[From OpEdNews.com]

January 27, 2011

Game-Changing Narratives, Or: How Social Media is Changing Reality

By Bud Goodall (about the author)

Lately there has been a convergence of news narratives that coalesce into a series of otherwise disparate nouns: reality, gaming, social media, Tunisia, avatar envy, emotion, college-students-aren’t-learning-anything, the Internet, and revolution. For academics studying communication, the merger of these nouns spells good times, fascinating times, times that promise cool science and thought-provoking essays. For entrepreneurs, they provide investment opportunities. For the world beyond the academy and entrepreneurs, however, this new series of nouns creates life possibilities that are at once true, bizarre, and maybe even frightening.

Let’s begin with the basics of this first new grammar of the 21st century. Which is to say, appropriately, let’s begin with you. With the reality, and virtual reality, of you. For you are always and forever at the center of this unfolding many-storied story, because whether you are you in the flesh; or you are you in the sexier, sleeker avatar that represents and evokes a version of yourself that you’d often rather be; or whether it’s the you that creates friends on a Facebook page or surfs the “Net or the you who exchanges endless texts and tweets 24/7, the end result is the same: your pleasure in these texts, which is also to say the pleasure you give to yourself and others in and through engaging in these texts, is central to the choices about stories, and the lives, you make out of them.… read more. “Game-changing narratives, or: How social media is changing reality”

[A press release from The Media Development Authority of Singapore]

New S$23 million research centre by NTU, ETH Zurich and University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill will make virtual communication a reality

This Singapore-Swiss-American partnership that spans three continents will revolutionise human communication in the 21st century

Singapore, 26 January 2010 – Need to have a conference with others thousands of kilometres away? A glass-walled room lets all parties interact as if you were all together at one location.

Can’t be physically present for a meeting? Send your avatar which will take on your appearance as well as gestures and even give you a report of the meeting at the end.

Sounds like science fiction? Not at all. These are some of the advanced and sophisticated forms of interactive real-time 3-D communication, known as “telepresence” and “telecollaboration” that we can look forward to in the near future.… read more. “3 universities and Singapore’s MDA partner for telepresence R&D at new BeingThere Centre”

[From The Nevada Appeal; a detailed article about Brock Enright’s “Videogames Adventure Services” is available in The New York Times here]

[Larger image available here]

Opinion

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Living on the edge of virtual reality

By Ursula Carlson
For the Nevada Appeal

I like the words “virtual reality” because they suggest an alternate world, one that is not real, but that seems almost real. To me it’s like the world we encounter whenever we read a novel, watch a movie, recall scenes from the past or imagine scenes that might occur in the future.

But this is not the way we understand the words today, nor was it the meaning Antonin Artaud had in mind when he coined the phrase in his 1938 book, “The Theater and Its Double.”

Artaud, a poet, actor, director and theorist, decried theater’s dependence on the “text,” the words and language.… read more. “Living on the edge of virtual reality”

[From The Denver Business Journal; more information including a 3:09 minute video is available here]

[Image: A demonstration of what an engineer sees inside Lockheed Martin’s Collaborative Human Immersive Laboratory]

Inside Lockheed Martin’s out-of-this-world virtual-reality lab

Denver Business Journal – by Greg Avery
Date: Monday, January 24, 2011 – Last Modified: Tuesday, January 25, 2011

The newest advance at Colorado’s Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co. campus isn’t as out-of-this-world as some of what’s made there, but it’s not exactly of this world, either.

The Littleton-based division of Lockheed Martin Corp., the Bethesda, Md.-based defense and aerospace giant, this week publicly unveiled a virtual reality lab where its engineers can test and improve satellite and space vehicle designs before they physically exist.

In the company’s Collaborative Human Immersive Laboratory, teams of engineers can virtually walk around their creation, look at it from every angle, virtually add parts to it and interact with it as if it were in the room.… read more. “Inside Lockheed Martin’s out-of-this-world virtual reality lab”

[From ESPN’s The Gamer blog]

[Image: Hans Smith’s Association for Disabled Virtual Athletes will be featured in “MLB 11: The Show.”]

Association for Disabled Virtual Athletes debuts in ‘The Show’

By Jon Robinson
Jan 24, 2011

Hans Smith pitched his way through an up-and-down rookie year for the Cardinals last season.

Don’t recognize the name? That’s because Smith is a virtual athlete who spent an entire season playing as himself in “MLB 10: The Show.”

But Smith is anything but your average gamer.

The 25-year-old baseball fanatic suffers from cerebral palsy, making it impossible for him to play the game he loves in real life.

But that didn’t stop Smith from making the Majors.

You see, a few years ago, Smith wrote a letter to Sony’s San Diego studio, the developers of the top-rated “MLB: The Show” series, and the producers were so moved by Smith’s passionate words about the sport of baseball, the Cardinals, and their video game, that Sony went ahead and created Smith’s character in “MLB 10: The Show.”… read more. “Disabled virtual athletes experience reality of playing baseball”