other men had touched her.
Virtual Liz jerked backward, crossed her arms, her face ablaze with anger.
“Stop that!” she said.
AUGMENTED REALITY
Imagine you’re lost, on a walk along the Charles River in Cambridge, Mass., where you’ve never been. You walk past a shop, hold up your super-smartphone, which is talking to the building. It tells you at a glance who works in that business, and their telephone number, e-mail and sales pitch. Then it tells you where you can catch the train to have lunch at the Green Dragon near the Boston Commons.
GESTURE RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY
So, you know how to click and drag images across your computer screen with your mouse? What an antique you are. Imagine instead that your biggest wall at home is your screen, and with a gesture, you can watch last week’s “House” episode, and also watch Monday Night Football, while paying bills and surfing Facebook. A camera reads the movements of your hands and communicates the movements to the computer.
SEMANTIC-AWARE APPLICATIONS
Your computer is no longer your mute data slave but your semi-conscious servant. It studies what you write and what you search for, and begins to anticipate your every Internet want and need.
VIRTUAL REALITY
Imagine 3-D holograms in which engineers can design 3-D airplanes and know whether everything fits. Aviation engineers are already doing this, wearing 3-D goggles. Now imagine talking holograms and avatars, working for you, listening politely as you blab on and on about some silly passion.
CLOUD COMPUTING
Tired of losing your family photos and favorite silly poem every time your hard-drive crashes? Technologists have invented the cloud, with vast storage capacity, floating out there in the ether. Stick your stuff on the cloud, in Google Docs, or some other application. Six months later, you lost your password to retrieve it all, but when you get a new password, you look, and it’s all still there.