Inspiration for the Holodeck

In 1965, Ivan Sutherland imagined the goal of virtual reality with his 'ultimate display,'

The ultimate display would, of course, be a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter….With appropriate programming such a display could literally be the Wonderland into which Alice walked.

Sutherland 2002, 256 

Many people might have assume that Sutherland’s  was the inspiration for the ‘Holodeck’ featured in the television series, Star Trek the Next Generation. However, according to the Wikipedia entry for 'Holodeck,' this is not the case. Gene Dolgoff, the inventor of digital projection, claims to have suggested the idea to Gene Roddenberry in 1973, when the two spent the day together. The source for the Wikipedia article linked to a netcast for a show called ‘Home Geek Theater,’ where Dolgoff made that claim, but I could not find the actual mention of holodecks transcribed anywhere. So I decided to rectify that for other net surfers who may travel the same journey as I did.

(It would be nice btw, it the person who provided the account of the meeting of Roddenberry and Dolgoff would add a citation for the source of their information).




  -->

Transcript (49:51 – 51:46)

Scot Wilkinson – So I’m just gonna ask you one more question about 3D and that is the future of 3D. I know you wanted to spend a lot of time on this and we don’t have a lot of time, but I would like to get you hit on, um, ah, you mentioned we would eventually see our 3D displays go towards holography and this is very exciting to me. Of course I watch Star Trek and most of our audience probably does and they know of the holodeck, where you go in and it looks like you’re actually in an environment which is holographically generated, ah, I don’t imagine we’re gonna see that any time soon, but, ah, ah, I have seen some prototype holograph displays that were not very impressive, they were like just line drawings or dot drawings. You seeing the potential for something better than that in the foreseeable future?

Gene Dolgoff – Yes, let me first say that the Holodeck was my idea.

Scot Wilkinson – What?

Gene Dolgoff – Yeah, I worked with Gene Roddenberry, ah, back in ’73, I think it was.

Scot Wilkinson – No kidding!

Gene Dolgoff – Um yeah, I showed him holographs, I told him all about holography and I specifically explained to him, when he had the first Star Trek, ‘Look, this is the future and the future’s gonna have holography and you’re not depicting it in the show, that’s not right.’ And so I spent a lot of time brainstorming with him and, er, we came up with the holodeck idea. Er, I took it further and I said, ‘Not only that all the displays of the ship should be holographic.’ He said ‘yeah, but how we gonna show that on the show?’ So it just stayed the holodeck the way it is, the way you go inside it you see another reality, but yeah that was my development.

Scot Wilkinson - That’s incredible, that’s incredible.

References

Sutherland, I. E. (1965). ‘The ultimate display.’ In Packer, R., & In Jordan, K. (2002) Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality. New York: Norton, pp. 252-6. Available online from: projects.vrac.iastate.edu/hci580x/.../Sutherland-The-Ultimate-Display.pdf‎

Wilkinson & Dolgoff (2011) ‘3D Mayhem’. Home Theater Geeks Episode 74: Retrieved 06 06 13 from http://twit.tv/htg74

A HARVEY SACKS LEXICON

I have been reading the early lectures of Harvey Sacks and thought I would share my synthesis of his ideas. Sacks, who died in a car accident in 1975, is best known today as being the founder of conversation analysis (CA). Conversation analysis is a method of analysing recording of naturally occurring conversations, that is conversations which are not the product of social science experiments. To its critics, CA is a method that is obsessed with triviality at the expense of considering the wider themes of sociology. I think what Harvey Sack’s early lectures show is how ill judged that criticism is. Anyway, the lectures in book form are prohibitively expensive so I hope that by giving a platform to some of his ideas on the internet that may be able to bring them to a wider audience.

http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/b_resources/sacks_lexicon.html

And so it came to pass....

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

I recall a paper by Roman Jakobson entitles "The Sex of the Heavenly Bodies" which, after analysing the gender of the words for sun and moon in a great variety of languages, came to the refreshing conclusion that no pattern could be detected to support the idea of a universal law determining the masculinity or the femininity of either then sun or the moon. Thank heaven for that!

Teresa De Lauretis, (1987). Technologies of gender: Essays on theory, film, and fiction. Theories of representation and difference. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. p4

If I had to get 'ink done', it had better be something astonishing on my arm. This would design be a strong contender. Amazing!

The myth of digital versus analogue

Digitisation changes media not materially but at the level of the code. For example a digital video camera works in the exactly the same way as an analogue video camera, in that the light rays travel through a lens and strike a charge couple device where they are converted into electricity, it is only then that these electrical signals are digitised (that is to say turned into binary code: whereas analogue video signals are transmitted or stored in electronic for as fluctuations in voltage). Those who wish to emphasise a categorical distinction between digital and analogue media should consider that digital transmission and analogue transmission both use radio waves, and that digital and analogue recordings both user electromagnetism.

Kress and van Leeuwen (2001, 97) and Bolter and Grusin (2000, 105) to name but two sets of the best new media theorists who into this trap, talk about differences between digital and analogue in terms of ontology: there are different kinds of media. For example Kress and van Leeuwen state that the primitives that make up an analogue photograph (silver halides) are different to the primitives that make up a digital photograph (pixels). While at one level and dimension this is true, what is also true is that the material composition of the primitives do not radically alter the nature of the image itself since a photograph is about the image not about the material means of realising that image. (For if it were otherwise digital photographs would have a different quality and the technology would not have been such a good candidate to replace analogue). This confusion derives from a misdirected analytical scrutiny that looks at the material rather than the code, however, a photograph is not meaningful because it is made of silver halides its meaningful because the patterns of light and shade be they created by silver halides of in pixels are interpreted as images.

It is not hard to mistake, for instance a digital image with an analogue image; usually digital images are found on computers whereas analogue images are found on walls in the form of painting or photographic prints. It may be argued that a digital image can assume this form also. But if this is so, then they are no longer digital image (because it exists in print-form on paper not on a computer. Conversely, an analogue photograph may be digitised, in which case it is no longer an analogue image but a digital image that exists on a computer.

The real confusion emanates once media has been encoded and printed out to be distributed or transmitted as mass media. A photograph that has originated digitally when it is seen in a newspaper or on television cannot be distinguished from a photograph that has originated using analogue processes. Because both now have the same materiality in that form (they are in face both analogue photographs). The problem is that whereas before there was some guarantee in the fidelity of the image, to the object it represented (largely for the reason that it was too time consuming or costly to manipulate the image using airbrushing techniques). Now there can be no such guarantees. So people conclude that digital photographs have no indexicality. However, this is not precise enough. Digital images do have indexicality, in that they accurately represent the light rays that were present at the scene at the moment they were taken. They have in fact as much indexicality as analogue images when they leave the camera. The difference lies at the level of the code. For an image once digitalised can be manipulated at the level of the pixel using Photoshop software which produces photorealistic results (and because many of the operations have been automated by the software such manipulations are quick and cheap to do).

But the point I wish to emphasise, is that it is only at the level of the code that such ontological distinction meaningfully apply, since when the code is realised in a material form, all the affordances of digital no longer apply. Therefore what theories that posit an ontological distinction between digital and analogue are doing is reaching back (as it were) through the code to reify those differences in a material form. This is why digital verses analogue is a myth.

References

Bolter, D.J. & Grusin R (2000) Remediation: Understanding New media. London. MIT.

Kress, G & van Leeuwen T. (2001) Multimodal Discourse. London. Arnold