The Art of Virtual Reality

Author(s):  
Michael Heim

The snow hits your windshield without mercy. The car’s headlights reveal nothing about the highway. You can only guess where the lanes are, where the shoulder begins, where the exit ramps might be. The blizzard has so iced the road that you crawl along at five miles an hour. Other travelers sit stranded in their cars off the road, lights dimming in the dark. Hours later, you flop exhausted on the bed. Tension tightens your shoulders and forehead. You close your eyes. On the back of your eyelids, everything appears again in startling detail: the swirling snowflakes, the headlights, the windshield wipers fighting the moisture — all in slow motion this very minute. . . . > Modern art objects had aesthetic appeal when the viewer could stand apart from them to appreciate their sensory richness, their expressive emotion, or their provocative attitude. Today, detached contemplation still holds antique charm, as the contemporary scene presents quite different circumstances. . . . Flashbacks, a kind of waking nightmare, often belong to your first experiences with virtual reality. Subtract the terror and sore muscles and you get an idea of how I felt after two and a half hours in the exhibit Dancing as the Virtual Dervish (Banff, Alberta). Even the next day, my optical nerves held the imprint of the brightly colored transhuman structures. I could summon them with the slightest effort—or see them sometimes in unexpected flashes of cyberspace. . . . > Art is coming to terms with interactivity, immersion, and information intensity. Aesthetics—the delighted play of the senses—cannot preserve its traditional detachment. The modern museum with its bright spaces and airy lighting is giving way to darkened rooms glowing with computer screens and hands-on buttons. . . . For hours, you feel a touch of perceptual nausea, a forewarning of the relativity sickness called AWS (Alternate World Syndrome) in my book The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. Everything seems brighter, even slightly illusory. Reality afterwards seems hidden underneath a thin film of appearance. Your perceptions seem to float over a darker, unknowable truth. The world vibrates with the finest of tensions, as if something big were imminent, as if you were about to break through the film of illusion.

1919 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 166-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander G. Ramage

Most of us who have thought at all of mirage have thought of it as a phenomenon belonging essentially to distant parts of the world, such as the great Sahara Desert. Few of us would not be surprised to find it almost a daily spectacle on a familiar road so near our city.You may imagine my surprise when, in the early days of April of this year, while walking westward along the Queensferry Road, and when opposite the quarry at the north end of Corstorphine Hill near the point at which the Corstorphine Hill road joins the Queensferry Road, I saw on the surface of the road, at a distance of about one and a half the spacing of the telegraph poles (they are about 50 paces apart), what appeared to be pools of clear water reflecting the green grass and foliage very clearly, and further down the road other pools. As I watched, a white horse with a rider went along, and as it passed beyond the “pools” of the mirage water (the road being perfectly dry) it was reflected, with the effect that the horse appeared to be about twice its height, as if on stilts.


2000 ◽  
Vol 122 (11) ◽  
pp. 98-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Thilmany

This article discusses that virtual reality can be expected to be the next big thing in product design and prototype, especially for products too small to be seen with the naked eye. Virtual reality will be new technology for engineering, according to many companies. Virtual reality applications could become commonplace as soon as five years down the road. By using virtual reality systems, designers touch a stylus or pen to manipulate a three-dimensional image. They get their hands on tiny sensing devices, the way you would tinker under the hood of a car. They can still determine, through the system’s visualization and animation capabilities, how the MEMS devices will function in their tiny world. Intersense of Burlington, MA, provides the motion-tracking sensors that literally track a user’s eyes and hand motions, to ensure the object they feel and manipulate in three dimensions matches the movements of their hands and eyes. It is this key piece of technology that allows users to interact in a three-dimensional environment the same way they move in their real environments.


2006 ◽  
Vol 30 (10) ◽  
pp. 387-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Rose

The day I leave Ampara on Sri Lanka's east coast, a wild elephant kills a woman and severely injures two others on the road near my house. This is the second fatal attack in town this year and, as before, the animal is rounded up and bundled back to the jungle in a truck. The incident seems to encapsulate something important about the nature of Sri Lanka: dark forces coiled beneath an appearance of calm. In the past month, for example, three security guards have been gunned down at hospitals in Ampara, Batticaloa and Sammanthurai. Yet the world of crisp nursing bonnets and clinical order remains intact throughout. No one knows who the killers were or how they chose their victims, but in this smoke and mirror conflict, rumours are fuelled of a final push by one side or the other. Then nothing happens, just more of the same, daily isolated encounters, as if it were in no one's interest to go for all-out war. Meanwhile the world's attention moves on to Lebanon.


Author(s):  
Iia Fedorova

The main objective of this study is the substantiation of experiment as one of the key features of the world music in Ukraine. Based on the creative works of the brightest world music representatives in Ukraine, «Dakha Brakha» band, the experiment is regarded as a kind of creative setting. Methodology and scientific approaches. The methodology was based on the music practice theory by T. Cherednychenko. The author distinguishes four binary oppositions, which can describe the musical practice. According to one of these oppositions («observance of the canon or violation of the canon»), the musical practices, to which the Ukrainian musicology usually classifies the world music («folk music» and «minstrel music»), are compared with the creative work of «Dakha Brakha» band. Study findings. A lack of the setting to experiment in the musical practices of the «folk music» and «minstrel music» separates the world music musical practice from them. Therefore, the world music is a separate type of musical practice in which the experiment is crucial. The study analyzed several scientific articles of Ukrainian musicologists on the world music; examined the history of the Ukrainian «Dakha Brakha» band; presented a list of the folk songs used in the fifth album «The Road» by «Dakha Brakha» band; and showed the degree of the source transformation by musicians based on the example of the «Monk» song. The study findings can be used to form a comprehensive understanding of the world music musical practice. The further studies may be related to clarification of the other parameters of the world music musical practice, and to determination of the experiment role in creative works of the other world music representatives, both Ukrainian and foreign. The practical study value is the ability to use its key provisions in the course of modern music in higher artistic schools of Ukraine. Originality / value. So far, the Ukrainian musicology did not consider the experiment role as the key one in the world music.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (SPL1) ◽  
pp. 550-557
Author(s):  
Harini P ◽  
Abilasha R

The most unexpected pandemic global outbreak is COVID 19 which is a newly discovered viral infection which originated in Wuhan, China and it caused the outbreak of pneumonia in the rest of the world. Dental practitioners are more susceptible to COVID 19 infection as their work is related to the aerosol formation during various procedures through which the virus spreads. The aim of the study is to create awareness about precautionary measures against COVID- 19 exposure among dental practitioners in Tamilnadu. A Survey based questionnaire was formulated with questions related to the various precautionary measures to be adopted by dental practitioners which would be effective to prevent Covid-19 exposure. A questionnaire with a total of 20 questions was circulated among dental practitioners and the responses were collected by google forms SPSS software statistical analysis was done. The overall awareness of dental practitioners against Covid-19 was above average. The dental practitioners were relatively well aware of the precautions to be adopted while treating the patients, but the implementation in practice is lacking due absence of hands-on experience in using various kinds of PPE. There is a gap between knowledge and attitude and practice among the participants of this survey. It is therefore essential to plan for organising training sessions and hands-on workshops for the use of PPE and public training of the general population regarding Covid-19 to improve the knowledge among the patients visiting the dental clinic as well.


2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (01) ◽  
Author(s):  
JAVED ALAM SHEIKH

Almost 50 per cent of the world population is constituted by the women and they have been making substantial contribution to socio-economic development. But, unfortunately their tremendous contribution remains unrecognized and unnoticed in most of the developing and least developed countries causing the problem of poverty among them. Empowering women has become the key element in the development of an economy. With women moving forward, the family moves, the village moves and the nation moves. Hence, improving the status of women by way of their economic empowerment is highly called for. Entrepreneurship is a key tool for the economic empowerment of women around the world for alleviating poverty. Entrepreneurship is now widely recognized as a tool of economic development in India also. In this paper I have tried to discuss the reasons and role of Women Entrepreneurship with the help of Push and Pull factors. In the last I have also discussed the problems and the road map of Women Entrepreneurs development in India.


Text Matters ◽  
2015 ◽  
pp. 62-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paulina Ambroży
Keyword(s):  
The Road ◽  

The article examines the correlation between the world and the word in two novels which engage with a post-apocalyptic scenario: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988) and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). Shifting the focus from the very event of catastrophe to the notion of survival through memory and storytelling, both novels problematize the strained relationship between language and reality in an increasingly diminished and dehumanized world. My aim is to investigate the limits of language as well as its capacity to withstand the chaos, loss, trauma, and death that follow the apocalypse. The issues to be considered include the influence of external experience on forms of communication, the role of central metaphors (the archive and the museum in Markson’s novel; cinders and the road in McCarthy’s) and their relation to the form of both novels, as well as the word’s (in)capacity to preserve human values and hopes. Both novels will be discussed as deconstructionist projects in which language becomes a habitat at once impossible and life-preserving: in Wittgenstein’s Mistress it plays the role of both home and prison, whereas in The Road it functions as messianic discourse which simultaneously carries, propels and extinguishes the human hope for a transcendental reality beyond the post-apocalyptic emptiness and doubt.


1981 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 515-522 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amos S. Cohen

Car drivers' eye fixations were registered while driving a car on the road or when in the viewing a slide which showed the same traffic situation. Even when the subjects of the second group were instructed to observe the slide presented as if they were driving there, they fixated their eyes on well-defined targets with quite different frequencies than those motorists who actually drove the car on the road. Furthermore, prolonged fixation times were observed in the laboratory as compared to the road-driving condition. The magnitude of the obtained differences was rather great. The results suggest that the subjects on the road fixated more task-oriented targets and also picked up more information per time unit than their counterparts in the laboratory. The results are discussed in relation to the experimental design.


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