Author: surfdaddy

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Virtual Reality

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Book Review: Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution

Ray Kurzweil has commented that we’ll be spending quite a bit of our time in virtual reality environments in the coming decades. They’ll be full immersion, and, as in Second Life, you can be someone else if you choose. Or several someones.

“Re-creating Yourself” is but one of the chapters in the new book, Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution, by psychologists Jim Blascovich (UCSB) and Jeremy Bailenson (Stanford). In this chapter, they discuss a series of studies on virtual doppelgangers — and explore the notion of avatar clones of you that can behave independently of your own intentions and actions in virtual space.

Improviso Game 0

Toys & Tools / Virtual Reality

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Collective AI: A Conversation with MIT’s Jeff Orkin

You’re the director in an ultra-low-budget movie set around an alien encounter. You select scenes, summon special effects, and play the supporting cast members: G-Man, Scientist, Alien, and Little Girl. Your lead actor Ted is a struggling reporter who wakes up tied-up on an alien spaceship. What do you do? You improvise.

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images / Virtual Reality

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Tom Boellstorff on Being Virtual

What does it mean to be virtual? Pioneering anthropologist Tom Boellstorff’s recent appearance on the the weekly Metanomics event series suggests that our digital and “real” lives — our avatar selves and our physical ones — inform each other in highly complex ways that are not yet fully understood. I interview Tom to find out more about the patterns that make us both real and virtual.