Rosedale: Yes, there might be. It might be something about search and the interface.
Industry Standard: Could it be a hardware thing, like an input device?
Rosedale: It could be. I spent a lot of my life working on that stuff. Did you know that? We worked, initially when we started the company, on this thing called The Rig, which is a hardware interface device that is really, really cool. I'm super into interface devices.
Industry Standard: Are you still working on that now?
Rosedale: Yeah. Not right now, it's all packed up right now, but I could explain it to you and we do little demos of it sometimes. It's pretty cool. It's basically an immersive interface where you get that dreamy VR thing of having your hands in the virtual world. You can look around, but it doesn't use gloves and it doesn't use head (muddled) space. We came up with something else and it's not the Matrix. It's not invasive! [laughter] You don't have to part with your brain stem. I'll explain it you. It's a longer conversation, I'm sure.
It's based on force feedback. I'm sorry, not force feedback, but something (muddled) or something, but it's based on a very interesting idea that it was my idea from 1993. We actually have a patent on it.
If I take this Ottoman and I put these little things that are called strain gauges on it, I don't know if you know what these are?
Industry Standard: No.
Rosedale: They're very, very cheap. It's kind of like the Wii; it's just such a clever idea. They're these little pieces of almost tape that cost nothing. The circuitry associated with reading them is totally free and it's 25 cents for the circuit. I can put these little pieces of tape -- this is a bad example, we've purposely built them, I'm just giving you the example. If I put my hands on this and I can't move, like this thing is really heavy, but I can try to move kind of like when you use a track-point mouse. I do that with both of my hands, my whole hand.
It turns out that if I put the screen in front of me and I render my avatar's hands, it turns out that I cannot move my real hands at all, that all the latency and nausea on this that is associated with VR, this goes away. What happens is my brain sees the hands and then my hands are here and I go, "Turn." I try to go like this, but of course I can't move my hands because it's a glove or whatever. I'm just not going to hold on to it too long.
If I tell my brain, "Turn your hands up like this." You see the digital hands go (motions with hands) and your brain, because the strain gauges can tell how I'm pushing on the chair. So, even though I don't have to move the chair, the strain gauges can detect easily how I'm distorting the wood and they can read. You can do a bunch of math and you can go all the way back to what my muscles must be doing. There's a mapping between what my muscles are doing and how that wood is bending. You can just compute it. It isn't easy but it's not a big deal.
Industry Standard: Now, you mentioned the Wii before. You have also the iPhone which has an accelerometer in it.
Rosedale: I was dreaming about that stuff when I was in college. I was like, "When is somebody going to a make a massive accelerometer?" And I mean, everybody was, not to say that I was always inventing the idea like, "You've got to a chip that can do acceleration!"
Industry Standard: Is there an opportunity, these types of devices and touch interface?
Rosedale: Multi touching interfaces are certainly fascinating. I actually think 3D cameras is one of the things ... we actually have all of the camera prototypes here as well. Do you know what those are?
Industry Standard: Is it looking at you face and then ... ?
Rosedale: Well, it's a really cool thing: there's three companies Canesta, 3DVR, I may get them wrong, but there's like three or four companies that are doing this. They're all competing.
What they have is a camera. So, their goal is to replace the little camera that's in the edge of your laptop screen that's looking at you with a camera that's a little bit smarter. And it makes a big difference.
The "little bit smarter" is it has a radar. So, every pixel in the image that it generates has a fourth pixel which is the distance to whatever it's hitting. So, it's a depth map, a "z-map" of the thing.
It turns out that's the biggest deal ever. Do you know why?
Industry Standard: Why?
Rosedale: It can't find my hands. It takes [artificial intelligence], formal AI. Like, if you're a computer and I say, "I want to build this interface where I can go like this and grab a virtual object or do multi touch without even touching the screen, I can just go like Minority Report"? (waves hands around) It's impossible because the problem is, if my face is in the background, finding my hands ... It's not impossible, but it's basically I need two gigaflops of continuous computing power to find my frickin' hands in the image. It's a very hard problem and our computers are not fast enough yet to do it.
I'm saying it's almost at the edge of AI. It's like pattern recognition that almost requires a human brain to find a hand.
Industry Standard: Is that a Moore's Law issue that will go away in five or ten years?
Rosedale: Yes, it will go away in five or ten years, but it's going away right now because those cameras -- now imagine, all you have to do is adjust the depth filter.
Industry Standard: So, it only gets stuff that's one foot away.
Rosedale: Because the camera's here. Yes, it's just that everything that's more than a foot and half away is painted black. Now, only my hands are left.
Now, any idiot can write a program that tells, for example, which way a rectangle is turned. That's long axis short, axis angled between the top and you've got it.
And then it can also see distance. So, I can take a door in Second Life and just push through it, or I can move like that.
So, I think there's some very interesting opportunities. I think it's possible to -- what we see, multi touch, the iPhone -- in a few years time, [they] will become these hand interfaces. Maybe they'll use pressure, multi touch hand pressure or something. It would be very cool. Maybe we'll touch the screen, I don't know. If you touch the screen you get them dirty, the big ones, but you know, Microsoft's always experimenting with that.
Industry Standard: For 3D cameras ... you've read Snow Crash before?
Rosedale: Sure.
Industry Standard: There's a character in it who makes her mark by developing very good facial expressions.
Rosedale: Juanita.
Industry Standard: Right. And for these cameras, is that another potential killer app for you guys where you can really have real expressions?
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