Leaving it to your imagination

Throw huge amounts of CPU power into the mix and you end up with early 21st century animated movies. Movies which are getting incredibly close to the holy grail of making the real and the fake very difficult to differentiate.

Then there are the worlds of photography and audio. Again, both reaching the point where fidelity with old-world analog technology is no longer a gap that needs to be bridged. Indeed, we are reaching the point where digital methods are the norm - they are the reality - for audio and video creation and processing. We are no longer using computers to, as it were, "fake it". Computers are the standard way to do it. The real world is out there but digital media are becoming our primary way of interacting with it from afar.

There is a snag though. At least I think there is a snag. You may well disagree. We will see. The snag I see relates to imagination. When you have a medium to work with that has only limited ability to express reality, you have to imagine new ways of doing things. Take web browsers for example. Imagine if, prior to the invention (discovery?) of the web, computer screen sizes had reached a point where book-sized pages could easily be displayed and read online looking and feeling like they do on paper? We would have had a way of taking reality (books) and turning them into digital forms that mirrored reality very closely.

As you know, that didn't happen. Screen sizes had limitations. Machines and communications links had capacity limitations. The problem required imagination. The imagination lead to a lightweight concept of "page" in the form of HTML and lightweight hyper-linked document flows in the form of HTTP.

My point is that the limitations present at the time necessitated new imaginings. They necessitated looking past simple emulations of the real world. They necessitated harnessing imagination so as to invent completely new ideas. Of course, with the feedback loops that exist all over this industry, those new imaginings have become part of accepted "reality" and are themselves, subject to attempted emulation. For example, how long do you think it will be before someone embeds a web browser in something like Second Life? Will that happen to an acceptable level of quality before somebody imagines a completely different and better way of working around the limitations of 3-D emulations? Does it matter which happens first? I think so.

I find myself strangely thankful for the limitations in our technologies. The limitations have a way of forcing us to think past the norms, the obvious, the "reality" that is out there. We think beyond mere emulation and invent new things.

Three cheers for technology limitations!