Virtual Reality

A recent article on the Reuters web site Ancient Rome comes back to life in virtual model reports on the University of Virginia’s RomeReborn1.0 project, which attempts to recreate a virtual reality model of the entirety of Rome circa 320AD. (That’d be good to splice into a computer simulation game)

Reminded me of the ARCHEOGUIDE project that was promoted before the 2004 Athens Olympics. This was an augmented reality project that allowed people physically exploring the site of ancient Olympia to have virtual constructs of the “unruined” structures superimposed upon the landscape to give impressions of their size and relationship to other structures. More in the paper Cultivate Interactive Issue 9: Augmented Reality Touring of Archaeological Sites with the ARCHEOGUIDE System.

Also there is an exploration of the ruins of the bronze age palace at Knosós on the island of Crete available at British School at Athens: Knosós. (Uses Quicktime VR)

Three different approaches - virtual reality, augmented reality and web-based media.

This looks promising. Touch is much harder to simulate in VR than sound and vision. This development seems to bring it a bit close. See Haptic glove to touch on virtual fabrics - tech - 13 February 2007 - New Scientist.

Simon Smith (who runs the BetterHumans.com web site) pauses to think about the effects of living in “eschatological” hope - in this case, waiting for some sort of techno-rapture. See Simon : Are virtual worlds inhibiting real social progress?.

But I would argue that, thanks to their sheer immersiveness, virtual worlds are qualitatively different from previous escapes, and getting more sophisticated all the time. My concern is what happens to the world while we’re waiting to upload into our digital utopias. The more realistic and appealing our virtual worlds, the more I fear people will avoid dealing with real problems. It’s certainly possible that virtual worlds will have a positive societal influence, with people trying to replicate some of their virtual experiences in real life. But I think it’s far more likely that people will increasingly seek to escape a world with poverty, sickness, social strife and other ills for one where such suffering is not only eliminated, but simply not represented because those who suffer can’t afford the cost of entry.

Related link - Greenflame: By their eschatology you shall know them.

A couple of links relating to ethical considerations of emerging technologies.

No sex please, robot, just clean the floor - Sunday Times - Times Online notes the call by some for ethical guidelines to be developed with respect to robot/AI research. Ethical guidelines for both developers and users.

BetterHumans.com : An uplifting evening with James Hughes. Simon Smith ponders whether you should make your pet (or other animals) more intelligent if you had the power to do so. Again some interesting reflections here (though Deep Blue Sea did come to mind seeing as dogs and cats are carnivores).

This is funky. Playing virtual tennis in real space with your cell phone. I love augmented reality technologies (see Greenflame: Augmented Reality, Children’s Books and Ritual), and the video clips at the HITL (NZ) web site have some interesting demos. (Just wish they were in Quicktime or MPEG formats - never know how WMV is going to perform on the old iBook)

See: Wired News: Next Game Controller: Your Phone and Human Interface Technology New Zealand (Videos).

3quarksdaily: Poison in the Ink: How Virtual Worlds Mirror Our Own is an article picking up on the popularity of the large-scale online multi-player gaming systems.

See also: Greenflame: UN uses video game as educational tool

Article over at BetterHumans.com on virtual humans - those created by scans, computer programs, and video capture. See pragmatica : The growing role of virtual humans.

Last night I was listening to the podcast Changesurfer Radio: The Future of Virtual Reality and there was this really clever clip at the end of a transhumanist parody from the production The Filkado.

Anyway, it’s a Gilbert and Sullivan knockoff available for download at I am the very model of a Singularitarian - Charlie Kam’s H+ filk. Just writing up some notes on the “Singularity” so it made me smile. The link to the web page has the lyrics too, which is good because the jargon and buzzwords come thick and fast.

“What is the singularity?” I hear you ask. See Transhumanist FAQ : 2.7 What is the singularity? and Technological singularity - Wikipedia.

The podcast wasn’t bad either with some interesting ideas about virtual reality.

A few years back (2001?) I played around with LifeFX (Windows/IE only) which at that point had a funky email program (FaceMail?) you could download and then its avatar software would recite your emails to you with speech synthesis, a “life-like” avatar and recognition of emoticons. So I was interested when I saw this today: Wired News: Avatars Among Us.

I remember discussing with some friends that the way that sociable computers might come about would not be through embodied robotics but through an AI system hooked up to an avatar (maybe trained through embodied robotics though). If you spend you day interacting with a life-like avatar then over time you may come to consider it more than a program on your computer (or PDA or media player).

LifeFX was developed in part using technology researched in part here at the University of Auckland for medical simulations. There’s an article here about it: Wired 8.12: Must Read - Interface2face.

Oh, and there are some video clips of it here: LifeFX Demos.

Just skimming through these while list current applications of virtual reality in practice. These look amazing though I’m not sure I’d volunteer to test “Spider-World” (which means of course I’m a good candidate for it.)

Hoffman, Hunter G. “Virtual-Reality Therapy.” Scientific American 291, no. 2 (2004): 58-65. [HTML version]North, Max M., Sarah M. North, and Joseph R. Coble. “Virtual Reality Therapy: An Effective Treatment for Psychological Disorders.” In Handbook of Virtual Environments : Design, Implementation, and Applications, ed. Kay M. Stanney, 1065-1078. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002.

Rizzo, Albert A., J. Galen Buckwalter, and Cheryl van der Zaag. “Virtual Environment Applications in Clinical Neuropsychology.” In Handbook of Virtual Environments : Design, Implementation, and Applications, ed. Kay M. Stanney, 1027-1064. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002.

Article on the Economist web site observing the love for robots in Japan. Has a few religious points of contact too. See Japan’s humanoid robots | Better than people | Economist.com.

Related to this is the Robotic Life group at MIT. Head over and have a look at their site. On their publications page they have some papers you can download that would fit with the article above, especially the ones about robots as collaborative partners.

Another interesting article is Wired News: Monsters of Photorealism which comments on the ideas of Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori. Mori asserts that the more real you try to make a simulacrum of the human being - a robot or in VR/video games/films - the less convincing they become, to the point of becoming disconcerting or even repulsive. (See also Uncanny Valley - Wikipedia.)

Anyway, that’s enough random thesis connections falling out of my head for today.

A nice short introduction to virtual reality technologies at the Virtual Reality Laboratory at the University of Michigan. See: UM-VRL: Virtual Reality: A Short Introduction. All you ever wanted to know (in summary) about CAVEs, BOOMs, HMDs and data gloves.

From some reading I was doing today.

Technology never escapes politics. The fiction of cyberspace is useful precisely to the extent that it allows it allows its proponents to imagine an androcentric reality in which a threatening, messy, or recalcitrant (and invariably feminized) nature never intrudes. In this respect, cyberspace is consensual primarily in its insistence that technologically mediated experience can transcend the ecological and economic constraints that have shaped and continue to shape human culture. It offers the fantasy that the more technologically sophisticated our society becomes the less it has to worry about the distribution of wealth and resources.

From: Robert Moss Markley “Introduction: History, Theory, and Virtual Reality.” In Virtual Realities and Their Discontents, ed. Robert Moss Markley, 1-10. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. (p.4)

This book is a collection of essays from writers who are more critical (even cynical) about the benefits offered by virtual reality and cyberspace, and the myths spun by the proponents of the technology.

Was writing up a section on immersion as one of the distinctive approaches to VR (one of the seven that Michael Heim identifies) and came across these articles. Love the VirtuaSphere (but not sure if I could carry off the Lycra body suit). The VR small and taste articles are also interesting but I think I’d need to see and try out the taste one. Anyway, here are the links:

• gizmag Article: The VirtuSphere: full body immersion Virtual reality at last.
• gizmag Article: First human robotic arm implant.
• New Scientist Breaking News - Smell cannon targets virtual reality users.
• New Scientist Breaking News - Virtual reality conquers sense of taste

Mike, a friend of mine, forwarded me this link about the new family world envisaged by Intel its recent developer forum. The author comments that a colleague of his saw it like this,

Wolfgang’s issue with what was presented is that our future family life would have little in common with a typical scenario of today. Availability of various digital devices, ubiquitous broadband and wireless connections will enable every family member to be engaged in their own digital worlds. Just like in Total Recall, we would become trapped inside our own heads.

More at: Tom’s Hardware Guide Columns: Intel Does a Total Recall at IDF.

Seems similar to the observations a while back by Michael Lewis in the very watchable BBC documentary series “The Future Just Happened”. You can watch episodes at the main web site BBC : The Future Just Happened - the key episode for this topic is “Promise vs. Threat” (Real Player). (Book available here.)

Matt and Maggi link through to some interesting stuff about using Augmented Reality (AR) out of the HITL project (NZ / US) for children’s books. I’ve also wondered about the possibilities for shared ritual experiences - that go beyond things like the primitive “CyberSamhain” described here in Erik Davis’ “Techno-pagans” article.

Beyond Tomorrow
News story about Human Interface Technology Laboratory New Zealand

I came across AR when I did my initial foray into looking at virtual reality for my BD, when I started looking at how emergent technologies interact with Christian understandings of being human. Some very clever, and potentially helpful, stuff there.

The HITL (NZ) stuff originates in the “Magic Book” project (HITL project in the US). There used to be some video clips there you could view on the net that showed multiple people using the augmented reality stuff. The clips are a bit dated now but might give you the general idea. I like the facility to move between the fully immersive virtual world and an augmented one.

BBC World has a programme “The Virtual World” on a few years back that showed AR technology using, among other things, haptic (touch) feedback - you could “feel” the surface of molecules through an interface hooked up to a scanning electron microscope while working in a normal work environment with others. Might be some clips from that around somewhere. BBC World’s “Click Online” has some AR stuff here.

Wired News: Real World Doesn’t Use a Joystick

Kozy Kitchens’ experience with having a difficult time separating her real-life consciousness from that of her game playing is all too common among hard-core gamers. It’s so common, in fact, that game publishers might want to consider warning their customers that they may soon be unable to tell the difference between the game and reality.

If you want to read some interesting essays and articles about how people interact online or shape their “real lives” and “virtual lives” see Sherry Turkle. (Her book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet is an accessible, if a little dated now, survey of online life and its psychological and sociological implications)

Spent an hour and a half this afternoon watching the documentary Synthetic Pleasures (1996) by Iara Lee as part of my research and also to get some discussion questions for Monday’s lecture on being or becoming human in Western technoculture. Couldn’t get hold of a copy in NZ so ordered it in from overseas post-haste.

IMDB’s plot summary says

Conceived as an electronic road movie, this documentary investigates cutting edge technologies and their influence on our culture as we approach the 21st century. It takes off from the idea that mankind’s effort to tap the power of Nature has been so successful that a new world is suddenly emerging, an artificial reality. Virtual Reality, digital and biotechnology, plastic surgery and mood-altering drugs promise seemingly unlimited powers to our bodies, and our selves. This film presents the implications of having access to such power as we all scramble to inhabit our latest science fictions.

That’s a fairly good summary. In places the movie drags a little and 8-9 years on it’s looking a little dated but there’s some really interesting material in there for discussion. What it means to be human, on the place/role of the body (consumer/consumed), on dreams of immortality and freedom from the flesh, as well as the bizarreness of people in general.
Read the rest of this entry »