Dog, Kinect, Rent. In that order.
Last night Kate and I celebrated New Year’s Eve by playing with a dog and an Xbox Kinect. The dog was pretty awesome, like a husky whose growth had stunted at fifteen pounds, and only became more awesome when we discovered that he knew how to sit. And lie down. And roll over.
And so, that’s what we did. We got a treat and said, “Sit.” Then, “Lie down.” Then, “Roll over.” He complied. We were impressed.
Then, we tried to do it without the treat. No such luck. So we got another treat, and despite trying the commands in a different order, he executed them in the same order as before. Sit. Lie down. Roll over.
This we found infinitely hilarious, so we tried other things. We tried other words with the same inflection or syllables as “Sit, lie down, roll over.” “Couch, stuff dog, mold spore.” Success. Such an earnest, compliant dog. The treat, the hand gestures, the rhythmic voicings were all taken as queues for action; the words themselves, not so much. We soon found we could say “Blah, blah, blah,” to the same result. The dog was brilliant not so much at following commands, but at matching patterns and meeting what he assumed were our expectations.
So, hacking a dog’s intellect can offers hours of fun and enjoyment.
Also, Xbox Kinect.
The potential of interaction that the Xbox Kinect barely begins to unlock is terrifying awesome. And much of that potential today is being channeled into guiding a rubber raft down a river that is one part Wipeout, three parts Cruis’n USA, and (sadly) no parts Toobin’, the best fucking premise for a video game ever.
Between the cracks in the Kinect interface one can see glimmers of promise that hold, if not the future, at least a future of computational interaction. On top-level menus a stamp-sized diagnostic video appears in the lower right corner of the screen. At first glance you believe it to be a live greyscale video feed of your room, but then you look closer. It’s not just greyscale, it’s a depth map. And it’s not just a depth map, it’s generating a real-time 3D model of your visible body. And marking out your hands with glowing purple auras. Seriously, this is some TSA backscatter shit, only sans the porno-scanning.
And you’re using it to pop bubbles.
Now, Kinect has some issues, not the least of which are input detection, interactive transparency, false positives, true negatives, and response latency. I would love to get one myself, but the amount of space it requires to get its thing done is an immediate turn-off. This is a toy (or, in more visionary terms, an input mechanism) for the living rooms of the suburbs, not the studios of San Francisco. If Rock Band made you the enemy of your apartment neighbors, Kinect will be what turns them overtly homicidal.
Try explaining to your downstairs neighbors that you need to keep stomping and jumping on their ceiling because those goddamn floating pins aren’t going to collect themselves.
We have not the room for a Kinect. And this, this is something I hope to clarify for those of you who do not live in the Bay Area, or in another über-expensive urban area. Because this has been a Unique Thing that has required Adjustment on my part over the last six months we have lived here.
Indeed, the best coping mechanism I have developed for dealing with rent prices and living accommodations in the Bay Area is to just keep telling myself I live in a foreign country. Because while our experience is not unique when compared to our fellow Bay Area citizens, it is unlike anything this Minnesotan/Oregonian/Hoosier-by-geography-but-not-by-spirit has encountered before.
Every single month, we send over the equivalent of a MacBook Pro, an iPad, and an iPod Touch to our landlord. This amount secures us a lease on a 700-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment in downtown Berkeley. We are a ten-minute walk from the downtown Berkeley BART station, which I commute on every day for the equivalent of two venti lattes.
Truth be told, we have it pretty darn good awesome. We have a secure parking spot for a single car, a dishwasher, a gas stove (hence, Gas Stove Girl) and an in-unit washer and dryer. It took us six months on Craigslist (don’t get me started on the clusterfuck that is apartment hunting on Craigslist) to find the right combination of amenities, location and space, and ours is a rare gem indeed. Access to public transportation, proximity to San Francisco, shared rooftop deck, nearby grocery store, junkie-resistant parking…
…all for less per month than the current year of our Lord.
