The Neurological Side-Effects of 3D

[Image: Auguste Choisy].

France is considering a ban on stereoscopic viewing equipment—i.e. 3D films and game environments—for children, due to “the possible [negative] effect of 3D viewing on the developing visual system.”

As a new paper suggests, the use of these representational technologies is “not recommended for chidren under the age of six” and only “in moderation for those under the age of 13.”

There is very little evidence to back up the ban, however. As Martin Banks, a professor of vision science at UC Berkeley, points out in a short piece for New Scientist, “there is no published research, new or old, showing evidence of adverse effects from watching 3D content other than the short-term discomfort that can be experienced by children and adults alike. Despite several years of people viewing 3D content, there are no reports of long-term adverse effects at any age. On that basis alone, it seems rash to recommend these age-related bans and restrictions.”

Nonetheless, he adds, there is be a slight possibility that 3D technologies could have undesirable neuro-physical effects on infants:

The human visual system changes significantly during infancy, particularly the brain circuits that are intimately involved in perceiving the enhanced depth associated with 3D viewing technology. Development of this system slows during early childhood, but it is still changing in subtle ways into adolescence. What’s more, the visual experience an infant or young child receives affects the development of binocular circuits. These observations mean that there should be careful monitoring of how the new technology affects young children.

But not necessarily an outright ban.

In other words, overly early—or quantitatively excessive—exposure to artificially 3-dimensional objects and environments could be limiting the development of retinal strength and neural circuitry in infants. But no one is actually sure.

What’s interesting about this for me—and what simultaneously inspires a skeptical reaction to the supposed risks involved—is that we are already surrounded by immersive and complexly 3-dimensional spatial environments, built landscapes often complicated by radically diverse and confusing focal lengths. We just call it architecture.

Should the experience of disorienting works of architecture be limited for children under a certain age?

[Image: Another great image by Auguste Choisy].

It’s not hard to imagine taking this proposed ban to its logical conclusion, claiming that certain 3-dimensionally challenging works of architectural space should not be experienced by children younger than a certain age.

Taking a cue from roller coasters and other amusement park rides considered unsuitable for people with heart conditions, buildings might come with warning signs: Children under the age of six are not neurologically equipped to experience the following sequence of rooms. Parents are advised to prevent their entry.

It’s fascinating to think that, due to the potential neurological effects of the built environment, whole styles of architecture might have to be reserved for older visitors, like an X-rated film. You’re not old enough yet, the guard says patronizingly, worried that certain aspects of the building will literally blow your mind.

Think of it as a Schedule 1 controlled space.

[Image: From the Circle of Francesco Galli Bibiena, “A Capriccio of an Elaborately Decorated Palace Interior with Figures Banqueting, The Cornices Showing Scenes from Mythology,” courtest of Sotheby’s].

Or maybe this means that architecture could be turned into something like a new training regimen, as if you must graduate up a level before you are able to handle specific architectural combinations, like conflicting lines of perspective, unreal implications of depth, disorienting shadowplay, delayed echoes, anamorphic reflections, and other psychologically destabilizing spatial experiences.

Like some weird coming-of-age ceremony developed by a Baroque secret society overly influenced by science fiction, interested mentors watch every second as you and other trainees react to a specific sequence of architectural spaces, waiting to see which room—which hallway, which courtyard, which architectural detail—makes you crack.

Gifted with a finely honed sense of balance, however, you progress through them all—only to learn at the end that there are four further buildings, structures designed and assembled in complete secrecy, that only fifteen people on earth have ever experienced. Of those fifteen, three suffered attacks of amnesia within a year.

Those buildings’ locations are never divulged and you are never told what to prepare for inside of them—what it is about their rooms that makes them so neurologically complex—but you are advised to study nothing but optical illusions for the next six months.

[Image: One more by Auguste Choisy].

Of course, you’re told, if it ever becomes too much, you can simply look away, forcing yourself to focus on only one detail at a time before opening yourself back up to the surrounding spatial confusion.

After all, as Banks writes in New Scientist, the discomfort caused by one’s first exposure to 3D-viewing technology simply “dissipates when you stop viewing 3D content. Interestingly, the discomfort is known to be greater in adolescents and young adults than in middle-aged and elderly adults.”

So what do you think—could (or should?) certain works of architecture ever be banned for neurologically damaging children under a certain age? Is there any evidence that spatially disorienting children’s rooms or cribs have the same effect as 3D glasses?

Space Noir

[Image: The International Space Station at night, photographed by astronaut Alexander Gerst, courtesy of the ESA].

The European Space Agency recently released a group of photos taken by astronaut Alexander Gerst showing the International Space Station at night. The only real contextual information provided is that “the six astronauts on the weightless research centre live by GMT, and generally sleep at the same time.”

[Image: Photo by Alexander Gerst, courtesy of the ESA].

Gerst—so close to Geist!—thus took advantage of the downtime to produce some images that make the ISS look uninhabited, a dead mansion rolling through space.

[Image: Photo by Alexander Gerst, courtesy of the ESA].

This is perhaps what it would look like to arrive somewhere in the middle of night, hoping to say hello to your comrades, only to find that you’ve actually boarded the Mary Celeste.

[Image: Photo by Alexander Gerst, courtesy of the ESA].

The dimly lit corridors of this house of sleeping astronauts take on the atmosphere of film noir, as if this is secretly a crime scene, still flickering with the last lights of its drained batteries, and these are the first photos to be taken upon arrival.

[Image: Photo by Alexander Gerst, courtesy of the ESA].

Small details take on narrative suspense. Why was that cupboard door left open, its contents bare for all to see? And are those objects messily scattered about, as if a struggle has taken place, or is this just the normal state of things in zero-g?

Where is everyone? Imagine performing forensic crime-scene analysis in the absence of gravity, three-dimensionally reconstructing a moment of violence by tracking objects back along all of their possible trajectories; you would need holographic models of every legally admissible collision and variation.

[Images: Photos by astronaut Alexander Gerst, courtesy of the ESA].

In any case, to browse more of astronaut Gerst’s collection, you can basically start at this image and click backward through the rest; one or two, unfortunately, feature other astronauts drifting around, perhaps staring down at the earth through the red eyes of insomnia, which ruins the illusion of this being a ruin, but the photos are still worth a glimpse.

[Image: Photo by Alexander Gerst, courtesy of the ESA].

Finally, proving that international scientific organizations have an active sense of humor, the photos were actually released on Halloween.

Just-in-Case Informatics

[Image: A screen grab from the homepage of Orbital Insight].

Proving that some market somewhere will find a value for anything, a company called Orbital Insight is now tracking “the shadows cast by half-finished Chinese buildings” as a possible indicator for where the country’s economy might be headed.

As the Wall Street Journal explains, Orbital Insight is part of a new “coterie of entrepreneurs selling analysis of obscure data sets to traders in search of even the smallest edges.” In many cases, these “obscure data sets” are explicitly spatial:

Take the changing shadows of Chinese buildings, which Mr. Crawford [of Orbital Insight] says can provide a glimpse into whether that country’s construction boom is speeding up or slowing down. Mr. Crawford’s company, Orbital Insight Inc., is analyzing satellite images of construction sites in 30 Chinese cities, with the goal of giving traders independent data so they don’t need to rely on government statistics.

If watching the shadows of Chinese cities from space isn’t quite your cup of tea, then consider that the company “is also selling analysis of satellite imagery of cornfields to predict how crops will shape up and studies of parking lots that could provide an early indicator of retail sales and quarterly earnings of companies such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Home Depot Inc.”

[Image: A screen grab from the homepage of Orbital Insight].

The resulting data might not even prove useful; but, in a great example of what we might call just-in-case informatics, it’s scooped up and packaged anyway.

The notion that there are fortunes to be made given advance notice of even the tiniest spatial details of the world is both astonishing and sadly predictable—that something as intangible as the slowly elongating shadows of construction sites in China could be turned into a proprietary data point, an informational product sold to insatiable investors.

Everything has a price—including the knowledge of how many cars are currently parked outside Home Depot.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal.

Art Arm

[Image: “Untitled #13,” from “Scripted Movement Drawing Series 1” (2014) by Andrew Kudless].

San Francisco-based designer and architect Andrew Kudless is always up to something interesting, and one of his most recent projects is no exception.

For a new group of small works called “Scripted Movement Drawing Series 1” (2014), Kudless is exploring how robots might make visual art—in this specific case, by combining the instructional art processes of someone like Sol Lewitt with the carefully programmed movements of industrial machinery.

[Image: The robot at work, from “Scripted Movement Drawing Series 1” (2014) by Andrew Kudless].

In Kudless’s own words, “The work is inspired by the techniques of artists such as Sol Lewitt and others who explored procedural processes in the production of their work. The script, or set of rules, as well as the ability or inability of the robot to follow these instructions is the focus of the work. There is almost a primitive and gestural quality to the drawings created through the tension between the rules and the robot’s physical movement. Precisely imprecise.”

[Image: “Untitled #16,” from “Scripted Movement Drawing Series 1” (2014) by Andrew Kudless].

These giant robot arms, he continues, “are essentially larger, stronger, and more precise version of the human arm. Made up of a series of joints that mimic yet extend the movements of shoulder, elbow, and wrist, the robot has a wide range of highly control[led] motion. The real value of these robots is that, like the human arm, their usefulness is completely determined by the tool that is placed in its hand.”

So why only give robots tools like “welding torches, vacuum grippers, and saws,” he asks—why not give them pencils or brushes?

[Image: “Untitled #6 (1066 Circles each Drawn at Different Pressures at 50mm/s),” from “Scripted Movement Drawing Series 1” (2014) by Andrew Kudless].

The results are remarkable, but it’s specifically the unexpected combination of Lewittian instructional art with industrial robotics that I find so incredibly interesting. After all, Kudless ingeniously implies, it has always been the case that literally all acts of industrial assembly and production are, in a sense, Sol Lewitt-like activities—that conceptual art processes are hiding in plain sight all around us, overlooked for their apparent mundanity.

It’s as if, he suggests, every object fabricated—every car body assembled—has always and already been a kind of instructional readymade, or Sol Lewitt meets Marcel Duchamp on the factory floor.

With these, though, Kudless throws in some Agnes Martin for good measure, revealing the robot arms’ facility for minimalist lines and grids in a graceful set of two-dimensional drawings.

[Image: “Untitled #7 (1066 Lines Drawn between Random Points in a Grid),” from “Scripted Movement Drawing Series 1” (2014) by Andrew Kudless].

Kudless explains that “each of the works produced in this series was entirely programmed and drawn through software and hardware”:

None of the lines or curves was manually drawn either within the computer or in physical reality. Rather, I created a series of different scripts or programs in the computer that would generate not only the work shown here, but an infinite number of variations on a theme. Essential to the programming was understanding the relationships between the robot and human movement and control. Unlike a printer or plotter which draws from one side of the paper to the other, the robot produces the drawings similarly to how a human might: one line at a time. The speed, acceleration, brush type, ink viscosity, and many other variables needed to be considered in the writing of the code.

Various drawing styles were chosen to showcase this.

[Image: “Untitled #15 (Twenty Seven Nodes with Arcs Emerging from Each),” from “Scripted Movement Drawing Series 1” (2014) by Andrew Kudless].

[Image: “Untitled #3 (Extended Lines Drawn from 300 Points on an Ovoid to 3 Closest Neigh[bor]ing Points at 100mm/s)” (2014) from “Scripted Movement Drawing Series 1” (2014) by Andrew Kudless].

[Image: “Untitled #12,” from “Scripted Movement Drawing Series 1” (2014) by Andrew Kudless].

[Image: “Untitled #14,” from “Scripted Movement Drawing Series 1” (2014) by Andrew Kudless].

There are many more drawings visible on Kudless’s website, and I am already looking forward to “Scripted Movement Drawing Series 2.”

You can also purchase one of the prints, if you are so inclined; contact the Salamatina Gallery for more information.

(Very vaguely related: Robotism, or: The Golden Arm of Architecture).

Etch a Sketch

[Image: Laser-etched wood panel, design by Kris Davidson, etching by Clear Cut Creation].

This laser-etched wood panel designed by tattoo artist Kris Davidson is pretty awesome.

While the grain of the bamboo itself interferes in a few spots with the actual patterns—perhaps suggesting that something like stained hardwood would be a better choice to really make this thing pop—it’s nonetheless a fantastically intricate and obsessively detailed project.

Part mandala, part maze, it’s like the floor plan of an alien palace, the board of an incomprehensible game, or a construction diagram for some occult supercomputer.

[Image: Laser-etched wood panel, design by Kris Davidson, etching by Clear Cut Creation].

It would be great to see this blown up to the size of an entire wall or decorative panel—or even just used as the basis of a student architecture project. Milled landscapes, or site plans burned directly into wood, suitable for hanging once the semester is finally over.

There is one more shot over on Davidson’s website, and check out his tattoos while you’re there.

Tales of the Crash: An Interview with Nick Arvin

Screenshot from a sample 3D car crash animation created by Kineticorp; visit their website for the video.

(Note: An earlier version of this interview previously appeared on Venue).

Ellis Barstow, the protagonist in Nick Arvin‘s most recent novel, is a reconstructionist: an engineer who uses forensic analysis and simulation to piece together, in minute detail, what happened at a car crash site and why.

The novel is based on Arvin’s own experiences in the field of crash reconstruction; Arvin thus leads an unusual double-life as a working mechanical engineer and a successful author of literary fiction.

As part of our Venue project, Nicola Twilley and I sat down with Arvin at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver for an afternoon of conversation and car crash animations.

Flipping open his laptop, Arvin kicked things off by showing us a kind of greatest hits reel drawn from his own crash reconstruction experience. Watching the short, blocky animations—a semi jack-knifing across the center line, an SUV rear-ending a silver compact car, before ricocheting backward into a telephone pole—was surprisingly uncomfortable.

[Images: Nick Arvin demonstrates simulated car crashes; photos by Nicola Twilley].

As he hit play, each scene was both unspectacular and familiar—a rural two-lane highway in the rain, a suburban four-way stop surrounded by gas stations and fast-food franchises—yet, because we knew an impact was inevitable, these everyday landscapes seemed freighted with both anticipation and tragedy.

The animations incorporated multiple viewpoints, slowing and replaying the moments of impact, and occasionally overlaying an arrow, scale, or trajectory trace. This layer of scientific explanation provided a jarring contrast to the violence of the collision itself and the resulting wreckage—not only of the scattered vehicles, but of entire lives.

As we went on to discuss, it is precisely this disjuncture—between the neat explanations provided by laws of physics and the random chaos of human motivation and behavior—that The Reconstructionist takes as its narrative territory.

Our conversation ranged from the art of car crash forensics to the limits of causality and chance, via feral pigs, Walden Pond, and the Higgs boson. An edited transcript appears below.

• • •

Nicola Twilley: Walk us though how you would build and animate these car crash reconstructions.

Nick Arvin: In the company where I worked, we had an engineering group and an animation group. In the engineering group, we created what we called motion data, which was a description of how the vehicle moved. The motion data was extremely detailed, describing a vehicle’s movement a tenth of a second by a tenth of a second. At each of those points in time we had roll, pitch, yaw, and locations of vehicles.

To generate such detailed data, we sometimes used a specialized software program⎯the one we used is called PC-Crash⎯or sometimes we just used some equations in Excel.

A screenshot from the PC-Crash demo, which boasts that the “Specs database contains vehicles sold in North America from 1972 to the present,” and that “up to 32 vehicles (including cars, trucks, trailers, pedestrians, and fixed objects such as trees or barriers) can be loaded into a simulation project.”

When you’re using PC-Crash, you start by entering a bunch of numbers to tell the program what a vehicle looks like: how long it is, where the wheels are relative to the length, how wide it is, where the center of gravity is, how high it is, and a bunch of other data I’m forgetting right now.

Once you’ve put in the parameters that define the vehicle, it’s almost like a video game: you can put the car on the roadway and start it going, and you put a little yaw motion in to start it spinning. You can put two vehicles in and run them into each other, and PC-Crash will simulate the collision, including the motion afterward, as they come apart and roll off to wherever they roll off to.

We then fed that motion data to the animators, and they created the imagery.

Screenshots of PC-Crash‘s “Collision Optimizer.” As the demo promises, “in PC-Crash 3D, the scene can be viewed from any angle desired.”

Often, you would have a Point A and a Point B, and you would need the animation to show how the vehicle got from one point to the other.

Point A might be where two vehicles have crashed into each other, which is called the “point of impact.” The point of impact was often fairly easy to figure out. When vehicles hit each other—especially in a head-on collision—the noses will go down and gouge into the road, and the radiator will break and release some fluid there, marking it.

Then, usually, you know exactly where the vehicle ended up, which is Point B, or the “point of rest.”

But connecting Points A and B was the tricky part.

Twilley: In real life, are you primarily using these kind of animations to test what you think happened, or is it more useful to generate a range of possibilities of which you can then look for evidence on the ground? In the book, for example, your reconstructionists seem to do both, going back and forth between the animation and the actual ground, generating and testing hypotheses.

Arvin: That’s right. That’s how it works in real life, too.

Sometimes we would come up with a theory of what happened and how the vehicles had moved, and then we’d recreate it in an animation, as a kind of test. Generating a realistic-looking animation is very expensive, but you can create a crude version pretty easily.

We’d watch the animation and say, “That just doesn’t look right.” You have a feel for how physics works; you can see when an animation just doesn’t look right. So, very often, we’d look at an animation and say to ourselves: we haven’t got this right yet.

Screenshot from a sample 3D car crash animation created by Kineticorp; visit their website for the video.

One of the challenges of the business is that, when you’re creating an animation for court, every single thing in it has to have a basis that’s defensible. An animation can cost tens of thousands of dollars to generate, and if there is one detail that’s erroneous, the other side can say, “Hey, this doesn’t make sense!” Then the entire animation will be thrown out of court, and you’ve just flushed a lot of money down the toilet.

So you have to be very meticulous and careful about the basis for everything in the animation. You have to look at every single mark on the vehicle and try to figure out exactly where and how it happened.

In the novel there is an example of this kind of thinking when Boggs shows Ellis how, when looking at a vehicle that has rolled over, you literally examine each individual scratch mark on the vehicle, because a scratch can tell you about the orientation of the vehicle as it hit the ground, and it can also tell you where the vehicle was when the scratch was made, since asphalt makes one kind of scratch, while dirt or gravel will make a different type of scratch.

For one case I worked on—a high-speed rollover where the vehicle rolled three or four times—we printed out a big map of the accident site. In fact, it was so big we had to roll out down the hallway. It showed all of the impact points that the police had documented, and it showed all of the places where broken glass had been deposited as the vehicle rolled. We had a toy model of the car, and we sat there on the floor and rolled the toy from point to point on the map, trying to figure out which dent in the vehicle corresponded to which impact point on the ground.

I remember the vehicle had rolled through a barbed wire fence, and that there was a dent in one of the doors that looked like a pole of some kind had been jammed into the sheet metal. We figured it had to be one of the fence posts, but we struggled with it for weeks, because everything else in the roll motion indicated that, when the car hit the fence, the door with the dent in it would have been on the opposite side of the vehicle. We kept trying to change the roll motion to get that door to hit the fence, but it just didn’t make sense.

Finally, one of my colleagues was going back through some really poor-quality police photographs. We had scarcely looked at them, because they were so blurry you could hardly see anything. But he happened to be going back through them, and he noticed a fireman with a big crowbar. And we realized the crowbar had made the dent! They had crowbarred the door open.

Screenshots from sample 3D car crash animations created by Kineticorp; visit their website for the video.

Sometimes, though, even after all that meticulous attention to detail, and even if you believe you have the physics right, you end up playing with it a little, trying to get the motion to look real. There’s wiggle room in terms of, for example, where exactly the driver begins braking relative to where tire marks were left on the road. Or, what exactly is the coefficient of friction on this particular roadway? Ultimately, you’re planning to put this in front of a jury and they have to believe it.

Twilley: So there’s occasionally a bit of an interpretive leeway between the evidence that you have and the reconstruction that you present.

Arvin: Yes. There’s a lot of science in it, but there is an art to it, as well. Pig Accident 2, the crash that Ellis is trying to recreate at the start of my book, is a good example of that.

It’s at the start of the book, but it was actually the last part that was written. I had written the book, we had sold it, and I thought I was done with it, but then the editor—Cal Morgan at Harper Perennial—sent me his comments. And he suggested that I needed to establish the characters and their dynamics more strongly, early in the book.

I wanted an accident to structure the new material around, but by this time I was no longer working as a reconstructionist, and all my best material from the job was already in the book. So I took a former colleague out for a beer and asked him to tell me about the stuff he’d been working on.

He gave me this incredible story: an accident that involved all these feral pigs that had been hit by cars and killed, lying all over the road. Then, as a part of his investigation, he built this stuffed pig hide on wheels, with a little structure made out of wood and caster wheels on the bottom. They actually spray-painted the pig hide black, to make it the right color.

He said it was like a Monty Python skit: he’d push it out on the road, then go hide in the bushes while the other guy took photographs. Then he’d have to run out and grab the pig whenever a car came by.

[Image: A stuffed pig on wheels, “like a Monty Python skit”; photo by Nicola Twilley].

But there wasn’t any data coming out of that process that they were feeding into their analysis; it was about trying to convince a jury whether you can or can’t see a feral pig standing in the middle of the road.

BLDGBLOG: That’s an interesting analogy to the craft of writing fiction, related to the question of what is sufficient evidence for something to be believable.

Arvin: Exactly. It’s so subjective.

In that case, my friend was working for the defense, which was the State Highway Department—they were being sued for not having built a tunnel under the road for the wild pigs to go through. In the novel, it takes place in Wisconsin, but in reality it happened in Monterey, California. They’ve got a real problem with wild pigs there.

Monterey has a phenomenal number of wild pigs running around. As it turned out, the defense lost this case, and my friend said that it was because it was impossible to get a jury where half the people hadn’t run into a pig themselves, or knew somebody who had had a terrible accident with a pig. The jury already believed the pigs were a problem and the state should be doing something about it.

Screenshot from a sample 3D car crash animation created by Kineticorp; visit their website for the video.

BLDGBLOG: In terms of the narrative that defines a particular car crash, I’m curious how reconstructionists judge when a car crash really begins and ends. You could potentially argue that you crashed because, say, a little kid throws a water balloon into the street and it distracts you and, ten seconds later, you hit a telephone pole. But, clearly, something like a kid throwing a water balloon is not going to show up in PC-Crash.

For the purpose of the reconstructionist, then, where is the narrative boundary of a crash event? Does the car crash begin when tires cross the yellow line, or when the foot hits the brakes—or even earlier, when it started to rain, or when the driver failed to get his tires maintained?

Arvin: It’s never totally clear. That’s a grey area that we often ended up talking about and arguing about.

In that roll-over crash, for example, part of the issue was that the vehicle was traveling way over the speed limit, but another issue was that the tires hadn’t been properly maintained. And when you start backing out to look at the decisions that the drivers made at different moments leading up to that collision, you can always end up backing out all the way to the point where it’s: well, if they hadn’t hit snooze on the alarm clock that morning

Twilley: Or, in your novel’s case, if they weren’t married to the wrong woman.

Arvin: [laughs] Right.

We worked on one case where a guy’s car was hit by a train. He was a shoe salesman, if I remember right, and he was going to work on a Sunday. It just happened to be after the daylight savings time change, and he was either an hour ahead or an hour behind getting to work. The clock in the car and his watch hadn’t been reset yet. He’d had this job for four years, and he’d been driving to work at the same time all those years, so he had probably never seen a train coming over those tracks before—but, because he was an hour off, there was a train.

So, you know, if he’d remembered to change his clocks…

Screenshots from sample 3D car crash animations created by Kineticorp; visit their website for the video.

Twilley: That reminds me of something that Boggs says in the book: “It’s a miracle there aren’t more miracles.”

Arvin: Doing that work, you really start to question, where are those limits of causality and chance? You think you’ve made a decision in your life, but there are all these moments of chance that flow into that decision. Where do you draw a line between the choices you made in your life and what’s just happened to you? What’s just happenstance?

It’s a very grey area, but the reconstructionist has to reach into the grey area and try to establish some logical sequence of causality and responsibility in a situation.

Twilley: In the novel, you show that reconstructionists have a particular set of tools and techniques with which to gain access to the facts about a past event. Other characters in the book have other methods for accessing the past: I’m thinking of the way Ellis’s father stores everything, or Heather’s photography. In the end, though it seems as though the book is ambivalent as to whether the past is accessible through any of those methods.

Arvin: I think that ambivalence is where the book is. You can get a piece of the past through memory and you can get a piece through the scientific reconstruction of things. You can go to a place now, as it is physically; you can look of a photograph of how it was; you can create a simulation of the place as it was in your computer: but those are all representations of it, and none of them are really it. They are all false, to an extent, in their own way.

The best I think you can hope to do is to use multiple methods to triangulate and get to some version of what the past was. Sometimes they just contradict each other and there’s no way to resolve them.

Screenshots from sample 3D car crash animations created by Kineticorp; visit their website for the video.

Working as a reconstructionist, I was really struck by how often people’s memories were clearly false, because they’d remember things that just physically were not possible. Newton’s laws of motion say it couldn’t have happened. In fact, we would do our best to completely set aside any witness testimony and just work from the physical evidence. It was kind of galling if there was not just enough physical evidence and you had to rely on what somebody said as a starting point.

Pedestrian accidents tended to be like that, because when a car runs into a person it doesn’t leave much physical evidence behind. When two cars run into each other, there’s all this stuff left at the point where they collided, so you can figure out where that point was. But, when a car runs into a person, there’s nothing left at that point; when you try to determine where the point of impact was, you end up relying on witness testimony.

Screenshots from a PC-Crash demo showing load loss and new “multibody pedestrian” functionality.

Twilley: In terms of reconciling memory and physical evidence—and this also relates to the idea of tweaking the reconstruction animation for the jury—the novel creates a conflict about whether it’s a good idea simply to settle for a narrative you can live with, however unreliable it might be, or to try to pin it down with science instead, even if the final result doesn’t sit right with you.

Arvin: Exactly. It sets up questions about how we define ourselves and what we do when we encounter things that conflict with our sense of identity. If something comes up out of the past that doesn’t fit with who you have defined yourself to be, what do you do with that? How much of our memories are shaped by our sense of identity versus the things we’ve actually done?

Twilley: It’s like a crash site: once the lines have been repainted and the road resurfaced, to what extent is that place no longer the same place where the accident occurred, yet still the place that led to the accident? That’s what’s so interesting about the reconstructionist’s work: you’re making these narratives that define a crash for a legal purpose, yet the novel seems to ask whether that is really the narrative of the crash, whether the actual impact is not the dents in the car but what happens to people’s lives.

Arvin: I always felt that tension—you are looking at the physics and the equations in order to understand this very compressed moment in time, but then there are these people who passed through that moment of time, and it had a huge effect on their lives. Within the work, we were completely disregarding those people and their emotions—emotions were outside our purview. Writing the book for me was part of the process of trying to reconcile those things.

Screenshot from a sample 3D car crash animation created by Kineticorp; visit their website for the video.

BLDGBLOG: While reading the book, I found myself thinking about the discovery of the Higgs boson—how, in a sense, its discovery was really a kind of crash forensics.

Arvin: You’re right. You don’t actually see the particle; you see the tracks that it’s made. I love that. It’s a reminder that we’re reconstructing things all the time in our lives.

If you look up and a window is open, and you know you didn’t open it, then you try to figure out who in the house opened it. There are all these minor events in our lives, and we constantly work to reconstruct them by looking at the evidence around us and trying to figure out what happened.

BLDGBLOG: That reminds me of an anecdote in Robert Sullivan’s book, The Meadowlands, about the swamps of northern New Jersey. One of his interview subjects is a retired detective from the area who is super keyed into his environment—he notices everything. He explains that this attention to microscopic detail is what makes a good detective. So, in the case of the open window, he’ll notice it and file it away in case he needs it in a future narrative.

What he tells Sullivan is that, now that he is retired, it’s as though he’s built up this huge encyclopedia of little details with the feeling that they all were going to add up to some kind of incredible moment of narrative revelation. But then he retired. He sounds genuinely sad—he has so much information and it’s not going anywhere. The act of retiring as a police detective meant that he lost the promise of a narrative denouement.

Arvin: That’s great. I think of reconstruction in terms of the process of writing, too. Reconstruction plays into my own particular writing technique because I tend to just write a lot of fragments initially, then I start trying to find the story that connects those pieces together.

It also reminds me of one of my teachers, Frank Conroy, who used to talk about the contract between the reader and the writer. Basically, as a writer, you’ve committed to not wasting the reader’s time. He would say that the reader is like a person climbing a mountain, and the author is putting certain objects along the reader’s path that the reader has to pick up and put into their backpack; when they get to the top of the mountain there better be something to do with all these things in their backpack, or they are going to be pissed that they hauled it all the way up there.

That detective sounds like a thwarted reader. He has the ingredients for the story—but he doesn’t have the story.

Screenshots from sample 3D car crash animations created by Kineticorp; visit their website for the video.

Twilley: In the novel, you deliberately juxtapose a creative way of looking—Heather’s pinhole photography—with Ellis’s forensic, engineering perspective. It seems rare to be equipped with both ways of seeing the world. How does being an engineer play into writing, or vice versa?

Arvin: I think the two things are not really that different. They are both processes of taking a bunch of little things—in engineering, it might be pieces of steel and plastic wire, and, in writing a novel, they’re words—and putting them together in such a way that they work together and create some larger system that does something pleasing and useful, whether that larger thing is a novel or a cruise ship.

One thing that I think about quite a bit is the way that both engineering and writing require a lot of attention to ambiguity. In writing, at the sentence level, you really want to avoid unintentional ambiguity. You become very attuned to places where your writing is potentially open to multiple meanings that you were not intending.

Similarly, in engineering, you design systems that will do what you want them to do, and you don’t have room for ambiguity—you don’t want the power plant to blow up because of an ambiguous connection.

But there’s a difference at the larger level. In writing, and writing fiction in particular, you actually look for areas of ambiguity that are interesting, and you draw those out to create stories that exemplify those ambiguities—because those are the things that are interesting to think about.

Whereas, in engineering, you would never intentionally take an ambiguity about whether the cruise ship is going to sink or not and magnify that!

Screenshot from a sample 3D car crash animation created by Kineticorp; visit their website for the video.

Twilley: I wanted to switch tracks a little and talk about the geography of accidents. Have you come to understand the landscape in terms of its potential for automotive disaster?

Arvin: When you are working on a case—like that rollover—you become extremely intimate with a very small piece of land. We would study the accident site and survey it and build up a very detailed map of exactly how the land is shaped in that particular spot.

You spend a lot of time looking at these minute details, and you become very familiar with exactly how lands rolls off and where the trees are, and where the fence posts are and what type of asphalt that county uses, because different kinds of asphalt have different friction effects.

BLDGBLOG: The crash site becomes your Walden Pond.

Arvin: It does, in a way. I came to feel that, as a reconstructionist, you develop a really intimate relationship with the roadway itself, which is a place where we spend so much time, yet we don’t really look at it. That was something I wanted to bring out in the book—some description of what that place is, that place along the road itself.

You know, we think of the road as this conveyance that gets us from Point A to Point B, but it’s actually a place in and of itself and there are interesting things about it. I wanted to look at that in the book. I wanted to look at the actual road and the things that are right along the road, this landscape that we usually blur right past.

The other thing your question makes me think about is this gigantic vehicle storage yard I describe in the novel, where all the crashed vehicles that are still in litigation are kept. It’s like a museum of accidents—there are racks three vehicles high, and these big forklift trucks that pick the vehicles up off the racks and put them on the ground so you can examine them.

A vehicle scrapyard photographed by Wikipedia contributor Snowmanradio.

BLDGBLOG: Building on that, if you have a geography of crashes and a museum of crashes, is there a crash taxonomy? In the same way that you get a category five hurricane or a 4.0 earthquake, is there, perhaps, a crash severity scale? If so, could you imagine, at one end of it, a kind of super-crash—a crash that maybe happens only once a generation—

Arvin: The unicorn crash!

BLDGBLOG: Exactly. In fact, Nicky and I were talking about the idea of a “black swan” crash on the way over here. Do you think in terms of categories or degrees of severity, or is every crash unique?

Arvin: I haven’t come across a taxonomy like that, although it’s a great idea. The way you categorize crashes is single vehicle, multiple vehicle, pedestrian, cyclist, and so on. They also get categorized as rollover collision, collision that leads to a rollover, and so on.

So there are categories like that, and they immediately point you to certain kinds of analysis. The way you analyze a rollover is quite a bit different from how you analyze an impact. But there’s no categorization that I am aware of for severity.

I only did it for three years, so I’m not a grizzled reconstructionist veteran, but even in three years you see enough of them that you start to get a little jaded. You get an accident that was at 20 miles an hour, and you think, that’s not such a big deal. An accident in which two vehicles, each going 60 miles an hour, crash head-on at a closing speed of 120 miles an hour—now, that’s a collision!

Screenshot from a sample 3D car crash animation created by Kineticorp; visit their website for the video.

You become a little bit of an accident snob, and resisting that was something that I struggled with. Each accident is important to the people who were in it. And, there was a dark humor that tended to creep in, and that worried me, too. On the one hand, it helps keep you sane, but on the other hand, it feels very disrespectful.

Twilley: Have you been in a car accident yourself?

Arvin: I had one, luckily very minor, accident while I was working as reconstructionist—around the time that I was starting to work on this book. I heard the collision begin before I saw it, and what I really remember is that first sound of metal on metal.

Immediately, I felt a lurch of horror, because I wasn’t sure what was happening yet, but I knew it could be terrible. You are just driving down the road and, all of a sudden, your life is going to be altered, but you don’t know how yet. It’s a scary place—a scary moment.

BLDGBLOG: Finally, I’m interested in simply how someone becomes a reconstructionist. It’s not a job that most people have even heard of!

Arvin: True. For me, it was a haphazard path. Remember how we talked earlier about that gray area between the choices you made in your life and what’s just happened to you?

I have degrees in mechanical engineering from Michigan and Stanford. When I finished my Masters at Stanford, I went to work for Ford. I worked there for about three years. Then I was accepted into Iowa Writer’s Workshop, so I quit Ford to go to Iowa. I got my MFA, and then I was given a grant to go write for a year. My brother had moved to Denver a year earlier, and it seemed like a cool town so I moved here. Then my grant money ran out, and I had to find a job.

I began looking for something in the automotive industry in Denver, and there isn’t much. But I had known a couple people at Ford who ended up working in forensics, so I started sending my resume to automobile forensics firms. It happened that the guy who got my resume was a big reader, and I had recently published my first book. He was impressed by that, so he brought me in for an interview.

In that business, you write a lot of reports and he thought I might be helpful with that.

Screenshots from sample 3D car crash animation created by Kineticorp; visit their website for the video.

Twilley: Do you still work as an engineer, and, if so, what kinds of projects are you involved with?

Arvin: I work on power plants and oil and gas facilities. Right now, I am working on both a power plant and an oil facility in North Dakota—there’s lots of stuff going on out there as part of the Bakken play. It’s very different from the forensics.

Twilley: Do you take an engineering job, then quit and take some time to write and then go back into the engineering again? Or do you somehow find a way to do both?

Arvin: I do both. I work part time. Part-time work isn’t really easy to find as an engineer, but I’ve been lucky, and my employers have been great.

Engineers who write novels are pretty scarce. There are a few literary writers who started out in engineering but have gotten out of it—Stewart O’Nan is one, George Saunders is another. There’s Karl Iagnemma, who teaches at MIT. There are a few others, especially in the sci-fi universe.

I feel as though I have access to material—to a cast of characters and a way of thinking—that’s not available to very many writers. But the engineering work I’m doing now doesn’t have quite the same dramatic, obvious story potential that forensic engineering does.

I remember when I first started working in forensics, on day one, I thought, this is a novel right here.

• • •

A slightly longer version of this interview previously appeared on Venue.

Thanks to Scott Geiger for first recommending Arvin’s work!

Spatial Basics

[Image: Red Bull New York offices by INABA; photo by Greg Irikura].

I got a handful of preview shots from the new Red Bull New York offices the other night, with interiors designed by INABA, and I thought I’d post them here.

[Image: Red Bull New York offices by INABA; photo by Greg Irikura].

INABA, of course, already designed the connected Red Bull Music Academy, and the private office space continues that aesthetic, albeit deliberately stripped even of the constrained maximalism of that project’s bold colors and public-facing spatial entertainments, down to a minimalist, calm workplace distinct from—or perhaps offsetting—Red Bull’s identity as an international energy drink monolith.

[Images: Red Bull New York offices by INABA; photos by Greg Irikura].

As architect Jeffrey Inaba explains, “the company wanted its New York offices to be low-key. The 16,800 SF project doesn’t celebrate the company’s values with eye-catching forms, nor is its layout inspired by recent theories of workplace productivity.”

[Image: Red Bull New York offices by INABA; photo by Naho Kubota].

“Instead,” he continues, “the design is simple and without the pretense of being on the cutting edge of cool tech office design. It responds to the quick cycling of trends in workplace interiors by steering clear of large-scale gestures, playful lounge zones, or urban-inspired ad hoc décor.”

[Image: Red Bull New York offices by INABA; photo by Greg Irikura].

From the architect:

If the new standard for corporate offices is to create a physical experience that builds on the brand qualities the company has successfully established in digital media, then Red Bull’s New York space is the antithesis of this best practice. There isn’t a reliance on storytelling or graphic imagery; the space is dialed back to reset the focus of the experience on the basic architectural qualities of scale and light.

Acknowledging that offices and technology are evolving quickly and the future functions of the work environment are unpredictable, the architects composed a layout of spaces with distinct, fixed features. The three types of spaces are large open zones, medium-sized enclosed areas, and small rooms. They are used now as open office seating, conference areas, and small meeting/workrooms, respectively. Designed to be unique in size and day lighting and not to any particular functions invites people to invent new uses for them in the future.

All the shots seen here were taken by Greg Irikura and Naho Kubota, as noted.

[Image: Red Bull New York offices by INABA; photo by Greg Irikura].

In Kubota’s case, she shot both digitally and on film, with the latter shots taking on a hazy, almost noir quality, like the set of a 21st-century Mad Men caught on a Sunday break.

[Images: Red Bull New York offices by INABA; photos by Naho Kubota].

Here are a final few shots—but click through to see the project on INABA’s own site.

[Images: Red Bull New York offices by INABA; photos by Naho Kubota].

Meanwhile, check out BLDGBLOG’s two interviews with Jeffrey Inaba—from 2007 and 2010, respectively—and congrats to INABA’s Darien Williams for appearing on Curbed‘s list of Young Guns finalists for 2014!

“We don’t have an algorithm for this”

[Image: Comet 67P, via ESA].

In the story of how European Space Agency researchers are scrambling to locate—and possibly move—the Philae probe, which they successfully landed on Comet 67P two days ago, there’s an interesting comment about computer vision and the perception of exotic landscapes.

[Image: Comet 67P, via New Scientist].

“We’re working our eyes off,” one of the scientists says to New Scientist, describing how they are personally and individually poring over photographs of the comet.

“It’s an entirely manual process,” New Scientist continues, “because the complex and bizarre landscape of comet 67P defies any kind of automated search. ‘We don’t have an algorithm for this,’ he says.”

We don’t have an algorithm for this.

[Image: The irregular terrain of Comet 67P, via ESA].

It would be interesting to develop a taxonomy of landscapes based on their recognizability to algorithms. This would tell you as much about how computers see the world as it would about the aesthetic assumptions—even the geological biases—of the people who programmed those computers.

Think, for example, of Adam Harvey’s work, asking When Is An Apple No Longer An Apple? That project explored the point at which machine-learning algorithms could no longer distinguish the iconic fruit from a jumble of colorful objects.

Or take Harvey’s more recent CV Dazzle experiment, which looked at how to prevent facial recognition software from identifying a face at all through the clever use of cosmetic camouflage.

However, in the case of Comet 67P and other extreme topographic environments, we would be looking at when a landscape is no longer a landscape, so to speak, at least in terms of the computer-vision algorithms programmed to analyze it.

[Image: Comet 67P, via ESA].

What other landscapes fall within this category—of spatial environments unrecognizable to machines—and what do those spaces reveal about the dimensional prejudices of the algorithm? Light and shadow; depth and range; foreground and background; geometry and complexity.

Bump Adam Harvey’s investigations up to the scale of a landscape, and a million potential design projects beckon. Learning from Comet 67P.

(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: The Comet as Landscape Art).

Preservation, Infrastructure, and the Museology of Crime

[Image: David Gissen, “Cross-Bronx Expressway,” with Victor Hadjikyriacou; from Landscape Futures].

In case you’re reading this near Ithaca, New York, I thought I’d mention that I’ll be speaking at a conference this weekend at Cornell, called Spolia: Histories, Spaces, and Processes of Adaptive Reuse. Things kick off this evening with a lecture by Kate Orff.

What are spolia? From the conference brief:

Spolia refers to using scavenged materials for new (and often originally unintended) purposes in constructed environment[s]. This practice is millennia old, dating back to Ancient Egypt and perhaps beyond. Both extremely pragmatic and symbolically charged, spolia is a complex phenomenon; beyond mere recycling, it also has social, cultural, and even political dimensions. Many sites, buildings, structures of antiquity were repurposed into newer edifices, not only to facilitate the production of new form, but also to claim the cultural and political heritage of the donor structures.

I’ll be speaking on a panel tomorrow morning with two people I’m very excited to meet: art historian Dale Kinney from Bryn Mawr College and co-editor of Reuse Value, and Abraham Thomas, the newly appointed director of the Sir John Soane Museum in London.

[Image: David Gissen, “Florence, Italy,” with Victor Hadjikyriacou; from Landscape Futures].

Here’s an excerpt from my abstract, in case you’re interested:

As the curator of a 2011 exhibition called Landscape Futures, I was able to commission new visual work from historian David Gissen. In the resulting project—called “Museums of the City”—Gissen explored what it would mean to foreground the apparatus of historical preservation in an urban environment. This meant populating downtown Florence, Italy, for example, with oversized lighting, display, and HVAC rigs, transforming the city’s center into an outdoor display; and doing the same in Central Park, such that carefully planted groves of trees and well-maintained lawns could be revealed for what they really are: an artificial landscape exhibition from the 19th century now hiding in plain sight as a recreational topography for present-day residents and tourists.

But it was Gissen’s look at what it would take to preserve the Cross-Bronx Expressway—a justifiably maligned urban megastructure—as a kind of stabilized ruin that seems most relevant here. Is the Cross-Bronx Expressway an example of spolia? More abstractly, to what extent can using a city’s transportation infrastructure become a museological experience?

Briefly, I’ll also discuss a half-serious proposal to preserve a freeway interchange in Baltimore, Maryland—not for reasons of aesthetics or historical significance, but, oddly enough, for reasons of topology. The interchange was due to be renovated, destroying its unique geometric arrangement, and a mathematician was thus calling for it to be saved. But are dysfunctional chunks of the city to be preserved even at the detriment of their intended use? How does infrastructure become museological?

Finally, I want to change topic altogether in order to look very briefly at one of the most remarkable private collections I have visited in recent years: a forensic collection of safes, vault doors, and entire sections of bank walls stored in a warehouse in New Jersey by a private security firm. Like something straight out of the work of artist Gordon Matta Clark—or perhaps a bizarre new version of the Sir John Soane Museum as rebuilt by the FBI—these broken doors, burnt safes, and heavily damaged architectural fragments are spolia under a different name.

I’ll use this example to discuss how architectural ruins and other spolia are used and reused in forensic analysis, exploring where forensics and archaeology become functionally indistinguishable.

[Image: From a private collection of failed safes, vault walls, and other crime scene evidence; photo by Nicola Twilley].

In any case, it should be a fun discussion and a great conference overall. Read more at the official website, and stop by if you are near Cornell’s OMA-designed Milstein Hall, where the conference takes place.

Goldberg Robotics

[Image: From Science Daily/University of Oslo].

Robots emitting robots emitting robots: this is one way that machines will learn to navigate extreme spatial environments.

“In the future,” we read in a press release courtesy of Science Daily, “robots must be able to solve tasks in deep mines on distant planets, in radioactive disaster areas, in hazardous landslip areas and on the sea bed beneath the Antarctic”—as well as in the cracks of otherwise inaccessible archaeological sites.

Researchers at the University of Oslo think we need to send machines capable of not exactly of replication, but something more like budding or fruiting, using 3D printers.

Kyrre Glette, one of the researchers behind the press release, imagines a robot being sent into “the wreckage of a nuclear power plant,” for example, where it encounters a stairway it had not been anticipating needing to climb. For the moment, it’s stuck. So what does it do? “The robot takes a picture. The picture is analysed. The arms of one of the robots is fitted with a printer. This produces a new robot, or a new part for the existing robot, which enables it to negotiate the stairs.”

The original robot—which was thus not single but a crowd waiting to happen—moves forward through the landscape by sending detached variations of itself further ahead. You could think of it as Goldberg robotics: advancing through variation.

This is obviously not a new vision—the idea of 3D printers printing 3D printers that can 3D-print further 3D-printer-printing 3D printers, for example, is a long-running staple of stoner sci-fi. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to see this specifically discussed in terms of navigating spatial environments, be they mines, caves, or architecture, explored and mapped by an instant machine-ancestry self-produced specifically for the task at hand.

Amongst the Machines: A Visit to the Tesla Factory

[Image: Outside the Tesla factory; Instagram by BLDGBLOG].

The coolest thing about a tour of the Tesla factory out in Fremont, California, is the huge metal-stamping machine—a behemoth piece of equipment that applies more than five thousand tons of pressure in order to mold metal parts in an instant. In fact, it was not even the company’s largest stamping machine, which was offline the afternoon I went through.

You hear this thing long before you see it: a thundering and resonant split-second blast that sounds more like a minor-key chord being sledgehammered out into the cavernous factory. Then the machine cycle repeats itself: parts are removed, dragged, and rattled into place, followed by the preliminary crash of a new metal sheet being lowered into the bay. Then bam, that weird sound again, equal parts dark ambient soundscape and sci-fi howl.

Strangely, though, there is an air of melancholy to the sound—a kind of unexpected pathos—as if the machine had accidentally been tuned to some minor and wistful harmonic. The instantaneous hydraulic detonation of what sounds like an organ chord thus rings out, augmented by the foot-shuddering bass of the stamp itself, which sends small earthquakes rolling through the floor. (In fact, this reminded me that the factory is more or less directly above the Hayward Fault and I began to wonder what seismic effects such a colossal machine might actually be having.)

The machine only got louder and louder as we wound our way through a complicated back-turning maze of welding walls and robot arms. Finally visible, it seemed to be made entirely of gates: a giant red portal through which shaped metal could pass.

[Image: The red gates of metal-stamping machine; photo courtesy of Tesla].

As we stopped to watch, the slow rhythm of its sounds matched up with processional movements now visible deep inside the cathedral-sized device, and the overall process began to make more sense.

Two men in full ear protection stood there, silhouetted against the mouth of the machine, presumably hypnotized by its otherworldly, repetitive soundtrack—or maybe that was just me, perhaps overly willing to hear, in the looped noise of this exotic machine, music that wasn’t really there.

In any case, I was on the tour as part of a workshop run last week at the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design, with students from Nicholas de Monchaux‘s course at Berkeley and a small group visiting from Smout Allen‘s & Kyle Buchanan‘s Unit 11 over at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London.

[Image: Photo courtesy of Tesla].

The idea behind the tour was not only to see robots at work but to experience the spatial logic of a factory, its interior the size of 80 football fields broken down into sequential functions and clusters, with color-coded circulation diagrams painted directly onto the concrete floor.

At least those were the paths meant for humans. For self-driving robots, long curving whirls of magnetic tape had been applied to the floor, forming cursive, counter-directional arabesques that only made sense when you considered the aggressive turning radii of those bulky machines.

It was the robot-readable world firsthand, or an indoor landscape architecture for machines.

There is a strict no-photo policy in place, unfortunately, and you are obliged to sign a non-disclosure agreement prior to entering the facility, so the only interior photos I have to show are from Wikipedia and Tesla’s own press page.

[Image: Photo by Steve Jurvetson, via Wikipedia].

The actual tour is very much in the vein of a corporate sales pitch, and it is delivered with true American gusto (and at very high volume), but it’s worth taking. Technically, by entering the factory you step into a foreign free-trade zone, which, for anyone else reading Keller Easterling’s new book, is an interesting thing to do in person, like entering a corporate eruv.

Once inside, you see things like aluminum rapid-injection molds, laser-cutting stations, and emergency “light curtains” dividing humans from the machines they steward. You see “laser-calibration trees,” or knobby poles branching with small geometric ornaments; they are used by laser-scanners for re-booting themselves after measuring the frames of new cars.

At the very end of the process, you see massive, Japanese-made robots lifting entire finished Teslas overhead as if they’re feathers. Each machine has been named by Elon Musk after X-Men characters: there is Thunderbird and Cyclops, Storm and Colossus, Xavier, Changeling, Ice Man, Wolverine, and Angel.

[Image: Photo courtesy of Tesla].

And, perhaps best of all, you might be lucky enough to see engineers training new robots for eventual roles in the assembly process.

Our tram slowed down for just a few seconds so we could watch a woman, less than two-thirds the size of the mechanical arm lurching back and forth in front of her, patiently coding new movements into the gyroscopes and actuators inside the machine.

Uncertain of what we were seeing, we tried to make sense of the drunken movements on display, which looked more like a snake hypnotized by its master, swaying side to side like a cobra being woken up from a dream.

At one point, our tour guide gestured out at literally dozens—perhaps hundreds—of new robots still under plastic wrap, all awaiting training and installation. The factory is expanding dramatically as Tesla gears up for the release of their new SUV.

We have “an army of robots under plastic,” the guide said enthusiastically, and he laughed. If there’s ever a robot uprising, he joked, this is probably not the best place to be.

[Image: Photo courtesy of Tesla].

It seems that our group’s educational affiliation made getting a tour much easier, but you can try your own luck using Tesla’s Contact page.