Virtual reality was originally used to describe a specific technology, comprising of a pair of goggles, with TV screens for eyepieces and a sensor for monitoring orientation and position. With the goggles on, the wearer sees a computer-generated image on the screens. When the head moves, the image on the screen moves correspondingly, thus giving the sense of being in a "real" space. From a refinement of arcade game and flight simulator technology, virtual reality is travelling towards complete immersion in "artificial" space, to the point where the subject is not just sensing an artificial world but is part of it. In "Virtual Worlds", Benjamin Woolley examines the reality of virtual reality. He looks at the dramatic intellectual and cultural upheavals that gave birth to it, at the hype that surrounds it, at the people who have promoted it, and at the dramatic implications of its development. Vitural reality is not simply a technology, it is a way of thinking created and promoted by a group of technologists and thinkers that sees itself as creating our future.
"Virtual Worlds" reveals the politics and culture of these virtual realists, and examines whether they are creating reality, or losing their grasp of it.
Sprache
Verlagsort
Verlagsgruppe
Zielgruppe
Für höhere Schule und Studium
Für Beruf und Forschung
Illustrationen
Maße
Höhe: 229 mm
Breite: 152 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-0-631-18214-6 (9780631182146)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Free lunch - introductory remarks on the concept of artificial and virtual reality; flying high - the origins of computer simulation; virtually there - the concept of "virtual" in computing, the mysterious ability of computers to be able to be bigger and more powerful than they really are; computer universe - a look at the limits of what can be simulated using a computer, and at the claim that the universe itself might be in a computer; made up minds - the greatest challenge of simulation - reproducing human thought - the evidence so far seems to show that this is in practice, perhaps in principle, impossible; euphoria - the origins of the idea of virtual reality are traced back to 1960s drug culture, some of its claims are revealed to be more matters of marketing than technology; cyberspace - the concept of cyberspace, central to virtual reality, is a way of making sense of the information era and media age, what sort of space is it?; stories - the emergence of critical theory and its influence over our concept of reality; hyperreality - the Gulf War as a case study for the postmodern; reality - the scientific conception of reality is itself being forced to change in response to strange phenomena discovered in the subatomic realm; virtual reality - how the changing perspective of reality in science and cultural theory is reflected in the concept of cirtual reality, a sceptical examination of the claim that fiction is a virutal reality, that even reality is a virtual reality.
