Archive for the 'TVIR' Category
The Virtual Is Real - Just Follow the Eye Movements or the Music
For folks who don’t want to follow the physics or the money or George Clinton, here’s more “evidence” …
After all, when you’re in Second Life, you’re just looking at computer-animated figures on a screen– how could it possibly matter where they’re sitting, or how long they’re looking into each other’s eyes?
New World Notes: THE SPACES BETWEEN US
The researchers being referenced concluded that …
… many patterns of physical interaction in the real world carry over into the virtual world. In other words, our insistence on embodiment in virtual environments structures social interactions in these worlds in ways that we may not consciously be aware of. On the other hand, this implies that virtual worlds may be useful platforms for studying things even as visceral as the rules of physical interaction.
The post also mentions a book coming out this fall which says:
Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, this fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think.
One can shrink the distance between the music and the technology even further by examining the relationship between the Dead and Funkadelic, and more significantly the influence jazz had on those two particular bands and counterculture movement in general. Read more
2 commentsThe Virtual Is Real - Just Follow The Money or The Physics
The song Paradigm on George Clinton’s recent CD How Late Do U Have 2 B B 4 U R Absent? closes with the statement “The virtual is real”.
As hard as this may be to believe, there is real money changing hands among the players in these games, Bowen reports. An estimated $1 billion worldwide is spent by users buying and selling virtual goods, such as furniture for virtual houses and clothing for their avatars. But it’s paid for with real-world credit cards — at Second Life alone, $6 million a month.Is Virtual Life Better Than Reality?, Living Online — With Dream House, Job, Friends — May Be Preferable For Some - CBS News
It shouldn’t be so surprising that people are making money in virtual economies. People buy things that are outside the human sense of touch all the time. People pay for MRIs and satellite radio signals and Wall Street is a virtual world where people trade in “financial instruments“. All of these have the same real existence as goods in virtual worlds - bits on a disk. Physics agrees with this. A bit on a disk is as physical as your fingers, it’s made up of the same atoms bound together with the same laws of subatomic physics. As the song says - “let the shakin begin”. 