Personal Tech
Beauty and Magnets
BY FRED GUTERL
Why don't robots ever move in a tentative manner?
Why doesn't your computer purr to your touch?
Why must technology always be useful?
One former science student says it's time to set things
right.
DAVID DURLACH
WAS A CHILD
when he discovered electromagnets. But not until he
was in high school did it strike him like a poem that
each winding of a wire coil increases the strength
of its magnetic field. At that point, he remembers,
he started winding electromagnets until his wrists
got tired. Once, when a coil grew to the size of an
acorn squash and the weight of a bowling ball, he
lugged it over to a wall socket and plugged it in.
By some miracle the fuses held, but lights throughout
the house grew dim. "My parents asked me not to plug
it in in the evenings when they were trying to read,"
he recalls.
In 1977, Durlach went to Princeton and tried studying
physics, math, and electrical engineering, but he
was unhappy. Academic science was too dry for his
tastes, and he had little in common with students
in traditional liberal arts courses. After four years,
he left without taking a degree, moved back to his
native Massachusetts, and spent several years in a
succession of odd jobs--volleyball coach, math tutor,
stand-up comedian--but otherwise rarely left his apartment.
Soon he was running out of the small inheritance he
had been living on. He needed an income, he needed
more human contact, and he had a vague sense that
he could turn his hobby--electromagnets--into something
he could present to the outside world. He joined a
support group for entrepreneurs.
"We spent half the time giving each other therapy
and the other half business advice," he says. It was
then, at the age of 26, that his tinkering with electromagnets
took a serious turn. One day he brought the group
a tray of iron filings, with a few small electromagnets
wired underneath. He had also rigged up a computer
to control the amount of electricity in each coil--and
thus the strength of its magnetic field--and had programmed
the computer to make patterns form and shift in the
filings. The support group loved it.
Thus emboldened, he tried out his creation on a more
discerning crowd. He took it to an open house at an
artists' cooperative, where some 3,000 to 5,000 people
saw his dancing iron dust (he had replaced the filings).
He watched their faces. "People looked like they look
when they see a child starting to walk," he says.
"There was this warmth and support. It was just delight.
And people laughing. And interesting conversations.
It would go from 'What chips did you use?' to 'This
reminds me of Tina Turner.' There were hard-core techies
and people who were dancers." It finally occurred
to him why he loved physics so much: not because it
was useful, but because it was beautiful.
Yet those same people whose faces lit up in delight
turned and asked: What's it for? And that kind of
thing upset him. "If it were a puppet show, with the
same audience impact exactly, no one would ask 'What's
it for?'" says Durlach. "But because it's high tech,
people think it must have been developed for some
'practical' purpose."
Despite the awesome application of science and technology
in solving practical problems, Durlach realized, virtually
nothing had been done to harness the same tools in
the service of emotions. And though he doesn't remember
a moment of epiphany--or a voice in the back of his
mind saying "My destiny!"--this realization had a
deeply personal significance. It gave meaning to the
years of discontent. Durlach began to feel passionately
that only half the potential of technology to enrich
people's lives had been tapped. "Medical researchers
think nothing of spending billions of research dollars
on dialysis machines and heart replacement machines
to keep people physically alive, but they don't build
virtual reality systems so that old people isolated
in intensive care wards can imagine they are having
dinner with their family. Now, it would cost a lot,
but we could do it equally well."
Durlach no longer has time to coach volleyball or
sit around his apartment. He now runs a three-room
lab in a modest single-story building in Somerville,
complete with a motley staff. Several students from
nearby Harvard and MIT work there, as well as an opera
singer and a fortyish man by the name of Wes Keyes,
a jack-of-all-trades equally adept at designing machine
parts on a computer and working the lathe. Amid the
clutter of books and boxes, manuals and machines,
Durlach, now a stocky, balding 38-year-old, flits
about in a state of nervous excitement, showing one
of his young helpers how best to cover a container
of oily liquid with Plexiglas to keep it from evaporating,
or negotiating with another what hours he will work
between classes. Durlach keeps several projects going
at once--ideas he's been cultivating for years but
that he hasn't had the time or money to try to realize.
Things got a bit easier for him last fall when the
National Science Foundation, as part of its program
to encourage small, innovative, science-related businesses,
awarded him a grant of $300,000 over two years.
TO UNDERSTAND
WHAT DURLACH
is going to do with this money, it is first necessary
to dwell for a moment longer on his magnum opus, the
dancing iron dust, because all of his newer work is
in some way related to it. He is eager to demonstrate
its charm. In a 15-by-15-inch tray, the iron dust
has arranged itself into nine rows, each composed
of nine little humps. Below the tray, directly underneath
each hump, a static, permanent magnet holds the dust
in formation. The humps look like walnut-size porcupines,
the dust forming spikes as it follows the direction
of the magnetic field outward. Durlach pops a compact
disc into his computer and hits a few keys. The dust
springs into action, shifting and swirling to the
strains of Flight of the Bumblebee; one moment it's
like a line of synchronized, kicking Rockettes, the
next like a troupe of modern dancers racing around
a stage. The humps are always there, but the shapes
move and change with uncanny swiftness and fluidity.
They bend this way and that, their spikes reach for
the sky or fall humbly toward the floor. At some moments
the performance is touching, at others comical.
This five-minute display is the result of hundreds
of hours of programming, not to mention the computer
language Durlach had to create to specify the details
of choreography. In this language, Durlach not only
shifts dust through the three spatial dimensions,
he also plays with time, changing the rate at which
it appears to flow, moving it forward and backward,
to achieve especially fluid motion. "One of the interesting
things is that you can make time go forward and backward
like a sine wave," he says. "It's as if you took the
reels of a movie, and instead of rotating them continuously
forward you moved them back and forth, woonk-woonk,
woonk-woonk. That's a very cool effect." Durlach goes
on to enumerate the different ways you can play with
time, and the effects they generate. He knows intuitively
how the 16 electromagnets underneath the tray act
to create these effects, but he doesn't understand
it in a rigorously mathematical way, and he doesn't
particularly care. Although he is engaged in research
of a sort, he is first and foremost an artist, which
is to say he is more concerned with figuring out how
to create an effect for his audience than in coming
to an academic understanding of the physics involved.
He is taking a similarly pragmatic approach in his
efforts to write a computer program that can listen
to music and, as the music unfolds, create a choreography
for his iron dust. At present, his choreography is
laboriously handcrafted to each piece of music. Although
some widely available devices already respond to music
in what computer scientists call real time, they are
primitive and not particularly interesting. So-called
light organs, which give you a moving graphic representation
of the volume of the sound at each particular band
of frequency, are easy to build but deliver no particular
emotional impact. At the other extreme, artificial-intelligence
researchers are working on analyzing music through
supercomputers.
For obvious reasons, Durlach eschews the supercomputer
approach. Instead he likes to conceive an idea and
play with it until it yields the effects he desires.
He hit on one idea by thinking about the problems
he faces in choreographing his iron dust--an especially
difficult task, precisely because the dust can be
molded by the magnets into almost any shape. From
the standpoint of choreography, it is better to have
some constraints, such as those imposed on human dancers
by bodies that can run only so fast, bend into only
so many positions. Since Durlach cannot actually impose
physical constraints on his dust, he is writing a
computer simulation that treats the dust as though
it were not millions of unconstrained particles but
rather a thick liquid able to slosh around the tray
only so fast. Then he'll use data extracted from the
music to create wave patterns in this virtual liquid.
The computer will translate these wave patterns to
the dust. He may also try changing the properties
of the liquid to certain cues in the music--when the
flutes come in, say, the liquid might get thinner,
or perhaps get thicker when the tempo slows. "We want
to give the iron dust a personality that is coherent
and separate from the music," he says. "This may or
may not work. It's a research question."
DURLACH HAS
NOT ALWAYS
appreciated the need to keep his solutions simple.
Eight years ago, desperate for funding to develop
his iron dust technology, he accepted an offer from
the owner of a chain of shopping centers to create
a display that could tour the centers. The only catch
was that it had to be rugged enough to be placed outdoors.
Durlach had to build a metal casing to protect the
sensitive electronics from salty ocean spray, from
graffiti, saliva, rain, snow, and sudden swings in
temperature--the machining bill alone came to more
than $10,000. To keep the electronics at the proper
operating temperature, he installed a $2,000 air-conditioning
and heating unit that had been designed for radar
on military ships. "I learned all kinds of things
that I didn't want to know," he says. "It was nuts,
absolutely nuts. The manual alone took me two and
a half months to write." He spent two years on the
project and was paid $60,000 for expenses and labor.
The more serious problem with the dancing iron dust,
however, is the expense of making the display any
bigger than it already is. The cost of additional
dust, magnets, and the electricity to run them quickly
gets out of hand when you start increasing the dimensions
of the tray. Nevertheless, Durlach has found a market
among manufacturers who want eye-catching exhibits
for their trade shows. And he's done a version of
the dust for Ford in which permanent magnets spell
out the company's name.
For some years, however, he has had in mind another
project, one that would be far less costly to scale
up. Like the dancing dust, Durlach says, it would
demonstrate "interactive physics" and also work as
a catchy sign. He calls this creation his Tower of
Triangles, and at the far end of his lab, near the
milling machine, sits a prototype. The triangles are
like those you'd make while building a house of cards:
each consists of three square faces joined to one
another along two edges. They revolve around an axis,
like the letters that Vanna White flips in Wheel of
Fortune. Although at the moment he has only a few
triangles mounted vertically, one on top of the other,
he envisions making long chains of them. Durlach flips
the top one with his hand and sends it wobbling back
and forth. The other two wobble as well, though they
lag behind each other as though they were abdominal
segments of a loose-hipped snake. "The idea is there'll
be a lot more segments," he says, "and when you move
one end, you'll see a wave propagate through the entire
thing." With motors operating the triangles at either
end, you could set up standing waves, in which the
hills and valleys of the wave alternate with each
other, while the points in between--the nodes--appear
to stay in the same spot.
"Remember how cool a barber shop pole looks?" he says.
"It's just a turning thing. You'll be able to wind
this thing up and turn it, like a barber shop pole,
but you'll also be able to superimpose a standing
wave on the twist, creating a sort of trill." Durlach
continues rattling off descriptions of other patterns
he'll be able to generate with the tower. His ideas
fall one after the next like fruit toppling from a
stand. With two towers next to each other, you could
set waves propagating down one and going up the other.
Then you could set the contraption up so that each
time the wave got to the end of a pole, it bounced
back, growing bigger each time. And so on. "Having
two towers would be wonderful," he says. "Imagine
one winds, and the other winds, and they wind in synchrony.
There are so many relationships of dance between two
of them. I think that kind of thing in the aggregate
will be just totally cool. And, of course, no matter
how big you make it, you only need two motors at either
end, so the cost stays under control."
Art collectors, Durlach has found, do not generally
invest in high-tech art, so he has looked instead
to science museums and corporations to sponsor his
work. In addition to the Ford logo, he has made a
logo for the Dexter Corporation's magnetic materials
division in Billerica, Massachusetts, out of its own
magnets. For the Clippard Instruments Laboratory,
a pneumatic-valve manufacturer in Cincinnati, he is
working on a sign made out of bubbles: small valves
at the bottom of a tank of water or some other fluid
would release bubbles in such a way that they would
form the company's name as they rise to the surface.
"I'm very interested in using the physics of a corporation's
own products to do promotion for them," Durlach says.
"There's also a whole market in retail stores and
trade shows that is right for serious research into
displays."
IN THE BUBBLE
SIGN
he is doing for Clippard, the physical challenges
are formidable. For one thing, when a bubble passes
through water it leaves behind a slight bit of turbulence,
which subtly and unpredictably affects the way a second
bubble following in its wake will behave. For another,
he must worry about what happens if the power fails
when the valves are open and the water floods back
into the electronics. And then there's the expense:
for the display to work visually, Durlach figures
it has to be about eight feet long, six feet high,
and two feet deep. He once priced an aquarium this
size, without the valves or electronics, at $30,000.
For these reasons he's put the bubble sign on hold,
though he hasn't stopped dreaming about it. "It could
be a very beautiful artwork," he says. "It could also
be a really cool clock, where it releases the time
in bubbles. You could also do three-dimensional imaging,
like releasing a DNA double helix from a circle of
valves at the bottom. Or an interactive display where
you move your finger over a touch pad and trace something
out, and you see the same pattern in the bubbles.
You could put it in a hotel lobby where guests come
to register, and when you put their names into the
computer the bubbles say, 'Welcome Mr. and Mrs. Schnitlau.'"
In the meantime, Durlach is beginning to explore the
use of ferrofluids--liquids that contain iron particles,
which make them magnetically attractive. It's already
late in the day and time is short, but Durlach decides
to open a bottle of ferrofluid to demonstrate what
it can do. It has the color and consistency of motor
oil. "This is the first time we've done anything with
this stuff on this scale," he warns. "I don't know
what it's going to do." His assistant, Anne Harley--the
opera singer--has finished mounting little metal dowel-shaped
magnets into a circular tray. When you look down on
it, you see that the dowels have arranged themselves
into the numerals of a clock.
Durlach begins to pour the liquid, but he pours so
cautiously that the liquid dribbles back up along
the side of the bottle. He gets flustered, and for
good reason: the quart bottle of liquid in his hand
retails for $4,500, though the manufacturer donated
it in exchange for access to Durlach's research. He
and Harley scour the office for a funnel, but instead
Durlach proposes using an ice cream stick as a channel.
Meanwhile, the teaspoon or so of liquid that made
it into the tray is crawling eerily up one of the
dowels. It perches on top, in the shape of a beetle
with odd ridges along its back. "Wow! Cool!" Durlach
and Harley say almost in unison. Durlach continues
pouring. More liquid runs onto the tray and creeps
up onto other numerals. "David, we should videotape
this," says Harley. "You're right," says Durlach,
and once again he interrupts his pouring. He scurries
around setting up lights and a video camera on a tripod.
"We want to document everything we do," he says. "Otherwise
it would be impossible to go back and re-create it
later."
Eventually, in the glare of a floodlight, Durlach
finishes emptying the liquid into the tray. Then he
activates the electromagnets to the same choreography
he programmed for the iron dust. The liquid runs from
one end of the tray to the other, forming little vortices
and currents. Now and then it makes a plop or a gurgle.
Durlach and Harley emit squeals of laughter. Of course,
Durlach explains, the programming needs to be tailored
to the physical characteristics of the new medium,
but this primitive demonstration gives an idea of
what it will be like. Just then a few drops of liquid
squirt straight into the air, as if in agreement.
Perhaps the oddest thing about Durlach is that he
has trained himself to look at technology in a way
that is almost completely foreign to most people,
except perhaps a handful in the entertainment industry.
"I often have to build what I envision before other
people can see it," he says. "So it might take two
years before a lot of people even understand what
I'm talking about. But I'm able to do this because
I understand how people react to kinetic things, and
I know enough physics about what to build to sort
of do that."
Durlach has come to the conclusion that some fields
of science are handicapped because researchers don't
appreciate the emotional point of view. For instance,
computers charged with searching quickly through reams
of data would do better, he says, if they had the
ability to ignore some information simply because
they didn't care about it. Likewise, robots are built
to lift heavy loads or assemble products, but few
people make robots that can, say, move gracefully
or with tentativeness. "There are plenty of chess
programs that are good at winning, but none that pout
if they don't get a chance to play," Durlach says.
"The point is, this is in fact relevant. It may not
be possible to build artificial intelligence that's
functional without having agendas of the kind that
are emotionally based, not cognitively based."
But since emotion is left out of the language of science,
discussing it invariably seems silly. These days,
however, Durlach has mustered enough confidence to
venture a few silly ideas. "One of the things you
could imagine doing is having your whole computer
and everything around it be sensitive to touch, so
that there's no way you could touch it without it
reacting in some way. That would make it so much more
human."
Durlach recalls once seeing a computer program that
could engage people in conversations. It wasn't really
intelligent, he says, but it nevertheless seemed more
human than most programs he had encountered. "The
reason it seemed human is that it really didn't listen
to you very carefully and sort of wound the conversation
back to the few things it cared about. Now, not listening
is not what most researchers would think of as a research
topic. But it is! It's what makes things human. We
don't have the skills in this lab to do formal research
in artificial intelligence. But we don't necessarily
need to understand this stuff. We need to dance. Dancers
don't understand the physics of what they do."
