Category Archives: Virtual Reality

GE: Your recommendation is, apply long term thinking to the goal of getting a tattoo, which is something that doesn't happen too often.

AS: I don't know, tattoos are forever, Gilad.

GE: I'm actually blown away to learn that you already have four tattoos because ... To the listeners out there, Adrienne has a very wholesome vibe, obviously putting out some mom energy into the world. And I've also just been in your physical presence and not noticed that you were tatted up.

AS: As far as my parents know, I don't have any. Mom, cover- Mom, earmuffs. But yeah, this is part of my brand, Gilad. Adrienne: not a gamer, not tattooed.

LG: It's all a faade.

GE: You're living a lie. You're living a second life, Adrienne.

AS: Good one.

LG: Oh, I bet people will be charging tattoo artists in the metaverse to tat up their virtual avatars.

AS: Oh, that's such a good idea. The lines in the metaverse would probably be shorter than the real ones at this point.

GE: Don't hurt as much.

LG: Gilad, do you have any tattoos?

GE: No, I don't have any tattoos and I never will.

LG: OK, all right.

GE: Lauren, you're supposed to say, "Why mess with perfection?"

GE: Oh, thanks Lauren. Thank you, that's so sweet.

LG: Why mar anything that's already perfect?

GE: OK, OK, OK, we get it.

LG: But Adrienne also, I respect that you are going to get a fifth tattoo at some point. If I can help in any way, let me know. You can come down to San Francisco and get it done. It'd be really fun.

AS: Yay.

LG: All right Gilad, he who does not have any tattoos, I must ask you now, what is your recommendation this week?

GE: It's not off the wall, it's food related. It's basically a recipe. I've been enjoying making mashed cauliflower recently. It sounds like a sad, healthy version of mashed potatoes but it's not. It's a good, healthy version of mashed potatoes because I like cauliflower and it's also quite a bit lighter than mashed potatoes, which can sometimes be pretty heavy. You just chop up your cauliflower, boil it for quite a long time to get a nice and ... Not an hour but probably good 25, 30 minutes, I would say. Drain it, mash it up, and then I've actually ... The last time I did it, I used the immersion blender to get a really nice, smooth consistency. And then because you're doing cauliflower, I feel more liberated to put in quite a bit of butter. And then I also like to put in a good bit of Greek yogurt, which is creamy but also has some tang and some acidity to it, which is really good for the flavor.

And then obviously, you can customize this however you want but just throwing that out there. It's a nice side dish and you feel good about eating it but it actually tastes good.

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Honey, I Brought the Kids Into Virtual Reality - WIRED

Facebook's announcement in October that it was further embracing the metaverse and rebranding itself as Meta set off a firestorm. While experts say the metaverse is still many years away, the explosion of the term has many asking, what is the metaverse?

The metaverse aims to innovate the way people interact with each other on the internet, interacting in a way previously only thought possible in science fiction.

"The metaverse is essentially a massive, interconnected network of virtual spaces," Rabindra Ratan, associate professor of media and information at Michigan State University. told ABC News Live. "In theory, we'll be able to move from one virtual world to another in the metaverse, but we'll be wearing virtual reality goggles or maybe augmented reality."

Technologies like virtual reality, a computer-generated simulation of a 3D image or environment, and augmented reality, superimposing a computer-generated image on a user's view of the real world, will play a significant role in bringing the metaverse to life.

The metaverse could potentially use virtual reality, or augmented reality as we know it now, to immerse users in an alternate world. The technology is still being developed, but companies like Meta say they are building and improving these devices. Meta's Oculus Quest, now in its second model, is one such device.

"When you're in the metaverse, when you're in a virtual reality headset, you will feel like you're actually sitting in a room with someone else who can see you, who can see all of your nonverbal gestures, who you can respond to and mimic," Ratan said.

Immersive worlds and creating online avatars is nothing new, as games like Grand Theft Auto Online, Minecraft and Roblox have already created virtual universes. Meta's announcement last October aims to go beyond entertainment, and create virtual workspaces, homes and experiences for all ages.

"What's happening now is the metaverse for social media without gaming," Ratan said. "The new metaverse is designed to support any type of social interaction, whether that's hanging out with your friends or having a business meeting."

Pan Bohang, left, founder of vHome, a virtual reality (VR) social gaming platform, wearing Meta's Oculus VR headset speaks with a user during a virtual gathering, at an office in Beijing, Jan. 21, 2022.

While the excitement around the concept of a metaverse is rapidly growing, Ratan said bringing that vision to reality is still many years away.

"People are building it in slow bits and pieces," Ratan said. "We don't know exactly how people are going to use the metaverse."

Experts say companies are making sure they are prepared once the change takes place.

"I think no one really knows exactly what shape it's going to take, but they need to make sure that they're at the forefront of it," Arun Maini, a tech YouTuber from England with over 9 million subscribers.

The possibilities of a virtual world, where everything is supported by lines of codes, could open new revenue streams for companies diving into this new venture. The opportunities are limitless, and based on how Americans have adopted an increasingly digital life, the change is already taking place. Walmart announced earlier this month it would step into the virtual world, providing currency and allowing customers to buy and sell NFTs.

"Over the next five years, you're going to see Metaverse technology become real, concrete and sampleable," said CNET Editor-at-Large Brian Cooley. "I think it's going to be impressive, but I think it's going to have many flavors, not just one."

A Pew Research study from March 2021 found that 31% of Americans were almost always online, while 79% were online several times a day. Maini said the recent patterns show how people are starting to shift away from physical to virtual goods based on the time spent on apps and games.

"In the metaverse, you will still have those stupidly expensive designer Gucci trainers to be able to show that, 'Oh yeah, look, I'm doing well for myself,' even if really it's just a line of code," Maini said.

An attendee demonstrates the Owo vest, which allows users to feel physical sensations during metaverse experiences such as virtual reality games, including wind, gunfire or punching, at the Consumer Electronics Show on Jan. 5, 2022, in Las Vegas.

The efforts required to make that world a reality, however, could be extensive. Many people in the U.S. still don't have access to high-speed broadband connections, and the price of reliable VR hardware could be high. But for Maini, he said the hardware is becoming more affordable and accessible as new technologies are developed.

"Like every day, the promise of this virtual land is increasing. So like a person's willingness to pay is going up and up and up. And if at the same time that hardware is getting cheaper, there probably will be a point where there's like mass adoption," Maini said.

With a high demand, the need for innovation is even higher. Meta announced on Jan. 24 it's developing a new AI supercomputer, describing it as a building block toward bringing the vision of a metaverse into reality.

"The AI Research SuperCluster, or RSC, will help Meta's AI researchers build better models that can learn from trillions of examples; work across hundreds of different languages; seamlessly analyze text, images and video together; develop new augmented reality tools and more," Meta said in a statement.

"Ultimately, the work done with RSC will pave the way toward building technologies for the next major computing platform -- the metaverse, where AI-driven applications and products will play an important role," the statement continued.

Virtual interactions offers enticing financial opportunities for big businesses, but they also raise concerns over the impact on users and safety of its users.

Facebook employees take a photo with the company's new name and logo outside its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., Oct. 28, 2021.

Meta continues to face scrutiny for alleged harmful effects on young users and how it monitors hate speech across its apps, including Instagram. With millions of users able to join different platforms, Maini said moderation is important.

"If you're trying to moderate something of that level of freedom, then you're going to have to be moderating in a way that's like incredibly invasive," Maini said. "So we either end up in a situation where it's complete chaos and everyone's allowed to do everything and you know, there's racism, sexism, abuse and all that kind of stuff, or there's incredibly tight moderation and no one's allowed to do anything."

With the speed at which technologies are being developed and companies are implementing innovative ideas around immersive reality, it's only a matter of time before the metaverse becomes a reality.

"The experience of the web will be different in many ways than it is now," Ratan said.

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How the metaverse could impact the world and the future of technology - ABC News

A virtual reality system is helping Boone Hospital workers deal with the stress and anxiety of the pandemic.

COLUMBIA- A new research trial is allowing hospital workers to escape the stress and anxiety that comes with working during the pandemic.

"It's important to equip frontline healthcare workers," Healium CEO Sarah Hill said. "People who've been doing really important work over the last several years."

Boone Hospital is partnering with Healium to provide a virtual reality system that lets workers step into another world to relive stress.

"They come in the form of kits with virtual reality goggles," Hill said. "It's personifying your anxiety."

One hundred Boone Health employees participated in the study that lasted several months. The virtual reality googles are now available to all Boone Hospital workers.

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"You put it on your face and you're instantly taken to a place that is less stressful," Hill said.

Hill said that Frontiers in Virtual Reality published a study that states the powered digital tools reduced anxiety in as little as four minutes.

"That was a really groundbreaking research," Hill said. "The fact that immersive media can quickly improve mood."

Hill said that nurses can use a break room or a quiet room while using the virtual reality system.

"Because after all, this is the 'Stress Olympics,'" Hill said. "Not all of us have trained for it."

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Virtual reality helping Boone Hospital workers recover from the 'Stress Olympics' - KOMU 8

Dear Reader (though not necessarily amateur rocket scientists),

When Margaret Thatcher (praise be upon her) passed away, the hashtag #Nowthatcherisdead took off on Twitter. And almost immediately, scores of people started freaking out about Chers passing.

Im reminded of this story, which I thought was hilarious, because in the wake of Neil Youngs ultimatum to SpotifyThey can have Rogan or Young. Not both!Who is Neil Young? started trending on Twitter. Of course, a lot of the people saying Who is Neil Young? actually know who Neil Young is, they just wanted to dunk on Young or suck up to Rogan.

The brouhaha between Rogan and Young leaves me passionately ambivalent. On one hand, I feel like the world would be a better place if they settled this with broken pool cues with the Joker declaring, Were gonna have tryouts. Of course, I dont condone violence. Also, the tryout wouldnt last very long. It would end in about 90 seconds with Rogan showing Young his still beating heart. Doesnt look like a heart of gold to me, old man!

On the other hand, I agree with Young that Rogans anti-vax stuff is terribly irresponsible. I also think Spotify is perfectly within its rights to say, Your terms are acceptable to Young and show him the door.

The thing is, Ive got more hands than the Hindu Goddess Gurda about the whole thing.

Sonny Bunch, much to my dismay, has the right take. From a certain point of view, the infamous defender of Alderaanian genocide writes, this is an example of the system working well, protecting the rights of artists and the prerogatives of businesses alike. But we might stop for a moment and ask whether this is the system we want.

He runs through a bunch of the other hands in this argument. And then the Sith sympathizer adds, But this is, perhaps, an inevitable result of our flattened world and our existence within an eternally online state.

So, like a totally innocent Alderaani family racing to an escape vessel as Sonny cackles, lets use that as our departure point.

A brief primer on nationalism.

There are a lot of different kinds of nationalismcivic nationalism, ethno-nationalism, economic nationalism etc. And there are even more, often conflicting, definitions of these terms. But one thing they all have in common is nationalization.

I dont mean in the economic sensenationalized industry, socialized medicine etc. I mean the process of creating a recognizable and distinct nation.

Historically, the process of domestic nation-building requires a state; These people and these places belong to usor, for a lot of monarchs and emperors, they belong to me. But it also requires some common denominators, chief among them language, ethnicity, and religion. The original German nationalists defined Germanness in overwhelmingly linguistic termsthe ethnicity stuff came later.

In other words, the forces of nationalization can come from abovethe stateor from belowthe people. But as a factual matter, it usually takes both.

James Scott, in his indispensable book, Seeing Like A State, persuasively argues that one of the chief projects of states is the process of making their citizens more legible. For instance, states hate nomadic tribes and other groups with no fixed address. So they make them stay put (this is called sedentarization). They also like to collect taxes, conscript soldiers, and generally to know where to find people and distinguish one individual from another. Thats how we got last names. In a sense, building a nation larger than a city-state involves some degree of imperialismimposing uniformity on distinct communities, tribes, or whatever.

A lot of this has to do with economics. From the states perspective, the people are a giant warehouse of economic resources. And good inventory management requires knowing how many farmers, blacksmiths, soldiers, and potential soldiers you have on the shelves. That requires a tally of your inventory. And once you have a list of what youve got, you can also see whats missing. This is where mass education starts. As farming becomes more efficient, the population grows, the share of the workforce dedicated to agriculture shrinks, and the need to find and fill more skilled jobs in bursting cities expands. This in turn fuels the need for even more legibility. And so it goes.

But for embryonic nation-states, education isnt just about school stuff (Wolfgang has 6 apples and gives 2 to Thor ). Its a cultural project. The state needs to explain to its own people why they owe it allegiance and, well, money. For instance, the Confederation of Germany, founded after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, was a league of some 39 sovereign states, each of which had its own distinct culture and subcultures, customs, and even dialects. It takes work to convince all of those Hessians, Prussians, and Bavarians that they are first and foremost Germans.

This effort had all sorts of legal and economic corollaries, eliminating internal borders, generating all sorts of paperwork denoting citizenship, and really putting teeth behind the concept of your permanent record.

This is also where nationalist ideologies come in. But Im going to skip ahead.

The first thing to understand about 20th and 21st century progressivism is that it is thoroughly nationalist. The fact progressives dont like the word nationalism doesnt matter, and we can concede that progressivism today is not necessarily nationalistic in the ways progressives define nationalism.

But it is impossible to look at, say, the New Deal and not see it as a nationalist endeavor (a point the dean of New Deal historians William Leuchtenberg would not dispute). Federalism was a joke to the New Dealers. Industry and workers were conscripted into industrial armies. At the heart of the New Deal, writes William Schambra, was the resurrection of the national idea, the renewal of the vision of national community. Roosevelt sought to pull America together in the face of its divisions by an appeal to national duty, discipline, and brotherhood; he aimed to restore the sense of local community, at the national level.

Progressivism holds that the government in Washington should have undiluted authority to work its willconstrained to one extent or another by democratic legitimacy and respect for civil rights and liberties (particularly when they agree with how those rights are used). Read Bidens inaugural speech again. Its all about unity, American unity (he wasnt speaking to Canadians after all). What is American unity other than a platitudinous euphemism for national unity? Or, simply put, nationalism? Read Obamas second inaugural. In his vision, there are only two legible units in American politics: the government in Washington and the individual. No mediating institutions, no states, no churches, and no associations:

No single person can train all the math and science teachers well need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation, and one people.

All of the hate tweeting that passes for argument against Florida these days boils down to the idea that states shouldnt be able to set their own policies if those policies are at odds with those set by Washington. The progressive rage against the Supreme Courts rejection of a federal police power to require vaccination is a nationalists rage. The bowel-stewing disgust at the idea the Senate should represent states is the disgust of a nationalist. The desire to federalize our election system is a nationalist desire.

The online state.

So what does all of this have to do with Sonnys point? Again, he writes, this is, perhaps, an inevitable result of our flattened world and our existence within an eternally online state.

As a conservative, Ive railed against the centralizing nationalism of progressivism for my entire professional life. Its one of the reasons I think all of the new nationalist conservatives are so misguided. Yes, theyre fighting the left, but their strategy is to embrace the means of progressivism on the barmy assumption that this is the way to achieve (allegedly) conservative ends.

But there are other forces of nationalization that we tend not to recognize for what they are. Big corporations have historically pushed for national homogenization and centralization. National standards and weak internal borders are the cats pajamas for companies that want to maximize efficiency. The railroads, for instance, hated dealing with local jurisdictionsbetter to have one-stop-shopping for lobbying and bribery in Washington, after all. AT&Ts old monopoly was a nationalist nod to efficiency. Big business loved the New Deal and Wilsons war socialism. Certain American Marxists like Gabriel Kolko, as well as old libertarian intellectuals like Murray Rothbard, had some important insights in their attacks on corporate liberalism.

That stuff is alive and well today. I assume youve seen these Facebook commercials. Aesthetically, theyre bizarre. Facebook employees sit down for one-on-one sessions with some nameless HR commissar type and explain why they desperately want the federal government to regulate Facebook. Others feature young, hip professionalsthe sort of folks who might be freaked out about Chers demisetalking about how cool and modern new federal regulations would be.

But its not just the folks running Facebook. Facebook itself, Twitter, and all other social media platforms are forces of nationalization. The New Deal vision of creating a simulacrum of local community at the national (or global) level is at the heart of Facebooks and the broader Silicon Valley crowds vision. What the hell is all this Meta and augmented reality crap if not a rejection of the idea that physical spaceliterally where you liveis an inconvenient barrier to be overcome?

And lets not forget that the other part of the agenda is to make Americans ever more legible to the companies. Your data profile makes the permanent record my teachers threatened me with look like a toddlers crayon drawing. When I look at China (where the distinction between the state and the private sector doesnt exist and Tyler Durden dies on the way back to his home planet) and its Orwellian social credit score, I become evermore nervous about the idea of the U.S. government getting involved in social media regulation.

One of the greatest bulwarks against centralization and nationalization has always been the existence of defined physical communitiesyou know, towns, neighborhoods, whateverthat are beyond the easy or daily reach of faraway social engineers. Social media, by design, seeks to overcome these physical impediments.

And heres the problem: It doesnt work. We glimpse through the peepholes of Snapchat and Twitter at the wholly curated images of how people far away live and think were seeing something real or meaningful. We think chat room conversations are conversations, properly understood. We think we can know someone from a tweet. Nineteenth century pen pals had a better understanding of people far away than social media provides.

Does any of this foster a greater sense of community? Real community? Are livestreams of church services a remotely adequate substitute for in-person services? Maybe theyre a necessary alternative during a pandemic. But a substitute? Of course not. Just look at the damage that remote schooling does to kids. The virtual world is a pinched, two-dimensional realm that reduces the full gamut of human interaction to just a couple facets. Ive never understood the appeal of online sex, but even if thats your bag, youre never going to convince me its an equally valid substitute for the real thing.

The funny thing is that the people most invested in the idea of homogenizing our politics and culture are often the ones most invested in social media. The Twitter socialists and Twitter nationalists spend all day owning each other, pointing out how people hither and yon live wrong, all the while deluding themselves that with one election, one change of the rules, they can impose their will across the whole of the country. But the only thing theyre succeeding at is making each other even angrier and causing their opponents to dig into their positions to the point where the opponents become existential enemies. Social media has been great for what Julien Benda called the organization of political hatreds.

I suspect Joe Rogan and Neil Young could have a great conversation, probably a heated one, in person. But their avatars or brands cannot abide being next to each other on a Spotify menu because of the antibody response to digitized nationalization.

Look, maybe technology will get to the point where the techno-astral plane is a real substitute for meat space. I doubt it. But in the meantime, this process of nationalization is simultaneously tearing the nation apart and encouraging the nationalists of all parties to just try harder.

Various & Sundry

Canine update: First, I want to apologize to Pippa, or at least to Pippa fans. Pippa herself doesnt care what I tweet about her. I could compare Pippa to Bela Kun and shed be fine with it so long as I kept rubbing her belly. But this comparison to perhaps the worst character in the Star Wars universe struck a lot of people as a low blow. Then again, I just got word that Pippa rolled in some Stygian foulness on the midday walk (Im at the cigar shop). So maybe she is getting payback. This morning we had to put Lucy on a plane back to school and that meant everyone was up very early and luggage was ominously moved around. Zo yelled at us in a riot of Aroos the likes of which Ive never heard. Other than that, the girls are doing great with a great deal of silliness thanks to the cold weather. I do wonder what evolutionary function is triggered that says, Cold weather? Snow? Lets burn a lot of calories on pointless rough housing!

ICYMI

Last Fridays G-File on the politics of candy

Ukraine in the brain

Do the Russians love their children too?

Why Biden needs a Sister Souljah moment

Wednesdays newsletter on the perils of identity politics

The Dispatch Podcast on Ukraine and the upcoming midterms

The weeks second Remnant, featuring a certain firearm and golf cart enthusiast

And now, the weird stuff

Evening at Bernies

Meanwhile, in Texas

Topsy turvy

Nothing lasts forever

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The Perils of Our Virtual Reality - The G-File - The Dispatch

Child of Empire, the VR docu-drama getting its world premiere at Sundance 2022, immerses viewers in some of the horrors of the forced migration

God was a little late that day, says Iqbal-ud-din Ahmed, before recounting how the terror of the Partition claimed the soul of his village (Ropar in East Punjab), as a bleak sense of terror hung in the air around charred houses and dreams doused forever.

Ahmeds character is voiced by actor Salman Shahid in Child of Empire, the docu-drama directed by Delhi-based Sparsh Ahuja (24) and London-based Erfan Saadati (27), which premiered at the ongoing Sundance Film Festival.

In the 17-minute immersive animated virtual reality (VR) film, two men from the Partition generation Ishar Das Arora (voiced by Adil Hussain), an Indian Hindu who migrated from Pakistan to India, and Ahmed, a Pakistani Muslim who made the opposite journey share childhood memories of their experiences while playing a board game. And it goes straight for the jugular, sticking to the facts of the Partition itself.

Our original plan was not to go the animated route, says Ahuja. But when Covid hit, we were left with no choice. However, Ahuja and the team would realise that the animated format was a blessing in disguise: it was far better placed in mirroring the horrors of Partition.

The film was created by Project Dastaan a peacebuilding initiative that reconnects individuals displaced during the 1947 Partition with their ancestral villages through VR in association with Anzo films. It is immersive, immediate, haunting, moving, and destabilising; one lives the days exactly as refugees in 1947 would have, fleeing, migrating, witnessing massacre and loss, says oral historian and author Aanchal Malhotra (Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition Through Material Memory), one of the advisors on the project. To be a listener of such stories is one thing, but Child of Empire may be the closest in imagining what millions of people experienced and survived.

Another advisor, historian William Dalrymple, says that he was both moved and astonished by the power of the medium and the material itself. His son, Sam Dalrymple, is a co-producer.

The team at Project Dastaan had an ambitious target before them: to complete 75 interviews of the Partition survivors (across the UK, India and Pakistan in five languages) on the eve of Indias 75th year of independence. However, Covid-19 delays meant only 35 could be completed. When we were sifting through the recordings, I was biased towards my own maternal grandfathers experience, says Ahuja.

In the documentary, the characters of Arora based on the experiences of Ahujas maternal grandfather, Ishar Das Arora (who migrated from Bela, a village in West Punjabs Attock Tehsil to Tilak Nagar, New Delhi) and Ahmed jointly based on the memories of the latter (who migrated from Ropar, East Punjab, to Lahore) and Jagdish Chandra Ahuja (Ahujas paternal grandfather who migrated from Dera Ghazi Khan in West Punjab to Tilak Nagar, New Delhi) recount stories of crouching under the seat of a humid train as a mob lashes at it, with images showing candles turning into ransacked villages.

More than anything, both share how each was saved by a member of the other religion. For Ahuja, this was telling of a larger political shift in his own family. My maternal grandfather was saved by a Muslim man but many in my family, who have now become fervent nationalists, had no idea that this was the case, he says.

Separating fact from fiction

Last year, Sparsh and the team at Project Dastaan had the rare opportunity of actually visiting Pakistan. And he managed to track down the family of the Muslim man who had saved his grandfathers life. This was in a small hamlet that goes by Bela, he recounts. The man had passed away a while back, but his family was overjoyed to see me. He recorded the entire experience in a VR format for his grandfather to experience back home. They wanted me to stay there for at least a week and even attend their cousins wedding. I collected some pebbles from the village to fashion them into wearable jewellery.

But there was a surprising revelation at the heart of this experience: Ahuja would soon understand that this Pakistani family, much like his own, had sympathies for the extremists in their country despite being happy for each other. Its strange and ironic how history plays out. In a different world, we would be a single unit.

Nearly every frame of the docu-drama features a child either crouching under a train seat, running away from a frantic mob, or simply sitting next to burning pyres. It appears that their presence is both a metaphor for the many children quite literally lost to us and a searing indictment of just how unfair it was that they were witnesses to our countrys blackest spot.

Ahuja believes that if we were to remove the two central narrators, Child of Empire would essentially parallel a single, tragic migration story. Its important to note that both the narrators are Punjabis, he says. They have internalised the political shifts of their time, which shows in the way they narrate their stories. When they recalled their experiences in the interviews, you could see the trauma in their eyes. It is that very experience that we want our viewers to come close to.

The way Arora sees it, for the uninitiated viewer, Child of Empire provides just the right context to understand how multifaceted the Partition experience was. The fact that both the characters have so much in common helps. We wanted the most moving and human stories to make it to the film from over two dozen interviews.

Towards the end of the documentary, a soulful rendition of Subh-e-Azaadi originally penned by the Pakistani revolutionary poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, composed by Vasundhara Gupta, and sung by Amira Gill beckons the viewer to contemplate the sheer human price of one of modern historys largest and bloodiest forced migrations; and the price of freedom itself.

Child of Empire is currently screening on-demand at sundance.org, as part of the New Frontier programming slate, which showcases works at the crossroads of film, art, and technology. This year, their Spaceships programme allows viewers to experience the films by teleporting themselves to the festival using virtual avatars.

Read more from the original source:

Flashback 75: Partition in virtual reality in Child of Empire - The Hindu

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North America (U.S., Canada) Europe (U.K., Germany, France, Italy) Asia Pacific (China, India, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia) Latin America (Brazil, Mexico) Middle East & Africa

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At what CAGR is the Automotive Augmented Reality Ar And Virtual Reality Vr market expected to expand? Construction News Portal - Construction News...

A major console-maker has for the first time released a Kiwi-made virtual reality (VR) game.

Wanderer Photo: supplied/Promotional

Wanderer was released yesterday by Auckland studios M Theory and Oddboy, in a partnership with Sony Interactive Entertainment.

The VR adventure game puts players in the shoes of Asher Neumann who travels through time, all in the name of saving humanity.

Taking inspiration from the likes of Quantum Leap and Dark, Neumann goes on a journey, uncovering traitors during World War II, working alongside inventor Nikola Tesla, and even as far back as the 1500s to defend a king.

Ben Markby, who is the co-founder of Oddboy and co-creative director of Wanderer, told Karyn Hay on Lately it was a late night for the team on Thursday as they put together the final details before the release, but he was proud of the results and feedback.

"It's been a fantastic day, just seeing people out there playing it and the global response to the game.

"It's just been mind-blowing. We've had people testing the game over the past eight to 10 months locally, but really putting it out now on the global stage and seeing the response from streamers, and YouTubers, and reviewers, and just the general public has been a bit overwhelming, to be honest."

The feedback had been humbling for the team, Markby said.

"Some of the best feedback we've had [on Friday] is we've had quite a few comparisons to some of the titles that we've always idolised on VR, which has been titles made by giants like Valve, like Half-Life: Alyx, games like Saints and Sinners on VR as well.

"Not trying to toot our own horn too much here but one of the PSVR [PlayStation Virtual Reality] channels on YouTube said that this is actually one of their most favourite PlayStation VR titles ever made, so for us, that's been pretty humbling.

"We're still coming to terms with 'holy s--t, have we actually made something this good?' like it's hard to say when you're in the trenches, and you've got that tunnel vision and you kind of pop out of it at the end like this, and you're thinking well how well is this game going to be ... but the response has been amazing so far."

Photo: Supplied / Oddboy & M-Theory

Sony eyed up the opportunity tosupport the makers after Markby headedto Bostonwith his business partner in 2019 to a big gaming convention in Boston, called PAX East, with an early prototype of the game.

"They liked what they saw, and we had a chat with them and they jumped on board ... and pretty much haven't looked back since," Markby said.

"We've grown our team from that and really dived headfirst into the VR world in trying to make a game that can stand out on the world stage."

Photo: Supplied / Oddboy & M-Theory

But Markby credited the whole team as having played a massive part in the success, including artists, writers, voice actors, programmers, and designers.

"Making a game is like an orchestra, there's so many people involved.

"They're all really important to the vision of the game and making it all come to life. So it's a real team effort. Making something here of this scale in New Zealand takes a lot of people and a lot of talent and we've been really fortunate with the people we've found."

It takes about eight to 10 hours to play the game from start to end, he said.

Wanderer is available on PSVR, Oculus and SteamVR.

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Virtual reality game Wanderer puts New Zealand developers on world stage - RNZ

On a whim, I recently started rewatching Ready Player One, the Steven Spielberg adaptation of Ernest Clines seminal novel about a future in which virtual reality is the real world. In the opening scene, protagonist Wade Watts clambers around a ramshackle trailer park before placing a headset on his face. Everyone has largely abandoned the decrepit, rundown reality for the Oasisa virtual world of limitless possibilities, where everyone can do, be, or look like pretty much anything they want.

If youd asked me if we were close to Ready Player One a year ago, I wouldve snorted and listed any of the objections my more skeptical colleagues have noted. However, on a recent Saturday afternoon, my husband put on the Meta Quest 2 VR headset to play Puzzling Places, a 3D puzzling game, while our children played with their stuffed animals and I sorted laundry.

After lunch, my 6-year-old daughter was allowed to spend a half-hour in Google's Tilt Brush, a 3D drawing app where she created a frosty winter scene, complete with falling snow and snowmen named Lisa and Tom. My 4-year-old watched, enraptured, as the headset cast to the screen. After dinner, I caught my husband putting the headset on again. I told him to charge it when he was done because I was going to try a few new games with my coworker in an hour.

Being the parent of a still-unvaccinated 4-year-old, in the middle of a rainy Oregon winter, during a still-ongoing global pandemic, has sucked. My kids go to school and daycare, but to mitigate their risk, we have canceled swimming and gymnastics classes, and playdates. Virtual reality isnt perfect, but it has allowed us to extend our lockdown indefinitelyuntil my son can be vaccinated. And also I kind of like it?

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A New Hope

It didnt start out this way. I first got the Meta Quest 2 as a loaner in November, to try coworking with my colleagues and experiment with briefings. For work or relaxation, I found the headset utterly unsatisfying. If I want to meditate, I will take my dog on a walk; if I want to blow off steam, I go for a run. The killer app is reality! my husband crowed, as he saw the headset sit dusty and unused on my desk for about a month.

That was until Christmas, when both sides of my family visited and we reinstituted strict social distancing to protect older family members in the middle of the Omicron surge. Trapped in my house with no escape from all of my loved ones, I downloaded Puzzling Places one night. Meditative music plays as you manipulate small pieces of landmarks, clothes, and places in a 3D space around you. The satisfying click and glow as I put each small piece into its place was addictive.

I downloaded a few more games. Then a few more. Getting used to the headset didnt come easy. The headset is much lighter and easier to use than older iterations, but its still heavy and awkward. Getting plopped down into empty space with no legs is still disorienting; I bought myself a big bag of the same ginger gummy chews I used to combat nausea during pregnancy.

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My Family Is Trapped in the Metaverse - WIRED

Once upon a time, a very long time ago until Thursday 28 October 2021, to be precise the term metaverse was known only to lexicographers and science fiction enthusiasts. And then, suddenly, it was everywhere. How come? Simply this: Mark Zuckerberg, the supreme leader of Facebook, pissed off by seeing nothing but bad news about his company in the media, announced that he was changing its name to Meta and would henceforth be devoting all his efforts plus $10bn (7bn) and thousands of engineers to building a parallel universe called the metaverse.

And then, because the tech industry and the media that chronicle its doings are basically herds of mimetic sheep, the metaverse was suddenly the newest new thing. This was news to Neal Stephenson, the writer who actually invented the term in his 1992 novel, Snow Crash. Since there seems to be growing confusion on this, he tweeted, I have nothing to do with anything that FB is up to involving the metaverse, other than the obvious fact that theyre using a term I coined in Snow Crash. There has been zero communication between me and FB & no biz relationship.

In a 2017 interview with Vanity Fair, Stephenson modestly said of Snow Crash that he was just making shit up. If so, some shit. The book is not just a great read, but eerily prescient. Its set in a US where the government has more or less disintegrated and where everything is run by corporations that function like principalities in medieval Europe. The CIA has merged with the Library of Congress to become the CIC, a for-profit outfit that knows everything (Palantir, anyone?)

The novel opens with an unforgettable car chase in which the main character, Hiro Protagonist, who works for the mafias pizza delivery conglomerate, races desperately to deliver a pizza on time (Deliveroo?). Failure to deliver within 30 minutes of an order being placed earns you a death sentence. So the chase is a life-and-death struggle as Hiro races his GPS-enabled electric car through the streets of Los Angeles before he runs out the clock and faces the anger of the mob. And this was written in the early 1990s.

But the really intriguing thing about the new obsession with metaverse(s) is that it seems to have missed the point that the future envisaged in Stephensons novel is a deeply, deeply dystopian one. His metaverse is a vision of how a virtual-reality-based internet, resembling a massively multiplayer online game, might evolve. Like many multiplayer games, its populated by user-controlled avatars, as well as system demons. And status in this virtual world is a function of two things: access to restricted environments such as the Black Sun, an exclusive metaverse club, and technical acumen, which is often demonstrated by the sophistication of ones avatar.

The irony of this metaphor being solemnly valorised by the boss of a powerful tech corporation seems to be lost on the industry. The original video in which Zuckerberg shows himself in the metaverse defies parody. Imagine, he burbles, you put on your glasses or headset and youre instantly in your home space [sic]. Theres part of your physical home recreated virtually. It has things that are only possible virtually and it has an incredibly inspiring view of whatever you find most beautiful. It goes on like this for 11 minutes. Do keep a sick bag handy in case you decide to have a look.

If it were a spoof, youd give it full marks, but apparently its intended to be serious. And because Zuck is surrounded by the reality-distortion field created by vast wealth, other apparently rational tech moguls are scrambling to pay homage to his fantasy. The other day, for example, Microsoft, hitherto a serious computer company, laid out nearly $70bn of shareholders money to buy computer gaming company Activision Blizzard. Various rationalisations have been proposed for this splurge. The logical one is that computer gaming is a huge industry in which Microsoft already has a significant presence. Owning Activision, which makes some of the most popular titles, including Call of Duty and Candy Crush Saga, would make it an even bigger player. QED.

But there is another, more intriguing interpretation, which is that Microsofts chief executive, Satya Nadella, has caught the metaverse bug. For one thing, metaverses are, by Stephensons definition, basically immersive virtual-reality environments and the games industry specialises in creating just such environments. For another, Nadella has been heard burbling about his desire to create an enterprise metaverse. At which prospect, fevered visions loom of avatars of tech moguls in pinstripe suits and chinos stalking one another in virtual boardrooms, doing battle with lightsabers. And then one realises that such folk have no need of a parallel universe, meta or otherwise. They already live in one.

Environmental alarm callCan Science Fiction Wake Us Up to Our Climate Reality? is an unmissable New Yorker profile of writer Kim Stanley Robinson by Joshua Rothman.

Learning to love oneself On Not Hating the Body is a truly extraordinary essay on body hatred in the journal Liberties by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum.

Mentioned in dispatchesDan Wangs letter from China is always a memorable annual event; his 2021 missive continues the tradition.

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The metaverse is dystopian but to big tech its a business opportunity - The Guardian

The meeting of tradition and technology was the highlight of week three of the Attakkalari India Biennial, a Transglocal Community Arts Engagement Initiative that has more than 12 countries taking part.CyberBallet by Berlin-based theatre collective, CyberRuber, is a virtual reality (VR) interactive installation, which takes viewers on an immersive journey of movement and dance from the point of view of artificial intelligence.Held in 25-minute sessions, each with four participants, this stand-alone VR experience was conceptualised and produced by Marcel Karnapke and Bjrn Lengers in collaboration with Karlsruhe-based dance company, Badisches Staatsballett.CyberBallet explores what it means to be human, to be able to have a body and move around in a physical space. The idea for this production was conceived in 2019. When the ballet company approached us for a collaboration, we were already in the process of thinking about AI and what it might mean in the field of art, especially the performing arts. So, we made an attempt to connect the two fields and explored the question of how a machine perceives movement, says Lengers.

To put the piece together, Karnapke and Lengers captured the movements of professional dancers, processed the data through machine-learning algorithms, and transferred them onto an interactive 3D stage. As a viewer, one is free to merely watch or perform along.

Talking of the process of putting this together, Lengers says, We wanted to capture what the dancers are doing. At first, we recorded the traditional two-dimensional video and then used 360-degree and 180-degree 3D cameras to record the movements of the dance ensemble in a prepared space. We also used a motion capture suit, which has over 19 little sensors that can be attached to the limbs.

Choreographed by German-Brazilian choreographer Ronni Maciel, the production features elevating music by Israeli composer Micha Kaplan.

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Dance meets AI at this virtual reality installation - Times of India