Some
Reference Points for Discussion
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Preliminary Class Business
- Guest Lecturers for Wed (Class 27):
Jeremy Douglass
Elizabeth Freudenthal
- Readings:
- François Le Lionnais, "Lipo: First Manifesto"
and "Second Manifesto" (handout)
- Italo Calvino, "The Night Driver," "t zero"
(handout)
- hAIku!
(see also "Random
Word Haiku")
- Optional:
- Class on Friday (Class 28):
Lecture on "cool"
Course evaluations
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VR: The Idea
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Chris Chesher, "Colonizing
Virtual Reality: Construction of the Discourse of Virtual
Reality, 1984-1992" (1984):
"Virtual Reality developed from fiction in 1984 to a
rich discourse and a marketed technology by 1992"
Jaron
Lanier's VPL company publicity in 1989
(cited in Chesher) [Lanier's
home page]:
"VR is shared and objectively present like the physical
world, composable like a work of art, and as unlimited and
harmless as a dream. When VR becomes widely available, around
the turn of the century, it will not be seen as a medium
used within physical reality, but rather as an additional
reality. VR opens up a new continent of ideas and possibilities.
At Texpo 89 we set foot on the shore of this continent for
the first time."
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- Tron
(1982) [film] | Link1
- William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
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Neuromancer,
p. 51:
"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced
daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation,
by children being taught mathematical concepts. . . .
A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks
of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity.
Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters
and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. . . ."
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- StarTrek: The Next Generation (introduction
of the "holodeck" in 1987) [TV series] | "Hollow
Pursuits" episode, 1990
- Howard Rheingold, Virtual Reality (New York:
Summit, 1991)
- Michael Benedict, ed., Cyberspace: First Steps
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992) [on the construction of
computer "cyberspace"]
- The
Lawnmower Man (1992) [film]
- The
Matrix (1999) | trailer
- David Cronenberg's eXistenZ
(1999) [film]
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VR: The Experience
Jonathan Steur, "Defining Virtual Reality" (1992)
"The key to defining virtual reality in terms of human
experience rather than technological hardware is the concept
of presence. Presence can be thought of as the experience
of one's physical environment; it refers not to one's surroundings
as they exist in the physical world, but to the perception
of those surroundings as mediated by both automatic and controlled
mental processes (Gibson, 1979): Presence is defined as
the sense of being in an environment. Many perceptual
factors help to generate this sense, including input from
some or all sensory channels, as well as more mindful attentional,
perceptual, and other mental processes that assimilate incoming
sensory data with current concerns and past experiences (Gibson,
1966). Presence is closely related to the phenomenon of distal
attribution or externalization, which refer to
the referencing of our perceptions to an external space beyond
the limits of the sensory organs themselves (Loomis, 1992)."
(p. 75)
. . . telepresence is the extent to which one
feels present in the mediated environment, rather than in
the immediate physical environment. Telepresence is defined
as the experience of presence in an environment by means of
a communication medium. (p. 76)
 Two
major dimensions across which communication technologies
vary are discussed here as determinants of telepresence.
The first, vividness, refers to the ability of a
technology to produce a sensorially rich mediated environment.
The second, interactivity, refers to the degree to
which users of a medium can influence the form or content
of the mediated environment. (p. 80)
Vividness means the representational richness of a mediated
environment as defined by its formal features; that is,
the way in which an environment presents information to
the senses. [ . . . ] A highly vivid
medium can be considered "hot" in the McLuhanesque sense,
as it "extends one [or many] sense[s] in 'high definition'"
(McLuhan, 1964, p. 36). Many factors contribute to vividness.
Two generalized but important variables are discussed here:
sensory breadth, which refers to the number of sensory
dimensions simultaneously presented, and sensory depth,
which refers to the resolution within each of these perceptual
channels. (p. 81)
 Interactivity
is the extent to which users can participate in modifying
the form and content of a mediated environment in real time.
Interactivity in this sense is distinct from engagement
or involvement as these terms are frequently used
by communication researchers [ . . . ].
(p. 84)
Three factors that contribute to interactivity will be
examined here (although many others are also important):
speed, which refers to the rate at which input can
be assimilated into the mediated environment; range,
which refers to the number of possibilities for action at
any given time; and mapping, which refers to the
ability of a system to map its controls to changes in the
mediated environment in a natural and predictable manner.
(pp. 85-86)
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- instructor's experience in a VR rig
- language? narrative?
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VR: The Art?
Jonathan Steur, "Defining Virtual Reality" (1992)
"First-person experiences in the real world represent
a standard to which all mediated experiences are compared,
either mindfully or otherwise: Face-to-face interaction with
other humans is used as a model for all interactive communication
(Durlak, 1987). The human perceptual system has been tuned
through the process of evolution for the perception of real-world
environments." (pp. 79-80)
"As media technologies become more and more vivid, it
is possible that we will some day have systems capable of
passing a 'perceptual Turing test.' The ramifications of media
systems whose representations are perceptually indistinguishable
from their real-world counterparts are both exciting and terrifying—exciting
because of the possibilities afforded by such systems to experience
distant and nonexistent worlds, and terrifying because of
the blurring of distinction between representation and reality."
(p. 84) [definition
of Turing test] |
Michael Heim, Virtual Realism (1998)
"When we talk about virtual reality, we have to keep
in mind that it is indeed a technology, not simply a nebulous
idea. It's not synonymous with illusion or mirage or hallucination"
(p. 4)
"VR depends ultimately on activating the inherent telepresence
capacity of human beings. While telepresence never equates
to unaided imagination, there is something within the human
being, a central point from which we stretch outside ourselves,
that makes the technology work. Total sensory immersion depends
in the long run upon our ability to enter into what our senses
receive." (p. 28)
"But what if the virtual landscape we reach through our
audio and video systems does not in fact exist anywhere in
the primary world? What if we use computer graphics and sound
samples to design an exotic information landscape? . . .
What we see and hear will not reproduce a remote landscape
but an imaginary landscape or imagescape." (p. 14) |
Albert Borgmann, Holding On to Reality (1999)
This impossible
union of unencumbered glamour and profound engagement must
sooner or later fall apart and settle for triviality or gravity.
Yet the illusory escape into cyberspace does not leave reality
unharmed. At least for a time, virtuality can spread a fog
of virtual confusion and blur the shape of things and events
with glamour and triviality. Two of the great forces of the
human condition, eros and thanatos, the erotic life and the
solemnity of death, have particularly suffered glamorization
and trivialization. Virtuality has extricated sex from the
depths of real life and made it available as a diversion that
would be harmless if it were not for the disabilities and
displacements it abets in real life.
As for death, Tom Mandel, the New York Times tells
us, was "one of the first (if not the first) to share on-line,
with a wide audience, his own experience of dying." Actually
to share a person's mortal illness is to feed, clean, and
change that person, to suffer the person's bursts of anger
and flights of hallucination. It is to see a person suffer
deeply and decay. It is to sleep irregularly and poorly and
to feel confined and at times resentful. With all that it
can be an occasion of grace and gratitude. In any event it
is quite different from checking your e-mail when you are
good and ready, to catch up on the progress of the disease,
to take in the sentiments of others, to contribute one that
reads, "Oh, Tom . . . Damn, damn, damn, damn . . .
(Do I get TOS [terms of service violation] for that?) Sweetie . . .
I am so sorry and I am so amazed that you can just get on
here and blurt it out," and then to log off and go about
your daily life. (pp. 191-92)
[Cf., "the meat"
in Gibson's Neuromancer] |
Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997)
"Don Quixote, living 150 years after the invention of
the printing press, exemplifies the dangerous power of books
to create a world that is 'more real than reality.' He still
stands for the part of each of us that longs to leap out of
our everyday life into the pages of a favorite book. . . .
A stirring narrative in any medium can be experienced as a
virtual reality because our brains are programmed to tune
into stories with an intensity that can obliterate the world
around us. . . . The age-old desire to live
out a fantasy aroused by a fictional world has been intensified
by a participatory, immersive medium that promises to satisfy
it more completely than has ever before been possible."
(pp. 97-98)
"Narrative is also a threshold experience. As we know
from the work of child psychiatrist D. W. Winnicott, all sustained
make-believe experiences, from children's play to Shakespearean
theater, evoke the same magical feelings as a baby's first
teddy bear because they are 'transitional objects.' . . .
Stories evoke our deepest fears and desires because they inhabit
this magical borderland. The power of what Winnicott called
'transitional' experiences comes from the fact that 'the real
thing is the thing that isn't there.' In order to sustain
such powerful immersive trances, then, we have to do something
inherently paradoxical: we have to keep the virtual world
'real' by keeping it 'not there.' We have to keep it balanced
squarely on the enchanted threshold without letting it collapse
onto either side.
Because the
liminal trance is so inherently fragile, all narrative art
forms have developed conventions to sustain it. One of the
most important ways they have done this has been to prohibit
participation." (pp. 99-100)
"Participatory narrative, then, raises several related
problems: How can we enter the fictional world without disrupting
it? How can we be sure that imaginary actions will not have
real results? How can we act on our fantasies without become
paralyzed by anxiety? The answer to all of these questions
lies in the discovery of the digital equivalent of the theater's
fourth wall. We need to define the boundary conventions that
will allow us to surrender to the enticements of the virtual
environment." (p. 103)
"Part of the early work in any medium is the exploration
of the border between the representational world and the actual
world." (p. 103) |
American Heritage Dictionary:
"1. Existing or resulting in essence or effect though
not in actual fact, form, or name . . . 2.
Existing in the mind, especially as a product of the imagination.
Used in literary criticism of text." |
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References
- Selected VR Labs and Centers
- Some Writings about VR
- Michael Benedict, ed., Cyberspace: First Steps
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992) [on the construction
of computer "cyberspace"]
- Chris Chesher, "Colonizing
Virtual Reality: Construction of the Discourse of Virtual
Reality, 1984-1992," Cultronix 1 (1994),
retrieved 9 March 2001 <http://www.eserver.org/cultronix/chesher/>
- Jerry Isdale, "What
is Virtual Reality" (primer on various VR technologies),
retrieved 9 March 2001 <http://www.cms.dmu.ac.uk/~cph/VR/whatisvr.html>
- Howard Rheingold, Virtual Reality (New York:
Summit, 1991)
Supplementary
links for this class on Study Materials page
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