Actual, Potential, Virtual

Virtual Reality

“a term that applies to computer-simulated environments that can simulate physical presence in places in the real world, as well as in imaginary worlds.”

Augmented Reality

“a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data.”

In my opinion, augmented reality (AR) is the next step beyond virtual reality – AR encompasses the whole environment around you and adds new things to it, rather than completely generating a world (eg. Second Life, the most used example of virtual reality). Mashable covers both the benefits and issues with AR.

Benefits

1. Urban Exploration: AR apps will be able to show you what is nearby, what you should go see and when you should go. You will be able to “see” animations of landmarks when you hold your phone up to them (eg.Glockenspiel chimes in Munich, Eiffel Tower lights, changing of the guards). Also 3D overlays of buildings showing photographs of what these places looked like in the past
2. Museum: AR ‘hotspots’ with more information about the exhibition, an alternative to audio tours. 3D virtual museum guides who will tell you about the art nearby or where to find things.
3. Shopping: Shop directly from magazines or catalogues; browse virtual galleries; virtual pop-up stores; and AR window displays activated by phone apps.
4. Travel & History: “Virtual vacations” – that is, visiting landmarks in your own backyard. Seems a little disappointing, but still a good option if you can’t afford to go on a real holiday, perhaps. A good idea for schools and education – you would be able to virtually explore the places you are talking about.
5. Customer service: Allows support teams to access your camera in real time to help with problems installing electronics etc. Support would be able to relay real time instructions over the phone because they can see what you’re seeing without you having to try and explain it yourself.
6. Safety and rescue operations: Emergency service workers could potentially use AR to make sense of chaotic scenes – “x-ray” maps of underground sites showing water and electrical mains, or a virtual map of the environment.
7. Moving or decorating your home: Be able to see how furniture works in real-time, or take a photo of the space you want to decorate and be able to virtually plan it out using properly scaled virtual furniture that you can actually purchase for your home.

Issues

1. Process paradigms: machines (obviously) process things in a more concise way than humans and can be used, for example, to monitor crops to see when the perfect time to pick them would be. Mobile devices could be linked to medical devices, like insulin pumps, to monitor the health status of people in real time. In the future, maybe people will be able to see virtual “markers” over people’s heads, showing that they have a certain allergy or medical condition. Not necessarily a bad thing, as such, but an interesting cultural change.
2. Cultural quandaries: people dislike it when the information they post on a site, such as Facebook or Foursquare, is shared in a way they didn’t intend it to be. This raises the issue of privacy and the publicity of information. For example, show people really be able to see how much their neighbour’s house cost or how many single girls are in the nightclubs around them.
3. Direction for the data: Relating to the last point, how can people fully protect the original intention of their data? There needs to be some balance between what is revealed and what isn’t about people with AR technology, to create an environment that people will be comfortable in.
4. Robot reflections: Does the thought of one day having AR lenses (or glasses, in the nearer future) make people uncomfortable, or implanting technology in their bodies. Many people have no problems with using plastic surgery to alter their appearance now; how is this different?
5. The vocabulary of vision: The world and communities will become far more connected. People would spend less time “tasking”.
6. Talk or tunnel: It’s likely that AR technology will increase “tunnel vision” and people will be even more focused on their technology and less focused on the world – and people – around them.

I find the new social issues resulting from AR technology to be particularly interesting and have chosen to study this topic for my final research paper.

PS. week 5’s word was EXPERIENCE

 

New Media Art

This Is Colossal is one of my favourite art blogs, and it features a lot of work that can be considered “new media” or that was created with the help of new media. Here are a few of my favourites:

“The Future”

I genuinely have no idea what this subject is about any more, so just bear with me.

Douglas Rushkoff is apparently some kind of media oracle who predicted all this random stuff that ended up happening like the internet being important, viral videos and social currency (was that actual currency, like bitcoins, or data as a “currency” online?). In his new book he believes that “we no longer have a sense of a future, of goals, of direction at all” which I immediately disagree with because things that don’t exist yet that should:

• awesome smart robots that will do stuff for you
• space travel for everyone – even i would join the defence force if it was in space
• really cool space ships
• self driving cars
• hoverboards and possibly hoverskates
• really intuitive interactive video games
• jetpacks for everyone
• a house that looks after itself
• plus more

So I think that people should really be devoting their time to these things. 

Anyway he talks about five ways we’re struggling, apparently

1. Narrative collapse – clashes between different types of narrative and the loss of linear stories.
2. Digiphrenia – modern technology lets us be in more than one place and self at the time which is disconcerting. Also the different between data flows and data storage
3. Overwinding – trying to fit big timeframes into smaller ones. Perhaps a result of everyone being so strapped for time.
4. Fractalnoia – experiencing life entirely in the present tense; conspiracy theories, trying to map relationships between things, prediction of data.
5. Apocalypto – crazy people who are stocking their bomb shelters because they think the world is ending and people that are obsessed with the zombie apocalypse.

Arthur and Marilouise Kroker also identify 10 issues and people:

1. Tethered to mobility – People are “tethered” to their devices, but they distract from other forms of vision.
2. Neurodiversity – Higher levels of insecurity and anxiety in the 21st century.
3. Lynn Hershman Leeson – Struggles of art and feminism in the 21st century. A filmmaker and artist from San Francisco.
4. Ricardo Dominguez and D. Fox Harrel – Dominguez is an artist and professor at the University of Calfornia; Harrel is a MIT Research Professor. Working on technology to assist social change and social issues.
5. Alex Rivera, Sleep Dealer (2008) – Augmented reality labor and colonisation; 90min film.
6. Off-grid bodies – The history of the 21st century will not just be written by the privileged and wealthy of mainstream media, but also the marginalised:
   

   “refugees, migrants, the homeless, the helpless, and torture victims who are always off-grid—disappeared, nomadic, prohibited, unlamented, undocumented, unseen.”

7. Drone culture 
8. Unmanned Perception – The impact of digital devices and social media on the human senses and how this impacts on the human landscape.
9. Posthumanism – The human breaks the boundaries of the body.
10. 3D Organs – 3D printing technology allows body parts to be individually sculpted.

 

P.S. this week’s word is hauntology.

 

 

New Media – Science, Technology & Innovation

I felt that some of this week’s articles were basically useless because they were all about really science-y stuff and we’re, uh, media students. Please excuse me whilst everything about DNA and coding genomes flies right over my head because it’s been a while since I’ve done high school biology. It might have been helpful if they articles had anything at all to do with media.

Apart from those, the rest of the articles were kind of interesting. They discussed the way that new media and data sharing is affecting scientific and medical research.

The Guardian and Seed Magazine demonstrate the changes that are occurring due to research being published online rather than on paper. After 2011, science funders wanted the studies that they fund to be shared, so that the data is widely available. The reason for this is that it increases the pace of discovery and it allows researches to see one another’s work. This is designed to get rid of a culture of ‘data-hoarding’, when researchers don’t want others to see their work. Some of these beliefs are founded because published papers are very important to researches and they don’t want people to see their mistakes during the process or take credit for their work.

We need… to think beyond the idea of knowledge as paper. We need to think about its consumption, not just its production.

– John Wilbanks

Over at RealClimate, meanwhile, compares posting research on a blog vs. getting it properly published and reviewed. Schmidt outlines the pros and cons of blog research in that it is much quicker but it is likely that your casual research may be taken more seriously than you intended it to, causing the researcher to worry it is wrong. To rectify this, he opted to get the study published, but that became an incredibly long process because he had to completely overhaul the study, do extra research and go through the actual process of getting the paper reviewed (which took several attempts). In the end, he decides that

 I certainly think that blogs can be of tremendous value in bringing up more context and dispelling the various mis-apprehensions that exist, but as a venue for actually doing science, they cannot replace the peer-reviewed paper – however painful that publishing process might be.

 

P.S. this week’s word is OPEN SCIENCE.

My favourite ‘data networks’

Unlike the people in this NYTimes article, I have really got no desire to spend my time recording every little thing I do every day and how long it took me in order to keep a document of my incredibly dull life. Nor do I want to see how much time I spent concentrating on work because the answer will be ‘not much’. I do, however, have a few ‘data networks’ that I love using and rely on a lot – these are some of my Smartphone apps on my iPhone…

Memory & Experience

Mnemonics – the process or technique of improving or developing the memory; assisting or intended to assist the memory (dictionary.com).

This week, Bernard Stiegler’s article is incredibly complex, but at the most basic it outlines the way that people externalise memory through the use of lists, notes, annotations, diaries etc. Stiegler calls these “memory bearing objects”, and if you lose these objects you can lose the memory (or reminder) attached to them. Phones are an example of complex memory bearing object – many people no longer memorise phone numbers as there’s no need when you can store them all on the device. It is easy to memorise phone numbers when you have to dial them in all the time, but with the invention of both speed dial and the ability to store contact numbers in the phone this is a less common activity. The downside of this is, of course, that if you lose the phone you may lose all your numbers, although this could also be the case in the past if you lost your address/phone book.

Meanwhile, Alva Noë asks “Does thinking happen in the brain?”. Yes, I think it does Noë, but I guess your philoso-babbly has some interesting thoughts behind it. The car is a good analogy – perhaps multiple parts of the body are involved in the overall thought process.

I found the Alan Kay on Learning video actually very interesting! It is really spot on, but I had never really found a way to explain this experience. I often find that I’m able to do things well if I’m doing them almost absently. I get into a rhythm without really thinking about it, but as soon as I become aware of what I’m doing though, I start to stuff up. That itself is very distracting. I’m aware that I’m aware and it’s hard to distract myself from that again. (Also, now I REALLY want to play tennis). In particular, I liked this quote from the video in respect to learning and memory:

“if you don’t have a good theory of learning then you can still get it to happen by just helping the person to focus”.

 

P.S. Experience

Media Ecologies

What are media ecologies?

“It is the study of media environments, the idea that technology and techniques, modes of information and codes of communication play a leading role in human affairs.

Media ecology is the Toronto School, and the New York School. It is technological determinism, hard and soft, and technological evolution. It is media logic, medium theory, mediology.

It is McLuhan Studies, orality–literacy studies, American cultural studies. It is grammar and rhetoric, semiotics and systems theory, the history and the philosophy of technology.

It is the postindustrial and the postmodern, and the preliterate and prehistoric.”

—Lance Strate, “Understanding MEA,” In Medias Res 1 (1), Fall 1999.

So, basically, media ecologies are… a lot of different things. Or media ecologies is a lot of different things? I’m not really sure of the grammar here.

I found this video (from about 10 years ago by the look of it) when I searched ‘media ecologies’ on youtube. It isn’t very helpful but it’s pretty funny.

Anyway, from what I understand, it seems to be about society and changes in technology, which is something that is obviously happening constantly in today’s world.

Matthew Fuller (2005) outlines three different approaches to media ecologies:

• “Information ecology” – the way that information flows between the different levels of an organisation supported by computer work and data.
• Media ecology as “environmentalism” – the interaction of technology with the world and maintaining the “human”. (Neil Postman)
• Literature as media

So I think they want it to be science but it isn’t really.

Milissa Deitz  (2010) mentions Wikileaks as an interesting example of  the relationship between citizens, government and technology, and I think I might almost understand what this topic is about. It raises questions of what information citizens should be able to have access to.

 

P.S. Machinic

Media, Culture, Society, Technology

Bear 71 is an interesting example of the amalgamation of media, technology and nature. Through the use of radio frequencies on collars and video cameras, viewers of the documentary are about to track the location of various animals. However, I did find the interface confusing, and there was little explanation of how to control it, which would have been helpful.

Google Glass and the rumoured Apple iWatch are two examples of human interaction between media, society and technology. Smart phone technology allows people to be constantly connected to the world – and people – around them, but devices like these are the next step.

I personally think Google Glasses look like kind of a joke (and that the iWatch is kind of redundant). Not do you look like an enormous loser whilst walking around wearing them, it raises a million questions about privacy and general etiquette to those around you. I guess people could argue the same about mobile phones, though. I think that it’s a lot clearer when someone is recording you with a mobile, but it remains true that basically anything you do could end up permanently on the internet.

I also liked Jussi Parrika’s reading from this week, because it reminded me of how much hipsters love ‘vintage’ stuff, like casette tapes and records and old clothes (but they all have iPhones, obviously).

I’ll end this post with this clip (ignore the annoying laugh track).

P.S. EVENT cause I go to lectures. They’re so interesting.