Category: Look up at the sky

  • The Uncanny Valley of Zoom backgrounds

    The Uncanny Valley of Zoom backgrounds

    We’ve all been talking about the Zoom experience. How it’s slightly off from the in-person experience, in ways that can be disorienting and exhausting. Yet, in the months since COVID-19 changed everything, we’ve also embraced it, as something that’s not just useful, but offers a close substitute to being in the same room with our fellow humans.

    The disorientation we can feel reminds me of the Uncanny Valley, the idea that emerged from the field of robotics and was taken up in the worlds of virtual reality and computer graphics. It proposes that as robots, or virtual or computer-animated figures come closer to resembling actual humans, they elicit a sense of uneasiness. In this case it’s the virtual experience of online video interactions that’s close to, but doesn’t quite achieve the comfort level of pre-COVID human interaction.

    I haven’t heard any discussions, though, on the uncanny effect of Zoom backgrounds. You’ve probably seen them—shots of the Golden Gate Bridge, or of corner offices with drop-dead, high-rise views. These virtual backgrounds have been around for several years, with video backgrounds appearing more recently. I’m guessing they served two purposes for the mostly corporate intended users of Zoom and related services: first, to add visual zing to presentations, and second, to cover up what might be a participant’s actual, less-than-presentable environment.

    What I’ve seen in the sci-fi/fantasy community is an enthusiastic upending of those conventions. I first noticed it at the Nebula Awards, the convention put on by SFWA, the Science Fiction Writers of America. The Nebulas was one of the first cons to switch from live to virtual, with a dauntingly short lead time to the late-May event. New SFWA President Mary Robinette Kowal rose to the occasion with a “Starship Nebula” theme, and backed it up with a bit of virtual magic: a downloadable porthole template that participants could use as a green screen, allowing them to show a shimmering starscape outside their “cabins.”

    Aydrea Walden, Toastmaster at Nebula Awards 2020,
    with a full complement of virtual portholes showing her proximity to the Galactic core

    As the conference went on, I spotted a number of portholes, working as promised. Toastmaster Aydrea Walden sported a double phalanx of portholes during the awards ceremony. But I also saw:

    • A participant’s t‑shirt, turned into a window on the vacuum of deep space
    • A stuffed dinosaur whose surface rippled with galactic winds
    • Floors and walls falling away into nothingness, leaving bookshelves standing by themselves
    Benjamin C. Kinney at the Nebulas wearing deep space panorama

    Nebula nominee Mimi Mondal managed to make her own still Zoom floral background come alive, as she seemingly dissolved and reappeared from a cluster of giant tropical flowers. She explained later that she was playing with the settings, adjusting for the similarity between her skin-tone and the wall behind her.  The result was that a bug—the sometimes unstable edge between the foreground subject and the background image on Zoom—turned into a feature, as Mimi’s outline softened and merged with the flowers, while the flowers’ colors pulsed with a shifting brightness.

    Sci-fi folks are apparently willing to dive head-first into the Uncanny Valley of Zoom. They show a playfulness toward representations of reality that reflects the baseline of the field—speculating on what-ifs, moving variables around to get a new view. They’re not freaked out by solid objects turning into negative space, or by their own forms being impinged on.

    Nebula Winner Cat Rambo with her bookshelves hovering in the vastness of space

    The enduring popularity of cosplay, which grew out of sci-fi Cons, offers another example of this zest for transformation. It also reminds me of one of the earlier online manifestations of personal malleability, the imaginative screen-names you can still see on sites like Reddit and Twitter, but not Facebook.

    This doesn’t erase the genuine disorientations of online meeting spaces, or the fact that they can’t fully replace the human experience of sharing a physical space. But it feels like we’re witnessing something that could evolve into a new, hybrid form of online expression—another small, positive development to come out of our very strange and difficult Pandemic year.

    Zoom-based image by photographer Jen Kertis-Veit

    Will this playful hacking of the Zoom experience jump into the mainstream? I hope so. Does it have other antecedents that I’ve missed? If you can think of any, let me know.

     

  • Looking at the Northern Lights

    Looking at the Northern Lights

     

    Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights

    The Aurora Borealis—that mysterious shimmer of light appearing sometimes in the night sky—is a great thing to contemplate now during Hanukkah, our Festival of Lights, and so close to the Winter Solstice. You can’t even plan to see the Aurora, this huge, otherworldly phenomenon, one of the strangest of light events on earth. You just have to show up where it might be seen and hope one will reveal itself.

    What is the Aurora Borealis, anyway? It was named for Aurora, the Roman goddess of dawn, and for Boreas, the north wind, in the 17th century, and often just called the Northern Lights.

    Before scientists teased out the secrets of the Northern Lights, the Kwakiutl and Tlingit people of Alaska interpreted them as the dancing of human spirits. The Inuit people of Labrador identified them as the torches held by spirits from the true heavens beyond the sky, meant to lead newly arrived spirits on the right pathway. The Algonquin Indians said that they were the reflection of fires built by the Creator, who retired to the north after he finished his work, kept burning to remind the people that he still thinks of them.

    The story told by scientists is just as incredible. Our sun throws off constant small storms of plasma—masses of electrified gas ejected out from its surface. These fly out in all directions on the solar wind. When they get near enough to the earth, they slide across our magnetosphere—the giant electromagnetic body that surrounds us, basically shielding us from getting too much radiation from the sun and the cosmos.

    Earth's magnetosphere absorbing solar plasma
    Earth’s magnetosphere absorbing solar plasma, still from animation at http://wimp.com/borealisaurora/

    Some of the plasma is pulled in and sucked toward the north and south poles, where it interacts with elements in the stratosphere. Here’s a great animation showing this process.

    This interaction of particles of sun and earth creates the Aurora Borealis, as well as the Aurora Australis in the southern hemisphere. A green light show, the most common, means that oxygen particles have been more excited by the flux of free electrons and positive ions, at an altitude of up to 150 miles. The rarely appearing red Aurora means it’s happening even higher than that. Blue or violet light shows reveal the involvement of nitrogen particles at a lower altitude. Sometimes the Aurora appears as undulating curtains, sometimes as swirling lines, or merely a soft allover glow. We now have numerous images, and even videos taken from space, showing how globe-spanning a single event can be.

    Aurora seen from space
    Aurora seen from space, Wikimedia Commons

    Have you seen the northern lights? I haven’t, but I hope I’ll be lucky enough to see them with my own eyes someday. It will be a chance for an up-close encounter with an off-world astrophysical effect, without the need for filters or lenses—a direct experience of the vast electromagnetic environment around us as it briefly drops into the visible realm, to become a stunning spectacle of light in the darkness.

     

     

     

     

     

     

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