Progress -- PATENTS . . . Slow and Sweet, but sometimes a bit faster

 I've been describing our AstroVirtual Environments in this space for about a year and a half now, and in particular, the Museum "Proof of concepts" that we have modeled for several potential situations.  The "anniversary" in fact was September 16, 2022, as noted in the December 16, 2022 blog post.  We showed a crude mock-up at an ACM Workshop Sept 30, 2022, and we have just (as in "just last month") been invited to write that up for a Conference Proceeding.  Writing these things down takes a while, right?

Did I ever mention the AstroVirtual website?   https://www.astrovirtual.com

I probably didn't mention a new Storyboard that describes the ACM Virtual Hall of Fame that we took to New York City last month.   This builds heavily on the ideas of that mock-up in September 2022.

Check this out:  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1k2Ve_PkkPCc3MKf9-Uufl0JdhbWKBaLu/view

More significantly today, we reached a different milestone--we were officially awarded our first patent on the AstroVirtual technology.   Coming out of the Workshop, we felt that the reception merited some true follow-up, and as a result, we tried to codify our thoughts into a coherent stream, that we then presented to a retired Patent Attorney.   

I always struggle with the idea of patents--both for the cost and time involved, but also for the relatively low probable return.   After some initial discussion though, we were convinced that it might be worth the investment.  We filed 42 claims on December 13, 2022, of which 27 were for "Method" and 15 for "Apparatus".   Along the way, the two were separated for reasons that are obscure to me, but the key fact is that the "Methods" were fast-tracked because the two inventors--Scott Futryk, my partner, and me--are both 'elders' and they want to get this done while we're still sentient apparently.

Well, it worked.  Today March 19 2024, the USPTO (US Patent and Trademarrk Office) issued Patent #11,935,131 B1 for 27 claims to Scott and me, assigned to our fledgling company, AstroVirtual Inc.

My last patent, # 7,904,323 B2 was filed by 8 inventotrs on December 23, 2003, and finally issued on March 8, 2011.   So the 'fast-track' worked.

Ironically, or maybe not so ironically as you think about it, both patents are in related space.  Here are the two titles, and the respective 'inventors'     Intel is the assignee for the Multi-team patent

Anyway, just wanted to note this occasion, and acknowledge the terrific work of my colleague, Scott.

It's WHO and WHY, not just WHAT and HOW

We've been preparing a proposed Virtual HALL of FAME for the ACM Council (you all know ACM, right?  The Association for Computing Machinery, not the Academy for Country Music).    In particular, ACM awards 20+ major awards every year, plus a slug of newly elected ACM Fellows.  Prize money is now appraoching $2M per year, with some fantastic support by companies such as Google, Microsoft, Infosys, IBM, and Two Sigma.

And the ACM History Committee has been embarked now for nine years on 'capturing' more about the winners, especially the Turing Award winners.  I've personally done something like 165 video interviews in this connection.

BUT, those interviews, like thousands at the Computer History Museum, the Babbage Institute, the Silicon Valley archive at Stanford, the Bancroft at Berkeley, the MIT Museum, the Dupont Museum (the Hagley), and other such places, are usually relegated to a dry transcript and on occasion a posted un-indexed video, that you have to KNOW that it exists for a specific person to find it, and your patience gets tested pretty hard to read and/or view and enjoy it.

The proposed Virtual HALL of FAME would illuminate these heroes, make their lives more accessible, and their importance more prominent--for students, teachers, professionals, and yes, even historians.  We'll show a 'walk-thru' and summarize a couple of key elements in the next post.

And when all is said and done, it is fascinating to me that most of these thousands of interviews focus on WHAT they did, and HOW they did it.  Naturally, you say!   That's why they're being interviewed--they did something that has been deemed important for their university, their company, their discipline, or even society at large.  And that is truly important, no question about it.

But the meta-message for me, taking in 'the set' of them, is WHO were these people, and WHY did they do what they did?  That is the story for the next generation.  "We" are enthused by the specifics of what they did and how they did it, because "we" were sort of in the trenches with them, and we can therefore appreciate what they accomplished.  But the next generation takes all of this for granted--they don't know a world before iPhones and ubiquitous Internet, and soon they'll not know a world pre-AI driven.  A story about how the iPhone keys got realized isn't too pertinent.   So, what's the 'constant' here?

I submit that the constant is "Where does the inspiration come from to do work of this caliber?"  And stories of "Who these people were, the difficulties they faced, and how they surmounted them" are more important to serve as motivation for a youngster (or even a middle-aged erstwhile practitioner) than the details of their achievement.     

For example, what Steve Jobs did on returning to Apple, and re-invigorating it with the iPod, the iMac, and the iPhone are wonderful stories, and Walt Isaacson does a great job telling them (via Jobs' own recounting), but somehow the fact that it took Jobs seven years to get Apple back to sales and profitability as it was when he re-arrived is omitted from the story.  If he hadn't 'owned the Board' he'd have long since been evicted a second time.   WHY was he able to persevere in such straits?   Did he have personal doubts?  Was the company morale affected?  Leadership in those circumstances had to be dramatically important, in ways not even hinted at in the best-selling biography.

Stories about how the mostly unsung heroes who did the public domain human genome project both persevered and succeeded against the organized 'for profit' teams--the latter headed by 'the big names' that have been extolled--are mostly absent, but think where the world would be if that vital technology were 'controlled' for private gain.   How do we even find out such stories if we focus on WHAT and HOW the genome works, and fail to include the WHO and WHY of the 'unsung folk'.  

So our thinking is that a HALL of FAME should include 'the whole story' -- not just WHAT and HOW, but WHO and WHY.   And, not incidentally, this has to cover more, MUCH MORE, than the "big names" that make the journalism headlines.  So we propose to cover ALL of the honorees of ACM, which is about 1,500 Fellows and nearly 1,200 Awardees, selected by peer groups over 50+ years in 20 categories of computing,    Not just the 'big names' although of course some are here, such as Vint Cerf and Steve Wozniak.   And a lot of 'big names' for Wall Street are not here, including Steve Jobs.   In fact, CACM, ACM's premier magazine, bemoaned Jobs' negative computer science research impact   https://cacm.acm.org/news/136161-what-did-steve-jobs-do-for-computer-science/fulltext?mobile=false.  Some consider this chary; others are quick to note that ACM acknowledges technical success vs. business $$.  And certainly, Jobs has gotten considerable acknowledgement, but our point here is that there are LOTS of other key contributors in our field--computer science is both broad, and a team game.

Our proposal has many hurdles to surmount to make it a reality, but in the scheme of things, we remain confident that illuminating WHO and WHY for many of these innovators will be valuable for students, teachers, professionals, and yes, even historians who seek to understand even years hence how this discipline changed the world forever, and WHO and WHY they did it.  

Actually, think about it--the whole world needs to and may well want to know about this--lay people, citizens at large, homemakers, grandparents all may savor more stories to appreciate these incredible innovators and their creations.

Baseball History factoids

 This blog, while primarily dedicated to InnovaScapes Institute 'business data', is sometimes corrupted by my personal interests.  And those, as many of you know, include unusual historical serendipity.  And as I was composing the note about AstroVirtual in the previous post, I mentioined "Astro" and the Houston ball team, and I thought about baseball and Nolan Ryan.

So, dear reader, be patient with me, and hear me out on this (or skip ahead to more relevant stuff).

The movie Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner, was a wonderful baseball fantasy, set in an Iowa cornfield, extolling the venerable game and its pull on the American psyche.   And it resonated in our family, a LOT actually.   It came out May 5, 1989.

My Iowa-born namesake paternal grandfather, Charles House, played Double-A ball in his youth; his younger brother Louie made it to Triple-A baseball.   My dad was the pitcher for his high school team when he met Mom.  And grandpa took my brother and me to all the Los Angeles Angels games for years circa 1950-1955, even introducing us to other ballplayers.  I got to know Warren Hacker, for example, the year that his knuckleball fooled enough batters that he vied for Most Valuable Player in the National League, with the best WHIP, and best Hits per game, and 3rd lowest ERA in the league.

When the Dodgers moved the Los Angeles, my dad took my brother and me to the 2nd World Series game ever played in the Los Angeles Coliseum.  The day my daughter Cynthia was born, I was at Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine its first year, with my grandfather, father, and brother.  The scoreboard announced that I was now a new father.  Cynthia has never let me forget that.   I didn't know yet that my wife's first cousin, Jim Didion (yes, brother to the famous Joan Didion). was the realtor for Chavez Ravine, and had a box behind home plate where he intro'd me to Tommy Lasorda Opening Day 1997.

And luck be with us, my grandfather was still alive, at 96, when Field of Dreams debuted.   And he loved it.   And he knew Bob Feller, the original strikeout king, born in rural Iowa a year after my dad was born a few miles away.   Feller still holds the most 1-hitters (12) in major league history (now tied with Ryan).   Feller did hold the most no-hitter record (3) until Sandy Koufax tied him in 1964 (and passed him in 1965, to end with 4).   Koufax only recorded 2 1-hitters though in his total career.

In 1989, my dad was a golfing partner with Koufax at their local Paso Robles CA club.  And daughter Cynthia, see above, was now a marketing associate for a little Texas company, Home Sports Entertainment, which launched on 1/4/1983, airing home games for the Houston Astros.   Their star pitcher was Nolan Ryan, who had just passed Koufax with his 5th no-hitter in 1981.  

Through HSE, Cynthia got to know Nolan Ryan, and then Prime Network bought HSE in March 1989, and Ryan moved to the Texas Rangers.  And then, Ryan got his 5,000th strikeout on August 26, 1989, like 3 weeks after my grandfather saw the Costner movie.  And Cynthia got Ryan to sign a baseball for him, and sent it to him.   Wow!   Cynthia's brother Warren owns that baseball today.

I arrived at my daughter Cynthia's home in Plano (next to Dallas, and near SMU where she graduated)  to find a life-size picture of Ryan on her bedroom door, signed "To Cynthia--Love, Nolan".  Puzzled, I asked "How did this happen?"   She smiled and said, "Dad, I threw the Prime Network party for Ryan."

So, today I went to Wikipedia, and found more info than I expected, that also resonated.   Ryan was born in rural Texas, 40 miles south of Victoria.   My maternal grandfather, Henry Coates (I am Charles Henry House, named for both grandfathers), was born 30 miles east of Victoria (La Ward, a town of 189 folk todayl).  Refugio (Ryan's home) is 2,730 folk today, MUCH larger.   La Ward kids went to school in Edna (pop. 5,940), and their league included Refugio High.  SMALL WORLD, huh?  Van Meter IA to Jewell IA for one; Refugio TX to Edna TX for another.    

But how about that.  We had personal connections to three of the greatest strikeout artists in baseball history.  Only one other pitcher in the past 140 years of the sport has matched Feller on no-hitters, that being Justin Verlander in 2019 for his third while with Houston.   And Ryan for total no-hitters and strikeouts, and Koufax for 2nd most no-hitters, to go along with Feller's 3rd most no-hitters (and he missed four peak seasons due to WWII) still stand among more recent sensations such as Jacob deGrom, Max Scherzer, and Randy Johnson, none of whom grew up near my grandparents.

Oh, yes, Cynthia, the girl for whom I missed the birth, took me to my 2nd World Series game, in San Francisco against the Texas Rangers, the 2nd game of the 2010 World Series.   Cynthia showed up, in a 95% Giant fans stadium, in Texas Ranger clothes--and I said, "Whoa."   And she replied, "Don't you realize that Nolan Ryan owns the Rangers now?"  Touché

Launching AstroVirtual Inc (AVI)

 My goodness, where did the time go?   My last post to this blog was in December, 2022.   Actually, there were five posts that month, the only ones for 2022.   And NONE for 2023.  Have you nothing to say?

Well, in truth, there is plenty to say, but seemingly 'no time to say it'.  Ever have that problem?   People in the middle of crisis don't generally take time out to describe it or write a book about it--they just ACT.  

Well, we've been acting.   My partner, Scott Futryk, and I formed a corporation last year, to little fanfare but with a lot of enthusiasm and hope for a couple of elder citizens.   Its name--AstroVirtual--says much.  It aspires to be "heavenly" or "star-struck" or whatever you'd imagine with an "ASTRO" prefix.  No, not the baseball team, although they've had some remarkable records over the past few years.   (Yes, Nolan did pitch for the Houston Astros, and serve them as an advisor years later).   More about Ryan and baseball in another post; this one is about our new company.

The posts of December 2022 describe our fledgling prototypes in modest detail.   Those have been updated, and some signal events have occurred along the way.  Here's a quick unverified chronology:

1. We filed a slew of patent claims early in 2023; these were 'fast-tracked' by the USPTO (US Patent and Tranemark Office), with the happy result last week that we've received advance notice of a major patent award for a sizable number of claims, along with encouragement to file additional materials (as funding permits, we'll certainly do this).    I don't know about you, but we've discovered that patent work is often a bit of an expensive hobby all by itself, and start-ups are usually lean mean machines (meaning cash starved--"oh, really?").

2. In July, Chuck was invited to SIGGRAPH '23, which was actually the 50th anniversary for SIGGRAPH.  He went as a "pioneer" thanks to his pioneering computer Display, the HP 1300A, from 1966, eight years before SIGGRAPH began.   It was heady, sitting alongside Don Greenberg, Andy van Dam, Jim Blinn, and Alvy Ray Smith in the "Memories" sessons.  And Don and I were invited to have the 'front row seats' for Nvidia's keynote by founder Jensen Huang, and then escorted by his aide to see him privately at the end.  WOW!!!

3. Huang's talk was amazing, and it is up on YouTube  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2VBKerS63A.  Because it is on YouTube, we have permission to 'play with it', and we took the opportunity to post it into our "Network Control Diorama environment".  Here's our AstroVirtual four minute extract: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv--Why9LLo&t=244s  This extract essentially indexes multiple speaking points within his talk with separate video screens in the diorama--try that with your standard YouTube version!

4. We added two new environments to our "Standard" repertoire, raising the number of screens for an environment from 22 in the Standard Diorama model to 55 for an Exposition Center, and more than 100 in an EIS (Executive Information Center).    Every screen is dynamic, interactive, synchronous, with real-time pixel streaming.   The compute power to deliver this performance is stunning, but amazingly available at reasonable cost from compute streaming services (we're using a bank of top-end Nvidia servers to make all this run seamlessly).  

5. We unveiled the Exposition Center at the United Nations General Assembly in NYC on September 27.  This was an unexpected and terrific opportunity to showcase both the AstroVirtual environment and its visual power, with the three year COVID-19 Dashboard analytics that InnovaScapes Institute pioneered with the complex Dashboard designed earlier by Scott Futryk's "AnywhereAnytime" LLC.  The UN General Assembly, held twice a year with multiple focused workshops, has included a focus on Digital Health for the past three years.  For InnovaScapes to be invited to speak was a real privilege.  Here's the key talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z63I88yOUIc

There were other highlights, but this list is adequate for now to give you a taste of our progress.  Thanks again for taking time to read and comment.  All the best for 2024

Chuck

A busy quarter

So, NOW WHAT?  We've been experimenting all year with different presentation styles, a set of other 'settings' instead of just the Museum 'walk'

We call the museum walk, "An Exposition" or "Moments in Time" or "A Gallery".  You can imagine a number of screens celebrating historic athletes (high school, college  or Pro).  It's equally easy to imagine featuring prominent donors to a college--for example, for Named Chairs.  The one here honors Computer Scientists who have won ACM Awards.

Here's a different use of the Museum metaphor.   Here we are portray 20 Screens, each  representing work or an activity that is part of a career--we call this one the "Chuck House Virtual 3D Exposition"

We call another one a Diorama.  You may think of Dioramas from Natural History Museums where they would try to simulate a forest setting or a savanna with appropriate flora and fauna.  We think of it as a curvilinear expanse of screens clustered around a topic, such as this one around COVID analyses.  Here's one with 22 screens that feature stories around the past three years of the worldwide COVID pandemic.

And here's another one, intended to portray a person's career and achievements.

Here is yet a third one, built around a Mission Control Center idea, symbolic of NASA's Mission Control headquarters or the AT&T Network Management Center

.

We can also model a Lecture Hall, as found at many universities

As these pictures illustrate, many different scenes / settings can be created in Virtual 3D space.

Maybe we have something novel here, novel enough that we ought to think about . . .                 A. Figuring out how to build a product                                                                                            B. Figuring out if any of this is novel enough to worry about, or decide to, try patents

In that connection, we met with a semi-retired patent attorney who had been a kind 'friend of the court' for the Dashboard work in early 2020.  And, as things have a way of happening sometimes (not often, but hey, enjoy it if it does) . . . 

We together concluded that there were several elements of the adaption of "real environments" that we have been playing with, that merit filing some patent claims.  So, anon, we had to learn the jargon of lawyers.  Eventually, we filed a bevy of claims--numbing in some ways, gratifying in many.   Now we can truthfully and with pride say "Patents pending"

Doesn't that sound wonderful?  Wacky?  Improbable?

So, who knows--or as the old radio show had it, "Only the Shadow Knows"

As they say, "Stay Tuned"

A couple of Prototypes

The ACM HC workshop wound up featuring my work on video interviews, but I did include one slide from the possible Award prototype as a discussion primer.    Several attendees at the workshop offered names of historic Computer Graphics folk who might be able to offer suggestions.

Spent most of the rest of October trying to put together the "Chuck House 3D Virtual Exposition Center.

By October 23, we felt we had enough storyboards put together to make a YouTube film version, and I taped the first Voice-Over via a Zoom session, that Scott merged into the video.  after several tries, we had a version that we kinda liked, on October 27.  Lengthy, 17:43 minutes.

By November 5, we had a 'finished' version, 21:49 minutes.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkarQkMpmiE

I put together a note something like this:  

Here’s some ideas along the lines we talked in the late spring

The metaphor is.’walking through a museum’ and viewing various exhibits, screen by screen

Each screen can be “live” with a deep PowerPoint deck, a YouTube video, any web call, etc. 

The whole thing is dynamically compiled,.

What I am showing you here is “a film” rather than actively dynamic, but we can do the latter at your discretion.

The video is a tour of InnovaScapes Institute and Chuck House projects over the years

I’d be interested in your thoughts

I am including Scott Futryk on this email.  He actually is the ‘developer’ of all of this.

Best,

Chuck

Who got this missive, and how did we 'cast it'?

Sent  to carefully selected friends, family, and colleagues who 'might know the field'.  Those gave us some very nice comments.

Within five days, we had received phrases like:

1. Format lends itself nicely to “moments in history.”

2. WOW!  those are great videos. I like the idea of a virtual museum
3. "I think the tool is phenomenal"

4. This clearly is a great and very flexible platform 

5. it is very cool!   this gives a far more pleasing viewer experience. 

6.wow, what a fun and interesting way to look at data; it’s captivating, with drill downs, etc.

Meanwhile, we have been considering patent coverage or trademarks?

Which will have to wait for the next post.

In Just 3 Months . . .

 3 MONTHS -- not all that long, measured in career terms.

From September 16, 2022 to December 16, 2022, it was kind of a whirlwind with the discussions described in the previous post.

Scott Futryk with his Dashboard company and I with InnovaScapes decided to construct a prototype Museum not to exhibit Art, but to extol Award winners for an international computer society, the Association for Computing Machinery (yeah, well, the name is certainly anachronistic now).  It is the largest Computer Society for computing professionals in the world, and they give many prestigious awards annually.   And InnovaScapes Institute has had the privilege of interviewing many of the winners over the past few years.

And I shared the link in the last pose, but here it is again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RINmCtL6-K4

This prototype is very capable of some extraordinary things.   Every Screen--20 of them--is individually selectable, and able to be interactive.  So we can select any individual, or any award, or any year, or any country, just as an example.  And then, for every person with an oral/video interview on file, those can be accessed as well.   So snippets from their life, whether challenges they faced, school choices they made, help and support they received from their parents or friends. .... you get the idea.

So, we designed it so that if we "walked" linearly down the hall, we'd come upon each Award, with its description on the first page, along with the names of all of the winners of that Award.  If you switched to Interactive Mode, you could click on any name in that Screen, and it would transport you to the information on file for that person.   So, for example, if we are on the screen for Past Presidents (yes, I was one once), the top screen looks like this

And clicking on that gives pictures of some (this is a rough prototype, so not fully loaded)

So, for an ACM HC workshop scheduled for Sept 30, I showed a page illustrating the idea.  

So, it'd be fun to claim "success" at this point, but a lot of work remains, especially in terms of how the video interviews we've been collecting get incorporated smoothly.

More in the next post . . . .