Breakfast Bytes Brought to You By... KQED?

If you live in the Bay Area, you have almost certainly heard KQED's Forum program, at least occasionally. It is on every weekday from 9-11am, hosted for over 25 years by Michael Krasny. It is also available, delayed a few days, as a podcast. Of course, normally it is recorded at KQED's studios in San Francisco, but sometimes it goes on the road. Recently, they did a tech version live from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. As usual, the show is really two separate shows, on two separate topics, complete with opening, a break for the hourly news, the program itself, and closing credits.

I went along to watch the show being made. Once, when I lived by the ballpark in San Francisco, KFOG broadcast from 6-10am from Public House, the bar across the street, back in the days when KFOG was in its previous incarnation and the morning show was presented by Dave Morey. They were serving free coffee and breakfast so I wandered over to watch that at about 7am. KQED has a rather different vibe.

Fake News

The first hour was about fake news. Since this isn't a political blog, I'll largely skip what was said. I'll just point out a couple of things that I thought were totally tone-deaf.

Sally Lehman, who is the director of the journalism and ethics program at Santa Clara University, said she works on the "trust project" which helps people identify good news online, an affirmative signal versus a negative one. She wanted to "differentiate Mother Jones, which is deeply investigated high quality, versus something funded entirely by a partisan organization." If one end of a scale is fake news, I just feel that if your idea for the other end of that scale is Mother Jones (or Breitbart for that matter) then your scale is wrong.

Later, Laura Sydell, the digital cultural correspondent for NPR, said, "there is a huge difference between citizen journalism and professional journalism." I think that is debatable. Some professional journalism is very partisan and not well written, and some citizen journalism (blogs and so forth) are very good and written by knowledgeable people. I don't know if Breakfast Bytes qualifies as citizen journalism or professional. It is no secret that Cadence pays me, but many places refuse to treat me as "real" press. I'm just not one of these places that suck up all the press releases. The value I add (and it is up to you, the reader, to decide how much I add) is based on my decades in the industry, not that I went to journalism school or write the most beautiful prose.

Whether professional journalists deserve their jobs is at the heart of a lot of the discussion of journalism. Journalists seem to truly believe that they are, in some deep sense, better investigators, more impartial, better writers. But the reason I think it is tone-deaf is that the media as a whole completely missed the biggest story in decades last November. Now would be a good time to be a little more circumspect about just how good professional journalism is, when I can't think of a single name-brand journalist who earned their money on that story. It turned out that they were selling fake news, although not deliberately. Their posturing after the event is a bit like Monty Python's Election Night Special where one of the panelists claims, "It's just like I predicted...except the other candidate won. I think this is largely due to the number of votes cast."

Augmented Reality

The second hour was about virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality...not to mention what one panelist called real reality. The panelists were:

• Liv Erickson, who was AR and VR team lead and an author
• Ryan Pamplin, VP and Evangelist at Meta, an AR glasses company 
• Peter Rubin, senior editor at Wired
• Tim Merel, CEO at Digicapital and an AR developer

Some definitions got us going. Virtual Reality (VR) is immersive. You wear a headset, everything you see is computer generated. Augmented Reality (AR) has transparency. Some of what you see is the real world, and some is computer-generated. The most famous example is Pokemon Go, which was the first time anyone had seen this sort of technology on a mass scale. The general expectation of the panel is that the basic technology for AR will progress in stages. Initially, on smartphones. Then, on headsets attached to smartphones. The headsets will get smaller until they are more like glasses. Then they won't need the smartphone. In decades, perhaps built into contact lenses.

To win in the hardware part of the market, technology will need to have:

• Apple-quality devices (not necessarily made by Apple)
• All-day battery life
• Connectivity to networks
• An app ecosystem, one company cannot build everything
• Telcos (thought after thinking about it, I'm not sure why they are in there since they are part of the rust-belt of technology)

The situation so far is:

• Mobile-phone-based augmented reality (Pokemon Go) is a... er... reality
• Smart glasses can have an all-day life with a battery pack, which works for the enterprise market but consumers won't go for it
• Devices (like Hololens) have shown the way, but are not consumer devices
• Smart glasses tethered to phones is probably the next step for consumers

One of the interesting areas discussed was ethics, safety, and privacy. With this technology, a lot of what we are doing is uploaded to the cloud. Who should have access to that information?

Even if you ignore the personal data, there is a lot of information that you might think of as very detailed mapping. Should I be able to imagine myself at the pyramids? Sure. in a department store walking around? Probably. What about your living room? Maybe not. But you should probably be able to walk around your living room even if I can't.

Then there is the issue of whether you should know I'm using AR. While the headsets are unwieldy and dorky---or even like Google glasses---it is obvious. But when things become less obtrusive, you might not be able to tell whether I'm really there with you or watching something else. Maybe my glasses are analyzing your voice and giving me a measure of whether they think you are lying or telling the truth. Or feeding everything you say to someone else, even when you think it is private.

There is another problem as the technology gets better, and this time for the user. Once it is so good that images in the AR field are completely convincing, do the artificial ones need to be tagged in some way to distinguish them? Obviously, if you are talking to a single person that is not a big problem. But if you are in a meeting with a dozen people, and some of them are really in the room with you but some are not, and you can't tell the difference, that might be problematic.

Another possible issue is AR pulling people away from reality. If your neighborhood is bad and all the trees are dead, then add some virtual trees. There needs to be more focus on reality, someone in the audience said. Actually, the problem is that's debatable. Growing real trees might be a really expensive way to beautify a neighborhood, as compared to just simulating them for everyone there. But that's maybe getting too like The Matrix or Inception.

A question was asked about Rainbow's End, a book I have not read. In this book, different groups apparently have their own different augmented realities. Peter said it is a wonderful book. I went onto Amazon and ordered it using my real reality MacBook, with the tactile interface (aka keyboard).

Virtual Trolls

Having gone from fake news to fake reality, the parting image was to imagine toxic behavior online, such as some comment threads, happening in your personal space. When AR is convincing, threatening behavior will seem really threatening, even if it is only a computer image. Trolls will actually look like trolls.