This afternoon I doodled while watching artist Jeremy Deller’s documentary Everybody In The Place: an Incomplete History of Britain 1984?–?1992.
Acid house is often portrayed as a movement that came out of the blue, inspired by little more than a handful of London-based DJs discovering ecstasy on a 1987 holiday to Ibiza. In truth, the explosion of acid house and rave in the UK was a reaction to a much wider and deeper set of fault lines in British culture, stretching from the heart of the city to the furthest reaches of the countryside, cutting across previously impregnable boundaries of class, identity, and geography.
At one point in the documentary he shows a bunch of students one of my favorite clips of all-time: a bunch of people in a club Detroit in 1981 dancing to Kraftwerk’s “Numbers.”
“I’m happy that I live on a planet where that happened once,” he says.
Apps als WhatsApp testen met regelmaat nieuwe functies, die uiteindelijk naar het grote publiek uitgerold kunnen worden. In een nieuwe bètaversie van de app zit deze keer een optie om gemakkelijker veel foto’s te delen, ontdekte WABetaInfo.
Stel, je bent een dagje uit geweest met vrienden en wil nu de foto’s van die dag delen. In WhatsApp moet je dan eerst één foto selecteren, waarna je in een scherm komt waar je deze kunt aanpassen en waar je een tekstje aan het bericht kunt toevoegen. Pas als je in dat scherm bent, kun je ook meer foto’s selecteren om te delen. Je kunt dus niet in één keer alle foto’s selecteren die je naar je vrienden wil sturen.
In de nieuwe bètaversie van de app komt daar verandering in. Daarin zit namelijk een nieuwe knop, waarin je geselecteerde foto’s en video’s in één keer in hoge kwaliteit kunt versturen.
Direct versturen, zonder aanpassen
Ook wordt het scherm waar je foto’s kunt aanpassen overgeslagen. In plaats daarvan kun je direct een berichtje toevoegen aan de foto en deze delen. Wil je foto’s nog wel aanpassen, dan kun je op een edit-icoontje klikken. Dezelfde mogelijkheden blijven dus bestaan, maar je hoeft niet meer eerst langs dat extra scherm als je een foto niet wil aanpassen.
WhatsApp heeft verder ondersteuning toegevoegd om een berichtje toe te voegen aan een compleet album. Tot nu toe wordt slechts één foto van de tekst die je schrijft voorzien, waarna de rest los wordt gedeeld. Maar in de nieuwe bèta kun je die tekst toepassen op het volledige album, zodat je gemakkelijk context kunt geven aan de foto’s. Ook worden al die foto’s die je deelt automatisch gegroepeerd in een enkel bericht.
Vooralsnog zitten deze functies echter alleen in de bètaversie van de app. Het is dus nog de vraag of ze ook hun weg vinden naar de algemeen beschikbare versie van WhatsApp. Ook is onduidelijk wanneer dat dan zou zijn.
The lawsuit was filed by Ethan Zuckerman, a professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst. He feared that Meta might sue to block his tool, Unfollow Everything 2.0, because Meta threatened to sue to block the original tool when it was released by another developer. In May, Zuckerman told Ars that he was "suing Facebook to make it better" and planned to use Section 230's shield to do it.
Zuckerman's novel legal theory argued that Congress always intended for Section 230 to protect third-party tools designed to empower users to take control over potentially toxic online environments. In his complaint, Zuckerman tried to convince a US district court in California that:
1. Over a quarter of a million people now subscribe to my newsletter.
2. I sold my next book:
These things aren’t unrelated: over the past decade, the newsletter has turned into a wonderful playground for me: a place where I can work out my ideas, share what I love, and show my work while I come up with the next thing…
One of the diary-like joys of the Friday newsletter is getting to sit down after a week and figure out if the things in my life have been speaking to each other in any particular way.
Usually, the week is a miscellany — if not cacophony — but often a theme appears.
That theme this week is “collective creativity,” brought about by reading about Prince, jazz, and the work of being in a band. It’s a dense one, and good, I think.
Today’s newsletter was about my shelves of diaries in the studio and my practice of keeping a stack of “on this day” diaries I can re-read when I have a spare minute: “Same but different.”
In today’s newsletter, I write about spending half of a flight to Honolulu drawing a comic while freeze-framing Tim Burton’s Batman:
Planes are excellent places to work, but they’re also excellent places to zone out and to play or do “comfort work” — what I’m calling the creative work we return to when we don’t know what else to do.
Drawing Batman, it turns out, is a great comfort to me!
A reader commented that they’d love to sit across from me on a plane, and it suddenly occurred to me that I left out a huge inspiration from the newsletter: I was sitting on the plane diagonally from a kid drawing, which is what made me get out my diary in the first place!
Here are a few blind contour drawings I made of the kid:
And what I wrote in my diary underneath:
there’s a little kid across the aisle from me who has the most chaotic little marker box and I love it. just scribbling little drawings w/ what looks like EXPO markers and crayons and all kinds of random stuff…
Since the letter takes a turn into kids and the aliveness in the lines that they draw, I can’t believe I left out this detail. But that’s what’s so great about putting work in front of people — the minute you do, you remember everything you left out.
I will often map out a Tuesday newsletter in my notebook, forget I made a map, and write it without my notes. Then when I go back flipping through my notebook, I discover everything I left out!
On the unpleasant side, I left out one of my favorite parts of the section of Katherine Morgan Schafler’s The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Controlthat inspired the letter:
We justify agreeing to get coffee with someone whom we don’t really want to see by saying something like, “It’ll just be half an hour and then I’ll leave.” No. It’ll be the anticipatory anxiety for the week leading up to that half hour, the half hour itself, and then the negative recall of how you felt annoyed and immediately resentful upon sitting down, didn’t want to be there, and couldn’t believe she said that, even though she always says stuff like that, and that’s why you don’t like hanging out with her in the first place….When it comes to agreeing to engage in events we don’t want to engage in, there’s nothing quick about quick catch-up drinks or quick calls or quick meetings.
This adds a layer to the question to ask yourself to avoid accepting invitations you’ll later regret: “Would I do it tomorrow?”
The time travel involved in this calculation is already tricky — who knows how I’ll feel about doing something five minutes from now, let alone five months from now? But if you think about the time leading up to the event and the time coming down from it, suddenly such obligations reveal their bloated shape.
(“The job never kills anybody,” says John Taylor of Duran Duran. “It’s the fucking stuff you do in between.”)
On the pleasant side, I was reminded of how important it is to have something to look forward to, no matter how silly.
All of this, by the way, is a form of playing with your experience of time: by exploiting anticipation and recall, you’re trying to effectively slow down and speed up certain events, and using your memory to shape the story you want to tell about your experience.
Yesterday’s newsletter, “Drawing Eno,” was inspired by seeing Gary Hustwit’s new film Eno and how I’ve been drawing Brian Eno lectures and interviews for over 15 years. Here’s a drawing I made from the generated version of the movie I saw:
I am a big believer that travel doesn’t relieve your problems, it throws them into relief. You see your life in a new light and new shadows. The desert light can be good for this. At its peak, it is harsh and unforgiving, but at dusk and dawn it softens, becomes more mysterious. Every trip has its challenges, but I returned home, as I often do, with a sense of perspective and a clarity about what I want to do next. What more could one ask for? (“Go away so you can come back.”)
What I liked most about New Mexico was being in the forests and the deserts outside of town.
In Benjamin Labatut’s The Maniac, a fictional Richard Feynman says:
Los Alamos was high up on a mesa with tall cliffs carved in dark red earth, lots of trees and shrubs all around. The landscape was breathtaking, the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. Coming from New York, I’d never traveled out to the West before, so I really felt like I was in another world. In Mars or something. It had the strange energy of a sacred space, a haven far away from the civilized world, away from prying eyes, farther than God could see. The perfect spot to do the unimaginable.
Four Tet’s Three is one of my favorite albums of the year, so I was delighted to come across an interview with Kieran Hebden on the Tape Notes podcast discussing its making. He rarely gives interviews, so before listening, I really knew nothing about him or how he works. It was a delight to hear about the making of a record I’ve spent so much time with.
Four Tet’s music is extra special to me because my 11-year-old composer and I both love it — I put “Loved” on my February mixtape and Owen put “Lush” on the mixtape we collaborated on this month. It was wild to me to hear Hebden describe how he works in Ableton, drawing the notes on the piano roll instead of playing them on the keyboard. (Something I see Owen do a ton when he’s composing.)
I really loved Hebden’s attitude towards making music after many decades. He says that if he can stay excited about listening to music and enjoy the making of it while also avoiding the trappings of success and the bog of the industry, that it actually makes the work more successful. Just a wonderful listen.
When he was asked about his most important piece of equipment, he said his hi-fi system because it’s what helps him listen to music in a level of detail that helps him really explore and hear sounds. (Check out the gigantic ongoing Spotify playlist of what he’s listening to.)
This emphasis on listening came up over and over again in the interview, and I wanted to copy down his advice to other musicians: Listen to more music.
“Listening to a lot of music and really exploring it and doing that level of investigation of really understanding where things have come from.”
If you listen to a current record now that samples an old nineties record, and then you check out the old nineties record, find out that sample’s like an old soul record for the drum break or whatever.
And then you go listen to the old soul record and then you find out who the drummer was who played that drum break. And it’s like, oh, it’s Bernard Purdy or whatever.
And then you look on Wikipedia and check out all the other records he made. And then you’re like, oh, he worked with this producer a lot and you check out what that producer did.
To listen to music in that way and explore it and study it, I think is hugely valuable in terms of learning how to be a good arranger, a good producer, a good musician. The more you take in of understanding the sort of like great music that’s out there and the things that came before, it’s so powerful.
Everything’s there, all the information’s there. And then if you take everything you learn from that and then combine it with your own ideas and your own emotions and stuff, then you sort of set up to sort of push things forward. I think that’s much more useful than spending all your time being like, I’m just gonna be learning what every single thing in Ableton does now for the next few months…
You’ve got to love records so much, he says, that you want to make something that can sit on a shelf alongside the records you love.
If you want to be a great musician, you need to listen to more great music. If you want to write great books, you need to read more great books. If you want to make great films…
Limas Lin (LinkedIn Contact) is a reader of my blog and wanted to share his block diagram and teardown of the Meta Quest Pro. He sent me these diagrams over a month ago, but I have been busy with videos and blog articles about the companies I met with at CES and AR/VR/MR 2023.
I have more to write about both the Meta Quest Pro plus the recent company meetings, but I wanted to get out what I think are excellent diagrams on the Meta Quest Pro. The diagrams show the location and the teardown photos with most if not all the key components identified.
I don’t have anything more to say about these diagrams or a conclusion as I think images speak for themselves. I know it is a major effort to find all the components and present them in a such a clear and concise manner and want to than Limas Lim for sharing. You can click on each diagram for a higher resolution image.
[March 4th, 2023 Corrections/Updates – poLight informed me of some corrections, better figures, and new information that I have added to the section on poLight. Cambridge Mechatronics informed me about their voltage and current requirements for pixel-shifting (aka wobulation).]
Introduction
For this next entry in my series on companies I met with at CES or Photonics West’s (PW) AR/VR/MR show in 2023, I will be covering two different approaches to what I call “optics micromovement.” Cambridge Mechatronics (CML) uses Shape Memory Alloys (SMA) wires to move optics and devices (including haptics). poLight uses piezoelectric actuators to bend thin glass over their flexible optical polymer. I met with both companies at CES 2023, and they both provided me with some of their presentation material for use in this article.
After discussing the technologies from CML and poLight, it will be got into some of the new uses within AR and VR.
Beyond Camera Focusing and Optical Image Stabilization Uses of Optics Micromovement in AR and VR
Both poLight and CML have cell phone customers using their technology for camera auto-focus and optical image stabilization (OIS). This type of technology will also be used in the various cameras found on AR and VR headsets. poLight’s TLens is known to be used in the Magic Leap 2 reported by Yole Development and Sharp’s CES 2023 VR prototype (reported by SadlItsBradley).
While the potential use of their technology in AR and VR camera optics is obvious, both companies are looking at other ways their technologies could support Augmented and Virtual Reality.
Cambridge Mechatronics (CML) – How it works
Cambridge Mechatronics is an engineering firm that makes custom designs for miniature machines using shaped memory alloy (SMA). Their business is in engineering the machines for their customers. These machines can move optics or objects. The SMA wires contract when heated due to electricity moving through them (below left) and then act on spring structures to cause movement as the wires contract or relax. Using multiple wires in various structures can cause more complex movement. Another characteristic of the SMA wire is that as it heats and contracts, it makes the wire thicker and shorter, causing the resistance to be reduced. CML uses the change in resistance as feedback for closed-loop control (below right).
Show (below right) is a 4-wire actuator that can move horizontally, vertically, or rotate (arrows pointing at the relaxed wires). The SMA wires enable a very thin structure. Below is a still from a CML video showing this type of actuator’s motion.
Below is an 8-wire (2 crossed wires on four sides) mechanism for moving a lens in X, Y, and Z and Pitch and Yaw to control focusing and optical image stabilization (OIS). Below are five still frames from a CML video on how the 8-wire mechanism works.
CML is developing some new SMA technology called “Zero Hold Power.” With this technology, they only need to apply power when moving optics. They suggest this technology would be useful in AR headsets to adjust for temperature variations in optics and support vergence accommodation conflict.
CML’s SMA wire method makes miniature motors and machines that may or may not include optics. With various configurations of wires, springs, levers, ratcheting mechanisms, etc., all kinds of different motions are possible. The issue becomes the mass of the “payload” and how fast the SMA wires can respond.
CML expects that when continuously pixel shifting, they will use take than 3.2V at ~20mA.
poLight – How It Works
poLight’s TLens uses piezoelectric actuators to bend a thin glass membrane over poLight’s special optical clear, index-matched polymer (see below). This bending process changes the lens’s focal point, similar to how the human eye works. The TLens can also be combined with other optics (below right) to support OIS and autofocus.
The GIF animation (right) show how the piezo actuators can bend the top glass membrane to change the lens in the center for autofocus, tilt the lens to shift the image for OIS, and both perform autofocus and OIS.
poLight also proposes supporting “supra” resolution (pixel shifting) for MicroLEDs by tilting flat glass with poLight’s polymer using piezo actuators to shift pixels optically.
One concern is that poLight’s actuators require up to 50 Volts. Generating higher voltages typically comes with some power loss and more components. [Corrected – March 3, 2023]poLight’s companion driver ASIC (PD50) has built-in EMI reduction that minimizes external components (it only requires ext. capacitive load) and power/current consumption is kept very low (TLens® being an optical device, consumes virtually no power, majority of <6mW total power is consumed by our driver ASIC – see table below).
poLight says that the TLens is about 94% transparent. The front aperture diameter of the TLens, while large enough for small sensor (like a smartphone) cameras, seems small at just over 2mm. The tunable wedge concept could have a much wider aperture as it does not need to form a lens. While the poLight method may result in a more compact design, the range of optics would seem to be limited in both the size of the aperture and how much the optics change.
Uses for Optics Micromovement in AR and VR beyond cameras
Going beyond the established camera uses, including autofocus and OIS, outlined below are some of the uses for these devices in AR and VR:
Variable focus, including addressing vergence accommodation conflict (VAC)
Super-resolution – shifting the display device or the optic to improve the effective resolution
Aiming and moving cameras:
When doing VR with camera-passthrough, there are human factor advantages to having the cameras positioned and aimed the same as the person’s eyes.
For SLAM and tracking cameras, more area could be covered with higher precision if the cameras rotate.
Shifting several LEDs to the same location to average their brightness and correct for any dead or weak pixels should greatly improve yields.
Shifting spatial color subpixels (red, green, and blue) to the same location for a full-color pixel. This would be a way to reduce the effective size of a pixel and “cheat” the etendue issue caused by a larger spatial color pixel.
Improve resolution as the MicroLED emission area is typically much smaller than the pitch between pixels. There might be no overlap when switching and thus give the full resolution advantage. This technique could provide even fewer pixels with fewer connections, but there will be a tradeoff in maximum brightness that can be achieved.
Conclusions
It seems clear that future AR and VR systems will require changing optics at a minimum for autofocusing. There is also the obvious need to support focus-changing optics for VAC. Moving/changing optics will find many other uses in future AR and VR systems.
Between poLight and Cambridge Mechatronic (CML), it seems clear that CML’s technology is much more adaptable to a wider range and types of motion. For example, CML could handle the bigger lenses required for VAC in VR. poLight appears to have an advantage in size for small cameras.
Login
