Randall A. Gordon

What do computer science, business and knitting all have in common? They all have their own language. Within computer science we talk about bits, compilers, pipelines and buses. In the world of business and finance there are p/e ratios, entities, assets and liabilities. If you don’t knit then purling and “the English method” make no sense and good luck trying to understand what “*K2tog, ps; rep from * to end” means.

It is obvious that someone who only knows English can not verbally communicate with someone who only knows Spanish. But it is less obvious when two English speakers come to the table to talk investments and one speaker does not know the language of finance. Unfortunately the conclusion often is that the speaker who lacks financial literacy is simply stupid. This type of attitude holds many people back from fixing his or her problem of ignorance so that he or she remains in the dark forever.

The line between being ignorant and lacking intelligence is a line which is rarely drawn. Ignorance can be fixed. Ignorance is simply a state of not being informed about a subject. This a problem which has a solution through education.

When it comes to literacy about subjects like physics, chemistry and biology the American culture has groomed its citizens to acquire the language of each subject through the university system. But this is not true of subjects like personal finance and investing for retirement. From talking with friends and family, it seems most people receive minimal education on such topics while in high school. Generally I hear they had to take a single class or there was a week or two of personal finance tucked away inside another class. My hope is that this changes promptly. [If anyone has examples of schools which are taking the time to teach students about finance, please let me know in a comment!]

Over the past few years I have slowly but surely been teaching myself exactly what money is and represents, becoming financially literate. While I recognize that there are already a slew of writers tossing their opinion in the ring, I intend to do what I can to help, if only within my small sphere of influence. The first step to fixing a problem is recognizing what the problem is, which from my experiences has generally been simple ignorance of financial language.

If you want to learn more, especially if you feel out of control of your finances, start by reading sites like Motley Fool and subscribe to Get Rich Slowly. Read the writings of authors like Warren Buffet and Robert Kiyosaki. The first step towards literacy is education and the Internet does an amazing job of bringing education into our homes at little to no cost.

To paint your living room you have to remove all the furniture. Then you must lay down covers so the floor does not get paint on it. After that comes the masking of windows, door frames, etc. Now you are ready to get paint all over a set of clothing you don’t particularly care about. Then, hopefully, some of the paint gets on the walls. What if you could skip all of that and change the color and even the texture of your walls just by pressing a few buttons?

To pull off such a feat, augmented reality comes to the rescue! Augmented reality, or AR, is a blending of “true” reality and virtual reality. Generally AR systems use computers to track the motion of objects and use that data to overlay useful information into our field of vision–such as adding virtual objects to the real world. Most applications to date have involved camera setups which track 2D “barcodes” to achieve motion tracking.

A great example of this can be seen in the YouTube video I have embedded below. It shows a demo of such barcode tracking being used to turn everyday objects into fantastical imagery from Harry Potter. A baseball cap turns into the Sorting Hat, a stick turns into a sword, a piece of paper becomes The Marauder’s Map and a cardboard box holds a Golden Snitch.

One hurdle to putting augmented reality into general use is getting such functionality off a computer monitor and placed directly in front of our eyes. Head mounted displays with optics to overlay a screen onto the real world are the common solution. At this point in time, however, commercially available HMDs are bulky and generally in need of wired power sources. But that is changing quickly as more companies put R&D into augmented reality technologies.

So how does this relate to interior design and painting your living room walls? Take a look at the diagram below:

So here we have a gentleman who is ecstatic (if you could see his face, he’s got a huge grin) that he doesn’t have to get covered in paint in order to change the look of his wall. The funny looking symbols on the four corners of the wall are what an AR system would use to track the location of the wall. This would then be used to overlay whatever color, pattern or texture our happy ex-painter wishes. The next diagram shows that he settled on a Victorian wallpaper. Note that the tracking symbols would not be seen by the user of the system, I have simply left them visible as a reference point.

As I mentioned earlier, the easiest way of pulling this off with today’s technology is with a head mounted display. So a major limitation would be that only people who are wearing a HMD would be able to see the texture on the wall. In addition to the HMD, the motion tracking system would also need to be head mounted so the wall doesn’t require a camera to track the user’s head. But as technology proceeds forward, the limitations will disappear. People like Johnny Chung Lee are showing us how to use easily accessed devices like the Nintendo Wii remote to do high quality head tracking. Nanotechnology is driving the size of all technology smaller and smaller so that HMDs will turn into contact lens displays and allow batteries to supply the necessary power to make the systems mobile.

This morning I stopped by IGN.com for the first time in months and immediately encountered an interview with Harald Seeley of CryTek. While the interview is quite interesting, talking about licensing CryENGINE 2 and its future applications, the demo video that they are showing off is the bread and butter. The demo is a recreation of a Sony Bravia advert from 2005 which involved a couple hundred thousand “bouncy balls” that were rolled down a street in San Francisco. For the demo, the balls were replaced with the ever classic 3D model–the teapot!

This demo hits home for me, as I am a proponent of simulated reality technologies. The graphics hardware of tomorrow combined with advanced rendering software like CryENGINE 2 get us one step closer to simulated reality becoming…reality. The demo shows hundreds of thousands of (apparently rubber) teapots bouncing down a modeled street among many cars as bystanders watch wondering what the hell is going on. Take a peek and drool as you realize that video on par with Pixar movies is being rendered in real time.