Nicholas Ray’s We Can’t Go Home Again

This chapter analyzes the film We Can’t Go Home Again (1972–1976), which the American director Nicholas Ray realized in collaboration with a class of students he taught at the State University of New York in Purchase. The film exemplifies the ability of cinema to provide access to an “elsewhere” and “elsewhen,” analyzed by Anne Friedberg in her book Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. This chapter claims that the film’s use of multiscreen projection can be illuminated through Friedberg’s notion of the virtual window, developed in The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. Thanks to the collaboration on the film of video artist Nam June-Paik and the employment of techniques associated with the contemporaneous practice of “expanded cinema,” We Can’t Go Home Again is an important precursor to contemporary digital media.

Introduction

This introduction presents the central concepts developed by film and media scholar Anne Friedberg (1952–2009) in her books Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern and The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. It argues that her notions of the moving virtual gaze and the virtual window prefigure subsequent discussions in the visual studies and mobility studies literature that emphasize the significance of vision in motion. It also explicates how the chapters in this volume investigate domains such as film, television, visual art, architecture, urbanism, and virtual reality. Finally, it indicates how each chapter extends Friedberg’s ideas to new areas and contributes to an ongoing investigation of cultural modernity in an age of rapid media change.

Moving Through Friedberg’s Properly Adjusted Virtual Window

This chapter analyzes the theory of virtual reality developed by Anne Friedberg in The Virtual Window and argues that Friedberg confuses the notions of pictura and imago developed by Johannes Kepler in his theory of optics. The chapter untangles the meanings of these concepts and develops a notion of the virtual image that builds upon Friedberg’s work while eliminating some of the inconsistencies and limitations in her account. Gunning cautions against simply aligning the virtual with the immaterial or tying it too closely to the process of representation and claims the virtual optical images Friedberg invokes mark a revolution we might call virtual media. This does not simply involve a process of reproduction (although Walter Benjamin’s analysis of technical reproduction provides a founding text in defining the virtuality of modern media), but rather a process of discovery and transport. If we focus more broadly, as Friedberg invites us to do, on virtual media rather than a virtual image, our attention shifts from image to the apparatuses, or better, the technical processes, of virtualization.

Calling while Driving Using Augmented Reality: Blessing or Curse?

We report on an experiment on the distracting effects of in-car conversations through augmented-reality glasses. Previous research showed that in-car phone conversations can be distracting, but that the distraction might be reduced if the remote caller receives visual information about the driving context. However, what happens if such video sharing becomes bidirectional? The recent introduction of commercial augmented-reality glasses in particular might allow drivers to engage in video-supported conversations while driving. We investigate how distracting such video-based conversations are in an experiment. Our participants operated a simulated vehicle, while also playing a conversational game (Taboo) with a remote conversant. The driver either only heard the remote conversant (speech-only condition), or was also able to see the remote person in a virtual window that was presented through augmented reality (video call condition). Results show that our participants did not spend time looking at the video of the remote conversant. We hypothesize that this was due to the fact that in our experiment participants had to turn their head to get a full view of the virtual window. Our results imply that we need further studies on the effects of augmented reality on the visual attention of the driver, before the technology is used on the road.

Speed and direction of an obstacle using virtual window

A virtual window is used to determine the direction and speed of a uniformly moving obstacle. Two intersections with the virtual window at different location are used to calculate the relative path and speed of the obstacle. Two simulations were performed using Excel 2010. The first simulation simulates a practical running of a uniformly moving obstacle, while the second has the obstacle moving at a very high speed. The result shows that the system was able to determine the relative speed and path of the uniformly moving obstacle accurately.