CRDM 701
Week 9 - Jon
In the opening paragraph of Digital Sensations, Ken Hillis describes how VR "has become something of a household term. Discussion in popular media abounds, and a number of speculative, promotional books on the subject have achieved mass-market success" (xiii). I agree that, for at least the last fifteen years, there has been a lot of buzz around VR. I can remember when The Lawnmower Man came out and being amazed at the VR experience. However, other than glossy stories in computer magazines like Wired and the occasional movie reference or news story, how accessible is VR actually? Although VR sounds amazing, my closest experience with it has been walking past the "VR Rollercoaster" at the mall, or viewing something that, from what I understand, is meant to mimic some tiny, tiny slice of the VR experience, such as an IMAX movie (not interactive, but very loud and big). As Hillis discusses, there are numerous military applications for the technology, but I am wondering when the technology will become available to anyone but the "well-heeled." Moreover, even when we do have access, will our experience be the incredibly advanced VR that we have seen in movies? For example, as described by Bolter and Grusin, the technology (as of 2000) contains "many ruptures : slow frame rates, jagged graphics, bright colors, bland lighting, and system crashes" (22). VR has existed in the media for so long that I am wondering if it will live up to its billing. Will MMORPG players, for example, ever be pulled away from their WoW interface to be immersed in a VR world?
The idea of virtual tourism was also interesting. Hillis describes how students are told that "they will not need to visit places such as the Peruvian Andes. Instead, they will enter a VE simulation of this far-off reality and, by engaging with a series of interactive images, obtain an experience as good as being there" (xix). In the context of some of the other things we have read, especially Sontag's writing on photography, it is difficult to equate the VR tourism experience as being just as "good as being there." By traveling to a place through VR, it doesn't seem like tourists will obtain the sense of documentation and narrative that go hand in hand with traveling. Individuals, smiling of course, pose, capture, and recreate their story in a photo album, a creation that may or may not represent their actual journey. In VR, I don't know if such access to narrative construction (with the tourists beings the main characters) will be available.
However, at the same time, the VR tourist will not be able to use a camera to, essentially, deal with all things foreign and reconstruct their experience. So, camera-less, the experience of a VR tourist may, in fact, end up being more real than the actual experience, for the camera is removed. Each tourist is left to experience only with their eyes and to use only words to describe their journey.
All of that said, we do have immediate access to other non-HMD style technologies, as indicated by Bolter and Grusin, that establish a flavor of "transparent immediacy" through "nonimmersive digital graphics-that is, in two- and three-dimensional images projected on to traditional computer, film, or television screens" (23). Bolter and Grusin move on to discuss the significance of linear perspective and digital photorealism, ultimately, the erasure of the human element from a photograph: "Computer graphics experts do not in general imitate "poor" or "distorted" photographs (exotic camera angles or lighting effects), precisely because these distorted photographs, which make the viewer conscious of the photographic process, are themselves not regarded as realistic or immediate" (28). I recently played a game that combined some of these elements (linear perspective, photo realism, an interactive interface) into a single experience. The game, Dark Cut 2, which came out about two days ago, is a free flash game that drops players into a Civil War medical tent, where they must perform surgeries on critical patients. Feel free to give it a try, but, I must warn you, the game is extremely graphic and unsettling. Anyway, there is no movement in the game; you are presented with what is, essentially, a Photoshop generated image of a wounded soldier. The image is, however, very real. The perspective is spot on, at no point does the game present players with anything but the surgeon's perspective on the patient. For example, there is no zooming in or out or floating about. The perspective is fixed. You interact with the patient by choosing one of many period medical tools and carrying out the surgery. While picking out instruments, the sounds of an ongoing Civil War battle burst through the speakers and flashes of light, simulating gunshots, periodically blanket the screen. Even though the experience is historical and viewed through a computer screen, when played in a dark room the experience is very, very real. I've been playing games since I was 5, and I can't recall a gaming experience that had my heart beating in time with the game like this one. The ending of the game, which I won't disclose here, makes the game and its immersive qualities shockingly real.
Lastly, in the context of this discussion of removing any trace of photography from the photograph, filmmaker from the film, etc., it is interesting to think about moments when just the opposite happens -- when someone flubs in the editing process and any notion of transparency is, temporarily, removed. The most popular example I can think of is in Braveheart during a battle scene. It seems that battles are shot in such a way that they capture an incredibly heightened sense of transparency. However, in this instance, someone, I don't remember who or how exactly, is struck with a weapon and, instead of the results of the blow remaining within the perspective of the film's setting, the blood splashes the glass plane between the audience and the action. Thus, for that split second, the audience is reminded that what they are seeing is just a movie. Any connection with the content of the film is pushed away with a reminder of the medium. Or, at the same time, the shot could have been edited out, so does such an effect actually heighten a moviegoer's experience?
Posted at 01:31PM Oct 24, 2007 by jtburr in Week 9 | Comments[1]
Week 9 - Kathy
When talking about the relationship between communication and the ways that reality is culturally constructed, Hillis suggests that virtual environments will "broaden the bandwidth array of sensory information users may transmit about themselves as they begin to extend their selves conceptually via these image technologies across a global terrain" (1999, p. xxxvi). I would be interested to read more about the way that various forces came together to shape the VE available today, but am also interested in looking at how forces acting on our information networks have the potential to alter, influence, and control the ways that we construct our "selves" in the virtual.
Virtual technologies allow humans control not only over selves, but also the construction of a reality made of both natural and synthetic parts. Hillis writes that VR is a ?technico-cultural fix invented by a postmodern sensibility to both as a bulwark against uncertainty instigated by the perceived death of the real and as an uncanny artifact created by a latter-day nostalgic Dr. Frankenstein in search of a means of producing a seemingly vanquished (meaningful) reality? (Hillis, 1999, p. xxix-xxx). Is this ?patch? for reality what Baudrillard is talking about when he discusses the precession of simulacra?
Bolter and Grusin (?) write that "the desire for immediacy is apparent in claims that digital images are more exciting, lively, and realistic than mere text on a computer screen and that a videoconference will lead to more effective communication than a telephone call" (p.23). As virtual environments become more advanced and more immersive, so too will the bandwidth - placing the evolution of or virtual environments in the hands of telecom companies and regulatory bodies. Their discussions on transparency and immediacy in VEs made me think about Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash (read this over winter break if you haven't already!), where individuals spend time in a place called the "Metaverse" which can be thought of as a much more immersive, interactive, and potent version of Second Life. In the virtual world in this novel, people enter the Metaverse with either custom or generic avatars, and if on a public (slower) connection, the avatar appears as a two dimensional, grainy, and in black and white. I bring this example in here to illustrate the extent to which immediacy can be effected by the speeds we dial in at, and as more and more of our daily business moves online, we have to think about the impacts that connection speed might have on the way that we access and use these worlds.
Virtual environments, such as Stephenson's metaverse and the worlds created in military training programs are all examples of "generation by models of a real without origin or reality" - what Baudrillard would call a hyperreal ? "the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere" (1983, p.3). Within these new worlds, looking at virtual geographies as complex assemblages can shed new light on the ways in which reality is being produced, and the possibilities and limitations of those realities. Hillis? project examines "a facsimile of this earth - a virtual geography that charts an array of representational spaces from the fantastical to the realistic" (1999, xxiii), and similarly, Wiley writes that "Human individuals and collectivities are not (or at least not necessarily) narrow, ideologically defined subjects; they are complex and dynamic assemblages of matter, energy, affect and subjectivity articulated into particular organizations of space, place and mobility" (p.79). It seems that to make sense of our increasingly networked world we must have a sense of ?the lay of the virtual land? which is best mapped by examining where forces intersect to create and compose our worlds and our selves.
What a tough week of readings! See you all Thursday -
Posted at 01:16PM Oct 24, 2007 by kfoswald in Week 9 | Comments[0]