A Boy And His Atom: The World's Smallest Movie

> I'm not as pessimistic as Bret Victor [...] ABriefRant I'd actually go one step further than that "rant". In the real world, small physical motions usually have little control significance. Mouse movement and keyboards are among the many exceptions. With XR's hand tracking, that can change. For example, while gaming is focused on "feeling like it's real", so game hands overlap real hands, for getting work done, it's nice to have stretchy arms, so you can reach across the room to grab things. For optimal long-term ergonomics, you want a mix - sometimes you want the exercise of waving your arms, and sometimes you want to achieve the same end by merely twitching a hand resting on a knee or keyboard. So not only did the video reduce all of human motion vocabulary, including gaze and voice, down to a single finger over a sad UI, but even that single finger was used in an impoverished manner. ;) > XR will work much better with some pointing and voice input Eye tracking as well. "Look; point; click" has a seemingly redundant step. When someone is watching an education video, say IBM's atom animation[1], you want to both be able to field common questions like "What are the ripples?", but also notice that they are looking at the ripples, and volunteer related content. One can do prototyping now, with WebVR, google speech recognition, and in-browser or google voice synthesis. [1] [this video]

> It's mind blowing :) When people watch this[1], and I'm standing next to them, they'll often ask about the ripples. But if they were watching it alone, there isn't an easy way to do that. Someone did an art project, where you sit and watch an interesting drama video. But why was it interesting? There's an eye tracker, and the video is a graph of scenes, like an old "choose your own adventure" story. So if you're interested in character A... the video explores/emphasizes character A. AR/VR is coming. With eye tracking (eventually... patents). So... Imagine science education that's consistently mind blowing, rather than boring. What might that be like? Though a cautionary note: there's apparently a problem of students, who have consistently had excellent teachers, clearly and motivationally presenting material, reaching college without the skills or inclination to themselves wrestle with a body of knowledge and distill understanding. Another opportunity for improvement. :) [1] stop-motion animation with individual molecules: [this video]

> but without chemical bonds? Metallic bonds. My understanding is all bonding is atoms sticking together electrostatically, with (insanely fast) "slow" lumbering nuclei, nudged around by their local e-field, and wacky electrons, adopting weird spatial distributions based on the current nuclei positions, setting that field. The bond taxonomy descriptively sorts by characteristics. Here, one is delocalization of valence electrons. Perhaps picture [this video] , STM imaging of cold CO molecules sitting on a copper surface, IIRC. You can't see the individual copper atoms, and there are extended ripples in surface electron density.

IEEE VR starts tomorrow (Sunday-Thursday). Entirely online. Registration is waitlisted, until they see how their infrastructure holds up. But they also plan live streaming video of all presentation sessions (papers, panels, workshops, and keynotes) on Twitch, open to anyone. streams: [link] schedule: [link] hashtag: [link] Also working on a video-rich[1] tweet thread "Atoms are {little, balls, sticky, jiggly, bouncy, stacking, etc}", as motivation while working towards an exemplar of transformatively improved science education content, which I hope will speed conversations about that. Anyone have any favorite media of atoms? Also on desktop panning using head tracking. Also on using RealSense t265 tracking cameras with Google Mediapipe's TF hand tracking.[2] Also on a next rev of DIY 3D shutter glasses. Also on... sigh. [1] example media: balls [this video] , sticky [link] , ball in the ball (nuclei) [link] [2] low-performance browser demo: [link]

Apropos visualizing atoms and their electrons, here's a fun sidebar. This IBM video[1] was made with an STM scanning tunneling microscope, which sees outer electrons. So while it shows the IIRC carbon monoxide molecules, standing up like buoys, as little balls, the background copper surface of delocalized electrons looks smooth, with ripples. You can't see the individual copper atoms. But if you instead used an AFM atomic force microscope, which can feel inner electrons, then you could - here's one of silicon[2]. When crafting and teaching abstract representations, it's easy to forget that these are real physical objects. [1] [this video] [2] [link]

> can be a huge barrier to entry for the student I did a category theory class a few months back. Huge barrier at times - so many moving pieces. "Err, which properties do 𝒞 and mumble(𝒟) have here , in this paragraph???" I wanted to create an interactive version of some topics. Just mouseover elaboration and graphics, to reduce the amount of state one has to keep track of mentally, and its associated cognitive load. But the state of in-browser rendering of category diagrams wasn't quite there yet. Best part of the class was the "after-math" (that's a 3-interpretation pun). An iterative improvement on past versions of the class, formalizing an observed custom - after the 1 hr math lecture, the room was reserved for a second hour, so people could hang out, with the instructors, in front of blackboards. In part, clarifying and explaining things in different ways. One instructor observed something very vaguely like "I'd never approach things the way I do in lecture, if I was tutoring someone one-on-one." One can imagine technical fixes. Mouse-over equations. FAQs. Presenting the material from multiple perspectives. Many of them could implemented on clay tablets. And that newfangled wood pulp. My best understanding is, that as a society, incentives are poorly aligned with creating non-wretched education content in the sciences, and I assume in math. So my hope for XR in education, is not just the power of tools like eye tracking, but that incentives are disrupted enough to get us

A notable inconsistency, or exaggeration: > we print our maps using the highest resolution mediums available. ... There's no sense printing at a higher resolution than humans are able to perceive. For print, 300 dpi is the gold standard . Higher resolution media such as [link] are around 20000 dpi. Current semiconductor processes [link] have feature sizes around 20 nm, which is about 1.3 million dpi. This is significantly denser than 300 dpi. It's easy to see the difference between a page printed at 300 dpi and one printed at 600 dpi, so I'd say even 300 dpi doesn't reach "higher resolution than humans are able to perceive". How long have more detailed mediums (or media) been available? In 01949 George Harrison reported improving the control loop of a ruling engine to a precision of, in the medieval units then in use, 0.2 micro-inches (5 nm): [link] so that he could cut grooves for a diffraction grating to that precision, which evidently amounts to a precision of 5 million dpi. This seems to have been about a factor of 70 improvement over what Michelson had achieved before 01900. But serious difficulties attended any attempts to use such diffraction ruling engines to cut irregular patterns such as these maps—as well, of course, as limits in the data bandwidth of the necessary control systems. More detailed media still have been demonstrated; in 01989 hackers at IBM demonstrated the ability to use an STM to position atoms with atomic precision (≈0.1 nm) [link] and in 02013 oth

Using gaze tracking with a CYOA-structured video or book permits another aspect of oral storytelling - noticing and adapting to listener interest. Attention focused on some character gets more scenes with them. Or the opposite? For personalized science education, might one wander the richly interwoven tapestry of stories that is science, following one's interests? I've shown people IBM's stop-motion cartoon drawn with atoms, [this video] , and they'd often ask about the ripples. IBM wrote supplementary content on them, perhaps because of such common interest. But when watching yt alone, its hard to engage, to follow up. Links in the description? Pop-up cards? With gaze tracking, one might notice the attention, and provide opportunity in that teachable moment. As if a mentor, tutor. Gaze tracking without extra hardware is still rough. And patents. But slowly it's becoming something to explore.

> So what next? LLM discussion of visualizations? I did guerrilla usability testing around teaching scale, which included this video[1] (stop-motion animation using CO molecules). Lots of people asked "What are those ripples?". IBM even had a supplementary webpage addressing this (which I no longer see, even on archive). People could easily ask this with me standing beside them, but not so much if viewing the content online. Which raised the UI question of how to encourage such. With LLMs, perhaps people will be able to ask questions of a visualization? What is that? Why is that? What about ...? I don't understand ... Does this mean ...? [1] IBM's A boy and his atom [this video] Making of: [link]