Greenflame
Jottings on science, religion, technology, pop culture, photography and faith from the Aotearoa New Zealand
Category: Virtual Reality
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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.
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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…
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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:…
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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…
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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…
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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.
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…