C|Net is reporting that a project in Japan plans on marketing a holodeck-like 3D television by 2020. Not only do they propose three-dimensional images and surround sound, but also the ability to transmit touch and smell to produce an immersive experience. The project is part of a larger effort to promote “universal communication”: “a concept [...]
Tag Archives | new media
Janet Murray Visits MSC
Last night, Janet H. Murray gave her lecture “Why Study Games?” as a part of the MSC Annual Arts Festival (See the poster (4.5 MB PDF) designed by Giles Hoover). Her answer to the titular question is because “games make us human.” Citing anthropological studies, specifically the work The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition by [...]
New Media’s Golden Mean; Or, How Do I Post to the Blog, Again, Dr. Lucas?
At times knowledge brings merely an enlightened impotence or paralysis. One may know exactly what to do but lack the wherewithal to act. (Winner “Mythinformation” 594) Janet H. Murray, in her work Hamlet on the Holodeck, discusses the future of narrative within digital environments, and she suggests the importance of “author” to narrative in particular [...]
New Media Architecture
Bruce Sterling, with his typical enthusiasm for green and quirky construction, reports on the french architect François Roche and his firm R&Sie, pronounced “heresy.” Sterling writes: Roche imagines a programmable assembly device dubbed the “viab,” a construction robot capable of improvising as it assembles walls, ducts, cables, and pipes. A viab would produce structures that [...]
Another Look at Humanism
Based on current technologies and their effects on the human body, it seems necessary to reexamine just how useful humanism is to our ideas of ourselves. Lister, et al, define humanism in relation to the physical world, to show how humanists do not consider the importance of the environment over that of the Renaissance-developed, Enlightenment-codified [...]
New Media Wiki
Via Kairos News: it seems that the wiki idea is already well used by the academy. For instance, the M/Cyclopedia of New Media, maintained by students at Australia’s Queensland Institute of Technology, shows how this collaborative technology can be used successfully for eduction. Along these lines, I discovered Drupal, a content-management system that seems to [...]
Educational Conditioning
Computer-assisted instruction, applied thoughtlessly and imitatively, threatens to extend the worst features of education as it is now. (Nelson, Computer Lib / Dream Machines, 1974) Perhaps one of the reasons why many students have difficulty with online literature courses is that their educational experiences do not train them to meet the expectations that distance education [...]