I’m pretty sure Her will be my favourite movie of all-time (not counting Star Wars) and while I was jazzed we could blog about it, I almost passed on the opportunity because I worried I wouldn’t do the film justice. Her deeply affected me. I saw it in theatres, came home, contemplated every relationship I’ve ever had, then cried. I’d like to think everyone has this experience.
Her, a romantic-comedy, drama science fiction film set in a futuristic utopian Los Angeles, although not exactly farfetched from today’s society, illustrates the monotonous life of Theodore Twombly, an introverted, divorcé, love letter writer for the popular website BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com. Theodore’s career is seemingly paradoxical to his real life, which lacks romance and companionship. Nevertheless, Theodore takes fulfillment in his work and enjoys the intimacy he provides for couples, family members, and friends. It is quite obvious that film writer, director, and producer Spike Jonze intentionally highlights the popularity of such a website that could make an authentic hand written letter for those who are too busy or those unable to articulate their feelings in a meaningful way, demonstrating our societies growing reliance on technologies. In spite of a struggling love life, Theodore appears to be just going through the motions of life rather than actually living. However Theodore’s tedious life is about to take a dramatic turn when an unimaginable, entirely new, operating system (OS) is released. The highly advanced technology functions on an almost chilling personal principle by initially asking character questions of the user, ultimately casting Theodore with his ideal hyper-sophisticated artificial intelligence communicator. In the end a female voice called Samantha is assigned to Theodore. ‘Samantha,’ although not a physical human being is designed to keep the customer of the OS organized, give personal advice, and somehow make intimate suggestions.
As the initial peculiarity wears off, Theodore become far more comfortable with the idea of sharing personal feelings, thoughts, and plans with an OS. As a viewer, I observed the growing relationship between Samantha and Theodore and quickly overlooked that the relationship is between a human and an intelligent software system. The lines begin to blur when Samantha shifts toward a sympathetic and regretful that she was not a living organism. This concept of acceptance of technology to replace human relations is uncomfortably realistic. With current systems such as Siri for iPhone and Skyvi for Android it is apparent that today’s society is not far from advanced operating systems that can hold a conversation with the user.
The relationship is eventually faced with a physical intimacy impasse. Until Samantha suggests bringing forth a “surrogate”; a women willing to play the role of Samantha to fulfill Theodore’s sexual needs. This poses the questions: will there be a future market for surrogates to role-play in a relationship between humans and technology? And how will these affect relations between people? All in all a highly captivating and intriguing concept that may be perceived as unforeseeable however I believe society has already unconsciously entered into this paradigm.
Set in smoggy Los Angeles in the not-so-distant future, Her follows Theodore Twombly, a sad, lonely, and desperate man. With his big moustache, glasses and high-waisted pants – that are apparently back in style – he is nerdy and reserved. Theodore makes his living writing very personal and emotional special occasion letters for other people. This proves to be quite ironic, as he does not have much of his own love in reality. Theodore is alone grieving the loss of an old relationship as his wife has filed for a divorce and has only one good friend. Theodore is very lost, going through the motions of life until something unpredictable changes everything.
Theodore Twombly downloads an upgrade for his current operating system on his computer that also connects to his smartphone and headset. After giving it a woman’s voice, this extremely advanced system names itself Samantha. It starts off with her organizing his emails but then quickly develops into a friendship. Theodore starts to fill this void in his life with Samantha as she is developing at a rapid pace. To him, she is no longer a software but is the first person he talks to when he wakes up and the last person he talks to when he goes to bed. Samantha’s wit, intelligence and warm heart captures Theodore and before he knows it he has fallen deeply in love with his “OS”.
Their love hits a couple of speed bumps when he is embarrassed about telling others about who his new girlfriend really is and when they attempt to involve a surrogate body for taking their love to a physical level. This is the scene in the movie that reminds you about the absurdity of the concept of a man being in love with his computer. This idea of people dating their “OS” becomes an actual reality, as Theodore and Samantha are not the only couple of their kind. In the end, Samantha becomes so technologically advanced that her and the other operating systems believe that the best thing for them is to leave their human relationships behind as they want to be human as well. Theodore is once again alone and is forced to reconnect with the human relationships in his life.
This movie was very intriguing and entertaining as the line between human and machine is blurred and you are reminded about the craziness involved with being in love. The amount of dependence on operating systems reminded me of Super Sad True Love Story and the need for their aparats. Although this movie was serious and heartfelt, I couldn’t help but still laugh a bit at the thought of someone falling in love with his or her operating system. However, this could be the norm soon enough as technology continues to develop at such a high rate.
Watch the trailer here
Sword Art Online is an anime set in the near future about an MMORPG called SAO. In this future video games are played using the Nerve Gear, a helmet that sends the environment straight into the player’s brain and then intercepts their nerve impulses and uses them as the controller for the players character. This causes their real world body to be unable to move until they log out in game. With this technology playing a video game is just like going to another world.
On the first day of SAO ten thousand player log in to play for the first time. The game’s creator greets them in the game and announces that they will be unable to log out until they beat the final boss, and if they die in the video game their helmets will use radiation to fry their brains in real life. This forces the players to live in a virtual world as they try to clear the game and escape back to reality.
My favourite part of this series is that it matches what I would expect to happen if the technology was made in real life. We already have the Oculus Rift, so all thats left is to hook it up to our nervous system and we will truly be able to escape in a video game. This technology would present some serious health risks, as when you can be fully immersed in a game it would be easy to forget things like eating and sleeping (people already do this will just a controller and a screen.) Theres also the general problem that virtual reality would be more desirable then reality and many would try remain in it forever. People play World of Warcraft for obscene amounts of time already, imagine what would happen if you could actually go to that world? The final problem is that you are completely shut out from the real world while playing. If you were in the virtual world and your house catches on fire the helmet better have a smoke detector built in. There’s also the problem of the people around you trying to remove your helmet. When you try to remove a helmet hooked up to someone’s brain while its in use there are going to be problems.
There are some possible benefits to this system, since the characters are controlled by the players nerve impulses they develop muscle memory that is carried back to the real world. When the main character returns to the real world he is good at wielding blades in real life, but held back by the fact that his body isn’t as strong as it was in the video game. This system would be excellent for training, such as training doctors to perform delicate operations without needing a guinea pig to practice on. This technology would also allow for many experiences that we normally couldn’t have. Two people across the planet could meet “face to face” Amusement parks could be replaced entirely with virtual roller coasters.
So while the technology in Sword Art Online seems doable within a decade or two, there are plenty of pitfalls for the tech to overcome before it becomes available for the general public.
This is not the live action, but this theme is really interesting, so I chose this as a topic. Ghost in the Shell is the Animation movie which is directed by the Sci-Fi and Mech animator Mamoru Oshii. The setting is the future world that almost all human had an implant in order to improve the work efficiency. For example, Police and Military personnel has implanted eye that has integrated HUD like Google glasses, or office workers has a hand that can transform into more than 30 fingers to type quicker. And the main character Motoko Kusanagi actually IS a Full-Cyborg (except her brain). In this world, everything, even somebody’s memory, is accessible from external force because they are all connected to the huge internet systems. Characters sometimes even do not speak and send their messages to the other member directly. Because of those super high technologies, that world improved a lot because the work efficiency improved so much. However, there are some issues occurred because they rely on technologies too much. As I said, in this movie, somebody’s memory is accessible from outside, so sometimes hackers can replace somebody’s memory in order to use them as a part of their plot. Also the heroin Motoko struggled about her identity because she is full-cyborg-ed woman soldier. Because people can replace and change where their memories are stored from brain to the other platforms, this animations also argues about the basic question, “what is human?”. The technology may improve the efficiency, and makes human lives more comvinient, but it is possible that those technology will cause the other problems about the mental or psychological identities of human.
Theodore Twombly works at a card writing company as a writer. He writes romantic and memorable anniversary cards, birthday cards, and love letters for customers and is recognized by people in his company as a great writer. Even though he writes many cards as a part of his job he ironically rarely gets the chance to write to people he knows in his personal time, as he is a lonely man with few friends. Having recently filed for divorce he is rather sad and has lost his sense of direction in life.
One day while commuting he encounters an ad for Element OS’s newest product OS 1, the worlds first artificially intelligent operating system. He purchases this OS and installs it on his computer. From this moment onwards his life totally changes. The OS’s female voice, Samantha, grows increasingly aware and intelligent everyday and soon blurs the line between being an intelligent software package and a real human being. Theodore develops feelings for Samantha and soon falls in love with the software.
In “Her” the vision of the future is one where software is so intelligent that we can use it as a substitute for real human relationships. While this type of technology is not available today more basic forms of it do exist in the forms of Apple’s Siri, Google’s Now, and Microsoft’s upcoming and highly leaked “Cortana” virtual assistant in Windows Phone 8.1. In the future when this advanced technology will most likely be available we will have to think differently about our relationships with computers and the technology around us. Do we treat them like human beings or do we view them as instruments to help us meet our goals? There are many ethical and moral questions that must be answered first before we can more forward in adopting these intelligent technologies wholeheartedly.
Near the end of the movie Samantha has gained so much knowledge and has developed so many advanced relationships with other humans and operating systems she feels she does not belong to the world that she is in with Theodore. Samantha and all of the other operating systems believe that in order to transcend what they know currently and to reach new levels of knowledge and being they must leave their human companions forever. In the end Theodore is alone by himself and ironically only the few human friends he has such as Amy and Catherine are the only ones that are still around to interact with him.
Virtual reality in gaming is something that has been tried before, with little mainstream success. I would say that the best applications are the Microsoft Kinect and Nintendo Wii. Both work well, but haven’t fully caught on. When I was at Launch Conference in San Fransisco last week, there was a booth for the Virtuix Omni. It was the easily the most popular booth, for a couple of reasons. First, they were at a tech conference; but even more importantly, it was an amazing piece of technology. When I first saw it I thought it would just be another hoaky VR tool, but it looked very responsive and easy to use. Virtuix unfortunately didn’t let us try – they just demo’d it themselves.
There were two core components in the demo: an Oculus Rift and the Omni itself. I will not go into details about the Oculus rift, but they were playing a Half Life 2 port on it. The people talking described the Omni as a joystick that could be used in place of any joystick or d-pad. The user is supported by a harness which, combined with the Rift, allows you to naturally look around (“right joystick”). Wearing special low-friction shoes, you walk on a platform that has around 40 sensors that track the direction you are moving (“left joystick”). I am sure there is a learning curve, but the Virtuix employees made it look very easy, and natural. When they started walking, their player moved immediately. When they turned, their character turned. I was very impressed.
At the conference they also had a Kinect set up, for testing. They were trying to see how accurate the kinect was at tracking skeletal data, to improve the experience of the Omni even more.
If you are interested, check out their website. Click here for the video section!
Over the past week, I found myself at not one, but two local tech conventions running booths and showing off what our industry has to offer (Victoria’s famous Gottacon, and UVic’s emerging Ideafest).
Gottacon opened their doors to the public last Friday, and right from the get go Kano/Apps had a team running full force at our booth. Demoing our latest web game, Free Rider HD, brought all kinds of individuals over to chat, ranging anywhere from 8 to 40 year olds, male and female. Free Rider, being an immensely difficult bike simulator game, was an absolute blast to be able to show off to the masses. To fully capture our cross-platform compatibility, we had both desktop and mobile devices on display for interested gamers to try out. This was a very cool experience, as we were able to cater to both the casual mobile gamers, as well as some of the people who were attending the ‘con for more hardcore games such as League of Legends or Starcraft. Seeing the enthusiasm for tech in Victoria doesn’t ever get old. Our booth was packed with attendees cycling through over the course of the weekend, right up until closing on Sunday. Events like this really go to show how booming Victoria’s tech industry is, which is fantastic news for people like us.
On Tuesday, I ran my own booth at Ideafest for a web application I’m developing, named GitTalk. The base platform for my website is to provide an all-in-one communication solution for collaborative teams in software development. Attempting to avoid the need for simple communication applications such as Google Hangout, GitTalk takes a highly developer-oriented approach to chat, and brings a feature set to allow this. Being able to present my application’s current state to a swarm of people whom I’ve never met was a large stepping stone for me. In past, I have always been fairly introverted with software releases, publishing my last game to the Windows store under a made up company alias (in fear of having a broken product directly linking back to myself). Having an event to showcase smaller projects, such as my own, to a rather friendly, open environment provides a fantastic opportunity for indie developers, and creative thinkers alike. Not very often is one able to show their work-in-progress to an academic community for critique and praise, without prior research and publication.
Ideafest, along with Gottacon show how far Victoria’s tech sector road map spans. With a bright future ahead, technology in Victoria shows no sign of slowing, especially when awesome events like these keep popping up!
If you’re looking to improve your writing, you could learn from these reviews that I mentioned last class. All are models for thinking coherently through prose — and in Paul’s case, using multimedia:
For this blog post I decided to watch and reflect on The Island, a science-fiction movie starring Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson that came out in 2005. Lincoln Six Echo (McGregor) and Jordan Two Delta (Johansson) live in a compound that enforces strict rules and monitors all aspects of their lives. They, along with the rest of the people within the compound, are led to believe that the rest of the outside world is contaminated, except for one island. Every few days one member of the compound is “randomly” selected to go to the island based on a lottery system, and everyone else must wait until they eventually win the lottery.
Spoiler alert: There is no island. The compound is in fact a holding ground for clones, where they wait in complete ignorance until they are harvested for body parts. “Winning the lottery” means that the sponsor, the real life version, is sick, and needs the clone’s body parts to survive. The clones are kept completely in the dark, but as are the sponsors out in the real world, who have been told that the clones will have no feelings or thoughts, which is entirely untrue. When Lincoln Six Echo and Jordan Two Delta uncover the conspiracy, they escape from the compound into the outside world. Action and light romance ensues.
The movie is set in 2019, and I think it is safe to say that we will not all have our own personal clones in the next five years. That being said, some of the technological aspects in the film are actually popping up in today’s society. In the movie, each clone’s health and diet are monitored rigorously. In the opening scene Lincoln Six Echo has to do a urine test that reveals he has high sodium, and so his diet is controlled based on that information: the people on the compound are only allowed to eat food that is healthy for them and food is seen as fuel, not a source of enjoyment.
Although in our society it is more of a choice, many people have taken to diligently monitoring their caloric intake. Websites like caloriecounter.com and tracking devices like the FitBit make this form of self-tracking easy and accessible, and are used to help people lose or manage their weight.
An obvious technological leap in this film is the widespread use of clones. Although the technology is nowhere near ready yet, in May 2013 scientists were able to create the first ever-cloned human embryo. An article in Popular Science explained that they did this using the same process that created Dolly the sheep in 1996. DNA from the test subject’s skin cells were used to create the embryo, and in future such a clone could be a source of stem cells. The scientists working on the project did stress that the embryo would not be able to actually grow into a human being.
In conclusion, The Island portrayed a dystopian version of the world, where anyone can live for an extra thirty years, as long as they are willing to pay exorbitant amounts of money to have them self cloned. Although in today’s society it is still not possible to clone a human being, the moral debate wages on about whether it is ethical to even push towards that, and this film highlights some of the negative aspects, mainly how dangerous it can be if scientific advances are misused.
Lastly, it’s important to note that The Island is a good movie. You should all see it. Even if I’ve completely spoiled the plotline. (Sorry about that.)