A widely cited article in IEEE states the goal of virtual reality (VR). “The overarching goal of VR is to generate a digital real-time experience that mimics the full resolution of human perception. This entails recreating every photon our eyes see, every small vibration our ears hear, and other cognitive aspects (touch, smell, etc.)” (111).…More
Tag Archives: virtual reality
Ultimate VR
In his book Reality+ philosopher David Chalmers restates a common view about the future of VR. My guess is that within a century we will have virtual realities that are indistinguishable from the nonvirtual world. Perhaps we’ll plug into machines through a brain-computer interface, bypassing our eyes and ears and other sense organs. The machines…More
Permeable portals
The satirical fantasy The Good Place is ostensibly about the afterlife, and features different mechanisms for moving between the Good Place, the Bad Place, the Medium Place and Earth via magical doors, a hot air balloon, a train, a snap of the fingers, pneumatic chutes and giant round doors that clamp shut like the iris…More
Parallel worlds
He’s making few public appearances but “the pixels of his Twitter feed continued to live in a world of alternative reality,” echoed the Washington Post this week about Trump. Meanwhile, His Dark Materials that also taps into a multiverse of realities is back on the BBC. A helpful entry in Wikipedia under multiverse lists several…More
Second Life revisited
It’s eleven years since I explored the shared 3D world of Second Life. The University of Edinburgh owns a virtual island there, and in 2006 I was gifted a small promontory of land on which to conduct some experiments. This playground nook was always a mess. One of our team created a stylised version of…More
Is 360 degree video more real?
High resolution display screens, motion and touch sensors, interaction with other people and virtual objects, channels that deliver sound, touch, taste and smell, stereo vision and sound, all wrapped into a 360 degree 3D sphere of experience — that’s the dream and expectation of VR (virtual reality). Is 360 degree video on the way to that ideal?…More
Is cyberspace real?
Cyberspace has been hijacked by cybercriminals, cyberterrorists, cyberwarriors and cybervigilantes. But is it a real place? Sometimes artless questions like “Is cyberspace real?” turn out to reveal more than the interrogator bargained for. Not only is it real, but surreal. Eventually, any cultural theorist investigating the problems of reality alights on the work of Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), the psychoanalyst and philosopher whose…More
Data waste
Four years ago when excitement about the 3D role-playing environment SecondLife was in full frenzy, a group of us constructed a playground promontory on the edge of the University’s main island. We built walls that changed their surface patterns and moved about in response to signals from mobile phones (in physical life). It was a…More
Hygienic reality
Many people take it for granted that we occupy two worlds: the physical and the virtual. In 1997 MIT digital researchers Ishii and Ullmer stated that people potentially “live between two realms: our physical environment and cyberspace” (Ishii and Ullmer, 1997). They took on the challenge of developing digital devices that connect the two spaces together.More