Subconsciously, you don’t like to wait
Five fragments for the week of March 18, 2024
If you’re at GDC this week, I’ll be hanging out with the Meshcapade team at their booth (P1821)—hope to see you there. 🤞
I’m Diana Kimball Berlin, a partner at Matrix leading concept through Series A rounds in B2B SaaS and AI startups. Here are five fragments that stuck with me last week…
We’re learning that machines may not only be emotionally perceptive, but they may actually be comparable to or even better than us in their judgments and reactions. Even the most “human” qualities, and certainly emotion, can be distilled into data.
– Annie Zhang and Elena Mosse, “AI Is Evolution: A Holistic View On Intelligence,” July 19, 2023, from their Hello Metaverse Research Collective on Substack. See also their piece on the personality economy from September 2022. Related: I keep looking for the executive coach chatbot that will ask powerful questions directly and insightfully, instead of status quo for AI chatbots of verbose diplomacy and performative compassion. If you find it, let me know!
The pneumatic air bladders, when placed in the glove next to the fingertips, would inflate and deflate to simulate the fingers touching a virtual object. They could crudely simulate tactile pressure, but took too long inflating and deflating, which created the perception that most objects were rounded.
– George Zachary, “Generator,” November 1996—a column in Next Generation, a video game magazine. This particular column focused on the Data Glove and Power Glove; discovered through the Wikipedia citation for the claim that the PowerGlove sold over a million units. An interesting long-ago comp for the Vision Pro—reportedly over 200,000 units sold so far, although those are month-old numbers so I’d be curious for the update.
The Star Trek conventions, costumes, and collectibles that seem eccentric to outsiders (and to self-aware fans) serve the same emotional purposes for that audience that car shows, couture gowns, or postcards of Paris serve for theirs. Such activities and artifacts transform projection into participation, giving utopia a tactile presence.
– Virginia Postrel, The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion, 2013. Tactile again.
The formation of a person’s will is most fundamentally a matter of his coming to care about certain things, and of his coming to care about some of them more than about others.
– Harry Frankfurt, “The Importance of What We Care About,” 1982. An old touchstone that came up in a few conversations last week, so I figured it was time to revisit.
“Subconsciously, you don’t like to wait,” said Arvind Jain, a Google engineer who is the company’s resident speed maestro. “Every millisecond matters.”
– Steve Lohr, “For Impatient Web Users, an Eye Blink Is Just Too Long to Wait,” The New York Times, February 29, 2012. Found while researching Glean’s origin story—Arvind Jain is the founder and CEO.
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com
p.s. Something fun…