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- Volume 1, Issue 1, 2010
Metaverse Creativity (new title: Virtual Creativity) - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2010
Volume 1, Issue 1, 2010
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Cyber-archaeology and metaverse collaborative systems
Authors: Maurizio Forte and Gregorij KurilloThe University of California, Merced and the University of California, Berkeley are developing an open source virtual collaborative system labelled tele-immersive archaeology which is able to involve different users/avatars in the 3D cyberspace at different levels of embodiment. The application is built upon Vrui VR Toolkit developed at UC Davis and tele-immersive technology developed at UC Berkeley. The visualization based on Vrui can run on various clients, from laptops to desktop servers, supporting different display technologies, from 2D to stereo. The framework also supports various input devices and trackers while providing integration and transmission of 3D video from stereo cameras, 2D video from webcams, and audio. This seamless integration (combined with proper display and capture technologies) provides users with immersive experience of the shared virtual environments. We started some tele-immersive experiments in archaeology using two different case studies: the reconstruction of a monumental tomb (replete with mural paintings) of the Western Han Dynasty (Xi'an, China) and the Mayan city of Copan (Honduras).
A possible evolution of the system will involve even the co-participation of multiple users from a metaverse, such as OpenSimulator or Open Cobalt. The creation of a hybrid 3D environment, tele-immersive-collaborative and Metaverse-co-participative will open up new perspectives in the analysis of the interpretative and communicative processes in archaeology.
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For a critical perspective of the value of web art
More LessThe current article discusses the fact that art does not have a place in contemporary society and points to some solutions for a critical approach to web art and technologically endowed contemporary society. The article begins with a brief and general description of art's lack of meaning and its problems. It goes on to discuss practical examples that illustrate some possible solutions to art's critical value today.
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Using 2D photography as a 3D constructional tool within the metaverse
By Murat GermenPhotography is a powerful 2D representation tool to document 3D volumes like architecture. It is possible to manipulate photos with 2D tools like Photoshop in order to suggest new 3D re/formations and re/interpret architecture. One can alternatively use 2D textures as mappings to create realistic 3D model renderings. This project is a combination of these two approaches: photographing architecture, turning the resulting photos into transparent image files, and then mapping these photos onto 3D volumes in order to create a new architecture from an existing architecture.
One of the advantages of using photographs to create architecture is that the photo pool can easily be composed of visuals from various cultures and you may end up using an amalgam of visuals from, say, so-called opposite cultures. This possibility reminds the peaceful collaboration of musicians from different cultures to create a unique music. In addition, this act can also be taken as a migration of media through appropriation of photography for 3D volume creation and re/presentation. At this point, we are talking about a double representation, since photography is a representation tool already and it gains another representational dimension when it is remapped onto 3D volumes for the construction of an alternative reality.
This article concentrates on using a representation tool (photography) to construct a 3D space (architecture) within a virtual 3D environment (Second Life). During the process the concepts of perception, reality, cultural context, re/presentation and appropriation will be examined.
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Brainflowing, virtual/physical space and the flow of communication: An explanatory approach to the metaverse through a tool designed for brainstorming
More LessThis article will focus on a tool developed by the author called Brainflowing, which was created specifically for brainstorming in sessions undertaken in Second Life.
While this tool is the primary subject under discussion, there is nonetheless a wish to contextualize the query within a broader look at the workings of a metaverse, such as Second Life, in which communication is established and knowledge is shared. For this purpose a two-way approach has been adopted: viewing the virtual world as a physical space and as a flow of communication. Second Life's main characteristics are utilized in the four steps achieved during the design process of Brainflowing: (1) researching, (2) creating, (3) showing, and (4) selling.
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Epoch of plasticity: The metaverse as a vehicle for cognitive enhancement
More LessThis article discusses simulation as an optimal vehicle for brain plasticity, a primary and distinct area of neuroscience and essential to human enhancement. By speculating on second-order enhancement cybernetics, the article links the 3D, virtual world of the metaverse to an epoch of plasticity, and also frames the practice of enhancement as taking place in this epoch. An arguable key issue of simulation and enhancement is the tension between desire and feasibility: a desire for greater than human attributes and what is technologically feasible for designing and developing such post-biological attributes. For example, a person may desire to have 24-hour remote brain integration with the metaverse but this is not feasible because (1) the technology has not been developed to do this safely; (2) the costs of research and development of artificial general intelligence and nano-robots to build a metabrain integration with the metaverse is vastly expensive; (3) patents have to be secured and take time; (4) the FDA may intervene preventing a human from integrating the brain with the net or metaverse. Further, while a person may desire to be an upload he or she has to face similar circumstances: (1) the technology has been developed to integrate the brain and computer safely; (2) the costs of R and D are enormous; (3) the ethical and moral issues are predominant; (4) this new construct for personhood may have a social and ideological impact.
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LPDT2
Authors: Elif Ayiter, Roy Ascott, Max Moswitzer and Selavy OhLPDT2 is the metaverse incarnation of Roy Ascott's groundbreaking new media art work La Plissure du Texte/The Pleating of the Text, created in 1983 and shown in Paris at the Muse de l'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris during that same year. Whereas in 1983 the text was pleated by human storytellers; in the metaverse the storytellers show novel and unexpected attributes: an emergent textual architecture/geography, as well as a number of autonomous, coded, robot avatars which dwell inside this bizarre, literary landscape pleating the text by acting as communication nodes between the narrators of this new version of the tale.
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Surpassing human nature: Reinventions of and for the body as a consequence of astronomical experiments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
By Luca AyalaThe involvement of mankind in a technologized society has a long history. This article analyses some examples from a crucial period of our history, when the development of the telescope gave rise to a complete new understanding of our world and the universe surrounding us. The use of a wide range of variations of this device has since become an absolutely indispensable part of our relationship with our environment. Many fields of human action and thought were combined with technological prosthesis, without which it became impossible to conceive of our being at all.
Within this context we present some exceptional devices that were neither popularized nor commercialized, but that constitute crucial metaphors for the changes caused by the new technologies. For instance, Galileo Galilei's prototype of a head-mounted display, or more precisely, a head-mounted viewfinder is put into relation with Kindermann's wonderful philosophical device for a global observation of our planet. This article also brings out some examples of the expanded body, as it was understood during this time.
Reflection on some case studies in the seventeenth and eighteenth century helps us understand our society better, insofar as both periods of time are affected by crucial changes regarding the development and implementation of technologies that subvert the entire scientific, epistemological, and tactical system.
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Virtual puppet, my love impossible
By Semi RyuThis article expounds upon the convergence of two seemingly disparate psychic manifestations; namely the mode of Han, a mindset deeply embedded in traditional Korean culture and the contemporary relationship of a human handler to his or her avatar in three dimensional virtual environments. As an artist whose artistic medium is virtual puppetry performed through three dimensional media, the author has found an extreme state of paradox as a key aspect of her own Korean culture, embodied by the concept of Han as the paradoxical state of the human psyche, initiated from the micro-politics of body. This article investigates the potential relation between human and virtual bodies, and avatars and their users in a paradoxical manner: this is a story of the love impossible.
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Editorial
Authors: Elif Ayiter and Yacov Sharir
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