Chapter 70 13.4 Transmission of simulacra

If simulacra had not been so useful, the unease caused by simulated reality would have been the most appropriate scholarly subject for French and Italian philosophers. In the Entertainment and Information Systems Group at the MIT Media Lab, Andy Lippman is developing a method of delivering television that can be "driven by the audience."A major research goal of the Media Lab is to allow consumers to personalize the presentation of information.Lipman invented a scheme for delivering video in an ultra-compact form that could be decompressed into a thousand different versions.What he transmits is not a fixed image, but a simulacra.

In its demo, Lippman's team used an earlier episode of "I Love Lucy" as footage, drawing a visual model of Lucy's living room from one shot.Lucy's living room becomes a virtual living room on the hard drive.At this time, any part of the living room can be fully displayed.Lipman then used a computer to remove the moving figure of Lucy from the background scene.When he wants to stream an entire episode, he streams two different sets of data: the background data as avatars, and a moving image movie of Lucy.The viewer's computer reassembled Lucy's character movement with the background generated by the virtual model.That way, Lippman only needs to send the living room set of data occasionally, rather than continuously as usual; updates are only made when the scene or lighting changes."It's conceivable that we could store all the background scene data for a TV series on the beginning of a disc, and the various actions and camera movements needed to reconstruct 25 episodes could fit on the rest of the disc," Lipman said. of disk space."

Nicholas Negroponte, director of the Media Lab, called this method "the transmission of models rather than content, and the content is what the recipient deduces from the model." From the experiment in "I Love Lucy" he I saw the future, when the entire scene, characters and everything will be made into a simulacra model, and then sent out.At that time, the program will no longer play a two-dimensional picture of a ball, but send a simulacra of the ball.The playback device says: "Here is a simulacra of a ball: bright blue, 50 cm in diameter, moving at this speed in this direction".The receiving device replied: "Well, yes, a simulacra of a jumping sphere. Yes, I see it".The dancing blue ball is then shown as a moving hologram.The home viewer can then visually examine the ball from any angle he wishes.

As a commercial example, Negroponte suggested playing a holographic image of a football game in the living room.The sports station does not just transmit a two-dimensional image of the game, but a simulation of the game: the stadium, players and the game are all abstracted into a model, which is compressed into a transferable size.Receivers in the home then decompress the model into a viewable form.In this way, fans with a beer can see the three-dimensional dynamic phantom of the player when he breaks through, dribbles, and makes a long pass.He can choose the viewing angle at will.And his kids can yell and watch the game from the perspective of the ball.

Aside from "breaking the tradition of sending video signals in prepackaged frames," the main purpose of sending simulacrum is data compression.Real-time holographic images require an astronomical amount of bits.Even with all the data-crunching tricks, a state-of-the-art supercomputer would take hours to process a live holographic image the size of a TV screen for a few seconds.The game might be over before you see that stunning 3D opening scene. Model it, send it, and let the receiver fill in the details—what better way to compress complexity than that? The military has also shown a strong interest in simulacra.