Monthly Archives: March 2014

Swallowed Up

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the-oculus-rift-virtual-reality-headset-will-blow-your-mindThere has been a lot of online chatter about Facebook’s two recent big buyouts of minnow companies; a whopping $19 billion for WhatsApp and a further $2 billion for Oculus Rift. The first has millions of users and the second is the latest must have gadget for gaming that hasn’t even hit the streets yet – virtual reality goggles. And it was only last year Facebook spent $1 billion on buying Instagram.

One can’t help smiling for the bought out folk; many of whom will have or will become millionaires, thanks to Mark Zuckerberg’s latest spree. It would not surprise me if every geeky school kid’s dream now is to be part of a promising start-up that Facebook then acquires for billions. A bit like when every aspiring artist in the 90s hoped that Charles Saatchi would drop by their end of year art college show and buy up all of their work for lots of money.

In total, Facebook have now hoovered up at least 46 companies. According to Wikipedia most of these are ‘talent acquisitions’ that are then shut-down. Mark once said, “We have not once bought a company for the company. We buy companies to get excellent people… One of the ways to do this is to focus on acquiring great companies with great founders.”

But there must be more that Facebook intends to do with its recently procured ‘billions bounty’ than swallow up bright sparks. Getting the very best people doesn’t cost that much. After all, we can attract some of the best PhD students and professors at UCL for a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of that. They are onto something bigger and more daring. Mark is moving into the world of UX, “we feel we’re in a position where we can start focusing on what platforms will come next to enable even more useful, entertaining and personal experiences.” He is gearing up for the next big thing – post social media. Instead of looking down at a mobile 2D screen we will be interacting with our friends in the here and now through 3D goggles. It will be an intense immersion that gamers all dream of. Moreover, it will be able to overlay the virtual and physical environments to appear seamless, where digital avatars and objects will populate a world of real people and objects. If we suspend our disbelief we will find it difficult to know what is actual and what is digital.

While many companies and academic researchers have been working on the ultimate Virtual Reality dream for a while, it seems Oculus Rift were moving full steam ahead of the game. A colleague at UCL, Will Steptoe, has been experimenting with overlaying webcams on the Oculus goggles to enable virtual and video spaces to fuse into one, in order to create a truly immersive augmented reality experience. In doing so, he hopes to blur the lines between what is real and what is virtual. It looks pretty cool and not surprising he is in big demand.

But could an immersive Facebook truly enhance our experience of how we interact and communicate with people remotely? How many of us would don a pair of VR goggles, 10 or more times a day (the average number of times someone looks at Facebook on their mobile each day is 14) in order to teleport to a friend’s party, go for a walk in the park, or just hang out, without ever leaving their living room?

While there have been numerous attempts over the last 30 years to create such virtual social spaces, notably Second Life, the Oculus Rift may just have that specialness that will make it happen – provided it can overcome the perennial problems of lag and motion sickness. But it could still be too soon for most of us to contemplate.

fig_02_02 Remember the hype for 3D TV a few years back. Lots of people excitedly bought them but then stopped watching them quite soon afterwards. According to a recent survey 8 out of 10 regret having bought one. Eyestrain, headaches and discomfort are common complaints. Having to share the limited set of glasses that came in the box with everyone in the family plus friends has proven to be one step too far. Many other problems, too, have been discussed by Ted Kritsonis. One wonders if Facebook might have bitten off more than it can chew. But at least they will have secured another sizeable chunk of hot talent.

In my view, nothing beats seeing amazing fish and coral in the real sea, wearing only a good old fashioned snorkelling mask. Yet.
YRsnorkeling

Big Decisions

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For the last few months I have been toying with whether to buy a brand new car or a used one. Everyone tells me to buy one that is a few years old as it is far better value for money. But my gut feeling is to go for a new one that had all the bells and whistles I want rather than those chosen by someone else – even if financially it does not make sense. The final countdown to what to do was a close shave that caused me much stress. Eventually, my heart ruled rather than my head. In a couple of months a new beauty will be delivered to me.

Throughout our lives we are confronted with making a number of such big ticket decisions, not just what kind of, or indeed whether, to buy a car, but also when moving to a new house, which university to go to, whether to change jobs and so on. For these kinds of life-changing choices we typically begin by doing lots of research, partly to reassure ourselves that we are selecting the best option according to certain criteria, such as reliability, price, reputation or new opportunities. To do otherwise, such as based on a hunch, would be rash and unwise. During this comparative process, we weigh up many options, read other’s reviews, prioritizing, and talking to others about our current thinking, all the time juggling the various criteria in our heads.

the big decisionMuch has been written about the rational decision-making processes that are involved. A commonly accepted view in the fields of economics, psychology, and consumer behaviour is of unbounded rationality; that states decisions are best made by gathering and processing all available information. Once, all the information has been sifted and sorted through, we can then make a well-informed decision. In contrast, the perspective of bounded rationality argues that we often make decisions with much less information, because of limited time, information, and computational abilities. Instead of processing all the available information and considering all the options, we often make surprisingly good decisions simply by using “fast and frugal” heuristics, which are rules of thumb or short-cut choice strategies that ignore most of the available information. The trick is to ignore the unnecessary pieces of information, and just search for the few pieces of information that will be most useful, or the few most appropriate options, and process them appropriately. To do this, we use search heuristics that look for options only until one is found that is good enough or “choice heuristics” that seek as little information as possible to determine which option should be selected.

In my case, I knew which car I wanted from the get go based on a gut instinct. However, because it was such a big decision, I looked at the internet flow of information in order to be more sensible. I don’t know how many reviews I read and how many people I talked to before stopping my search. But I ended up choosing what I felt I wanted 6 months ago. I wonder how many of us do the same – following our instincts but prolonging the anxiety by going through a drawn out decision-making process to justify it to ourselves and others.

So what is the role of technology in all of this? Has it helped or hindered, vindicated or confused? Especially for those of us who were born only ever knowing life through laptop fingertips?

Howard Gardner and Katie Davis in their new book “The App Generation” note how the app mentality developing in the psyche of the younger generation is making it worse for them to make their own decisions because they are becoming more risk averse. By this they mean that young people are now depending on an increasing number of mobile apps that remove the risks of having to decide for themselves. They will first read what others have said on social media sites, blogs and recommender apps before choosing where to eat, where to go, what to do, what to listen to, etc. Moreover, they often leave it until the last minute, micro-coordinating their arrangements with their friends, before deciding. They will wait and see if a better offers comes their way rather than making a decision for themselves, a week in advance, say, to see a movie with a friend and sticking to it.

But, relying on a multitude of apps means that young people are becoming increasingly more anxious about making decisions by themselves. For many, their first big decision is choosing which university to go to. This has become an agonizing and prolonged experience where both parents and apps play a central role in helping them out. They will read countless reviews, go on numerous visits to universities with their parents over several months, study the form of a number of league tables, read up on what others say on social networking sites, and so on. But in the end, I wonder if it was all that necessary. They may finally end up choosing where their friends are going or the one they liked the look of in the first place. Many will have spent hours, weeks, and even months talking about it, reading up on it, listening to lots of advice and procrastinating right down to the wire. Compared to previous pre-internet generations they wont have made the decision by themselves.

Technology, it seems may now be hindering not helping us with making big decisions.

Special Collections

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senate_library This week I went inside a real library. One made of bricks and mortar. I can’t remember the last time I went in one or what for – if I am honest, probably a few years ago. It feels like a shocking admission, especially since I work in academia. Libraries are our sustenance, where we obtain our knowledge. The stacks, the periodicals, the rows of books all neatly lined up in Dewey style used to be where you would find us browsing on a regular basis. But the Internet has changed all of that. Most of us now do our knowledge work by accessing the multiple digital libraries, databases and pdfs that are readily available at our laptop fingertips. Google, too, has made it even more easy to sample an increasing number of books in digitized form.

But Special Collections in libraries retain their specialness. Last Monday I visited one at Leicester University. The reason they are special is that they contain numerous archived collections that are often donated to them, by a local historian, politician, artist or other philanthropist. For example, at Leicester amongst many is the Dyos Collection, the Gorrie Collection and the Hatton Collection. The collections include rare books, pamphlets, papers, etc., from the person whom they are named after, such as the political memorabilia of Archibold Gorrie. Many of them have yet to be digitized and so can only be seen in the physical library where they are housed.

book_pillowMy reason for coming to Leicester University’s one was to delve into the Diplomatic Collection transferred from the Commonwealth Library after it became defunct (I was doing some research into my family history). It comprises 217 boxes of lists of diplomatic, consular and foreign service. I had requested to look at Box 140 that listed the diplomatic corps, consular corps and other foreign representatives for a given country. I’d discovered these existed through browsing Google and then the library catalogue. There was something antiquated about the place. The collections are hidden away in the bowels of the library to protect them and only brought out on request. The viewing room had no windows, just artificial light. Other protective measures included having to put my bag in a locker and being only allowed to use a pencil. But strangest of them all, was the presence of over-sized white cushions on each desk that looked like miniature futons. The librarian who welcomed me in (who had all the qualities you would expect – curious, rule-abiding, knowledgeable, methodical and very nice) told me they were there to protect the spines of the large rare books that are sometimes requested. How quaint.

I sat down and looked at the red box folder that was placed in front of me – it looked, itself, about 50 years old. I pushed back the metal clasp and opened it up. Inside were about 30 small green and red books all lined up in order of their year of listing. The first one I took out was from 1959. The pages were a faded yellow brown and the type font from a typewriter that had not seen the daylight for as many years. The one page I wanted to check was still attached to the next one. I was fearful I might rip the page in the wrong way so I asked the librarian to do it. She was delighted and went off in search of a paper knife. When she returned she diligently went through the whole book slicing up the pages that were cojoined.

I was transported back to another time and place, imagining who the people were and what they did in their diplomatic roles – behind the listed names of Brigadier M. d’Aude-Shaw, Major B.C. Butler and so on. A world full of diplomats, attaché cases and special car number plates in far flung places. The smell, colour and texture of the paper, with its embossed higgledy typewritten print, evoked a powerful train of memories and thoughts that digital print never does for me. It was sheer joy to let my mind move in mysterious ways. Usually when I am pottering through digital collections on the internet I jump all over the place, from one site to the next, engaging in multiple hops, that often lead me far astray from what I was looking at or thinking about. It can be as equally delightful but a very different form of mind wandering. One is not better than the other but there is something special about being immersed in a special collection that someone has carefully and meticulously catalogued for others to inspect. I doubt if many, if any, people had looked into Box 140. That gave me a visceral thrill to think I was the first and probably only one to do so. Whereas visual analytics can show the number of page views and downloads of digital collections there aren’t any records of what people look at in old boxes of papers. There is something special indeed in this time warp that cannot be digitally catalogued or mined.