Learning in Focus

The focus in this presentation is on digital media as a dimension of formal learning at tertiary level. I first present a project that uses QR-codes, then a look at virtual worlds and finally a summary of how augmented reality is our reality.

Video - "Bodies, Space and the Virtual: A Narrative of Becoming"

Click on the above image for the video stream of a keynote presentation I made in May 2013 on the perspectives and constituents of virtual space. Virtual space is becoming less virtual everyday because we live in it. From the online and shared spaces of massive multiplayer games, to GPS and the augmented and networked technologies of iPhones and wireless connectivity, the peoples of affluent economies realize virtual spaces everyday. What do these spaces mean for our understandings of the body? How can we imagine the body, with its associated territories of gender, sexuality and cognitive awareness, in this time of virtual space? This presentation examines these questions in conjunction with selected examples and proposes a conceptualization of the body based on the virtual as a narrative of becoming. Many of the ideas and analytical concepts expressed in this paper come from my doctoral dissertation work, which will be publicly defended in the Autumn of 2013 at Umeå University.

What is virtual space?
Virtual space is codified space. How I elaborate on this answer in relation to bodies, expressions of identity is related to contemporary discourse. What are the Codes of Virtual Space in relation to the body?

Webinar - Bodies, Space and the Virtual: A Narrative of Becoming

“Bodies, Space and the Virtual: A Narrative of Becoming" from Jim Barrett

A webinar (Audio coordinated with slides, just press play) from the keynote presentation I gave at the conference "There and Back Again: Cultural Perspectives on Time and Space" which took place at Umeå University, Sweden 22-23 May 2013, organized by the Department of Culture and Media.

Virtual space is becoming less virtual everyday because we live in it. From the online and shared spaces of massive multiplayer games, to GPS and the augmented and networked technologies of iPhones and wireless connectivity, the peoples of affluent economies realize virtual spaces everyday. What do these spaces mean for our understandings of the body? How can we imagine the body, with its associated territories of gender, sexuality and cognitive awareness, in this time of virtual space? This presentation examines these questions in conjunction with selected examples and proposes a conceptualization of the body based on the virtual as a narrative of becoming. Many of the ideas and analytical concepts expressed in this paper come from my doctoral dissertation work, which will be publicly defended 5th November 2013 at Umeå University.

What is virtual space?
Virtual space is codified space. How I elaborate on this answer in relation to bodies, expressions of identity is related to contemporary discourse. What are the Codes of Virtual Space in relation to the body?

Sound Self: A Oculus Rift VR Application

In the video above, SoundSelf’s designer Robin Arnott shows you the ins-and-outs of his LSD-trip inspired VR game, which he was showing off at the IndieCade booth at E3.

SoundSelf is not exactly a new project — the project met its Kickstarter goal last March. What has changed is the Oculus Rift integration, a feature that was not originally planned when the game started out.

Imagine being in a virtual tunnel 3D telescoping fractals that pulsate along with the sound of your own voice, which is then fed back to you as an ever-growing, Bodhisattva hum. It looks absolutely absurd when you see someone doing it, but when you’re inside that headset, it’s absolutely sublime. It's like the virtual reality dream of countless tech nerds, psychonauts and cyberpunks finally made manifest after so many years.

New Ways of Meeting People (Chatroulette Self-Portraits)

Omniscient business - Or how I met Erik Gustafsson

An artistic documentary commenting on the rhetoric's and integrity problems of the information technology business. The video is made by John Huntington in collaboration with artist Carl-Erik Engqvist.

Body Swap

Valeria Petkova, center, of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and Karolinska Institute student Andrew Ketterer, left, test the 'body-swap' illusion, a method whereby people can experience the illusion that either a mannequin or another person's body is their own body Monday Dec. 1, 2008 in Stockholm. In a study presented Tuesday, neuroscientists at Stockholm's renowned Karolinska Institute show how they got volunteers wearing virtual reality goggles to experience the illusion of swapping bodies with a mannequin and a real person.

Remixidity: Hybrid Spaces for Exploration

"Space is at once result and cause, product and producer; it is also at stake, the locus of projects and the actions deployed as part of specific strategies and hence also the object of wagers on the future - wagers which are articulated, if never completed" Henri Lefebvre, The Production on Space (1991)

"In these moments of heterogeneous entanglements of the social, political and technological space the meaning of the game as an entertainment tool transformed into a tool for public opinion expression and reflection." S. Lidtner, B Nardi et. al. A Hybrid Cultural Ecology: World of Warcraft in China (Forthcoming)

Hybrid, mixed or augmented space is produced by physical and mediated means. While anchored in representative technologies, the mediated elements of a hybrid space can be experienced in an immediate and fully embodied physical sense.

Perhaps the public face of augmented space at the moment could be assigned to the Nintendo Wii game console:


"Wii sounds like 'we', which emphasizes that the console is for everyone. Wii can easily be remembered by people around the world, no matter what language they speak. No confusion. No need to abbreviate. Just Wii." Nintendo anticipates worldwide sales of the Wii to reach 50 million units by March 2009.

My intention with referencing the Wii is to present a relatively established, although recent, concept as indicative of augmented or mixed reality space. From the fairly linear and demarcated system which defines the Wii I hope to move into more complex, nuanced, distributed and fragmentary examples of such hybrid spaces.


The Ping Body by Stelarc
Primary to space is the body. Inhabiting space as embodied is explored by the Australian artist Stelarc, whose work raises questions concerned with the body.


Players streaming into Astor Hall at the New York Public Library on Friday to play video games on the Wii, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and other systems.(New York Times)

Museums, libraries and teaching spaces are in themselves examples of 'mixed reality' space based on the concept of information spaces. How augmented reality can be developed in such environments is just beginning to unfold in the present time.

The Second House of Sweden
In July 2007 the Second House of Sweden, the Swedish embassy in the online virtual world of Second Life opened to the public. The Second House of Sweden functions as an information portal for those living outside the country to access real-time information and events. Guides have been employed at different times to answer questions and promote discussion around things 'Swedish'.

In January 2008 a event with the title “House of Sweden goes Virtu-Real” was staged. A function was held at the actual Swedish embassy in Washington DC, The House of Sweden. At the same time the Second House of Sweden (an exact scale model of the Washington House) held a function. Linking the two where two interactive video walls
in each location and a telephone link allowing for conversation between the two.


Installation of the video wall in Washington's House of Sweden.


Looking through the video wall, with telephone, from the Second House of Sweden.

The Second House of Sweden is an innovative project exploring concepts of branding on the global scale, hybrid space, presence and representation.

Tagging
The concept of tagging, attaching a word or key phrase to a web page or blog entry is well established on the contemporary internet. The use of Radio Frequency Identification Devices (RFIDs) to tag objects and places is a way of creating augmented spaces. The use of RFIDs for education, information distribution and storage and art has only just begun to be explored.


Presentation of the Augmented Reality installation at the Open Day of the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague, The Netherlands - January 27, 2007

Alternate Reality Games (AGRs)
An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions.
The form is defined by intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real-time and evolves according to participants' responses, and characters that are actively controlled by the game's designers, as opposed to being controlled by artificial intelligence as in a computer or console video game. Players interact directly with characters in the game, solve plot-based challenges and puzzles, and often work together with a community to analyse the story and coordinate real-life and online activities. ARGs generally use multimedia, such as telephones, email and mail but rely on the Internet as the central binding medium.

The production of space in an ARG can blend the physical with the virtual, or enmesh a mediated space with the familiar physical space of a neighbourhood or work environment. ARGs are geo-spatial, multi-modal, mobile and intermediated. One of the most recent ARGs is Traces of Hope, commissioned by the British Red Cross:

Vicious war in Northern Uganda has destroyed Joseph’s home and torn his family apart. He has one goal, to find out from the Red Cross if his mother is alive or dead.
Now he has arrived in the dangerous refugee camp they call Hopetown, he has 24 hours to track down the Red Cross messenger and he needs you to be his guide.
He has a satellite phone, you have the web – together you’ll make a great team. Time is running out; guide Joseph through sickness, fire and violence as together you follow his traces of hope.
Register to Play

Art as Augmented Reality
Art has long been a source of experimentation and investigation in regards to the potentials and boundaries of reality. In the field of augmented reality art is at the forefront of experimentation with the technologies available for blending and creating new forms of space.

Sheldon Brown (Director of the Centre for Research in Computing and the Arts at UCSD) is in my opinion one of the more interesting artists working in the area of augmented reality. Such projects as Mi Casa es Tu Casa result in a production of space that is hybrid, distributed and networked.


Mi Casa es tu Casa uses the contextual apparatus of museums with adjacent mission scopes to the art world, for bringing avant-garde strategies to engage ranges of social issues to venues that often use more pedantic forms of discourse." (Wikipedia)

Finally I would like to name a large scale project which problematise generally conception of space as physical and static. The Avatar Orchestra Metaverse (AOM) uses augmented reality technologies to articulate subjects as distributed in mixed or hybrid space.


The Avatar Orchestra Metaverse

The Avatar Orchestra Metaverse is a large group of new media artists and musicians which use Second Life as a space for coordinating and staging multimedia performances in real time over distance. These performances are achieved through the use of fast broadband internet connections and HUDs (Head Up Display) devices which allow for the running of samples from a central server. The effect created by the AOM performance creates an impression of shared space and immediacy.

3D Web Browser

While I wish people would finish with the here (reality) and there (virtual) hype (it is so 1990s) the ExitReality web browser looks interesting:

Available for free at www.exitreality.com as a four megabyte download, ExitReality operates as a plug-in for existing web browsers. The developers say it was designed with the average computer in mind.

"ExitReality has been built to run on low-spec computers," said Stefanic. "It can even run on dial up, albeit slowly".

Offering "more than 40 billion 3D worlds instantly", ExitReality converts 2D webpages into 3D landscapes that the user can then navigate to view the website's content. ExitReality also allows users to see and chat with other users who are visiting the same site.

ExitReality includes a search engine for all 3D content on the web. Searching for "Paris" returns several sites where you can take a stroll around the Louvre or the Arc de Triomphe, viewing them in three dimensions. (SMH)

The browser comes as a free 4 MB download from the website, I'll test it when I have the time.

Art and the User Generated Image

Arahan Claveau, Lupus Delacroix, Second Life 2008

"Avatar: the New You," an exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography that mixes the Web 2.0 vernacular of user-generated images with parallel but more self-critical art projects. The show includes fan-created screenshots from massively-multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, Habbo Hotel and Second Life and documentation of SimGuys.net, a virtual emporium of fashionable dude wear for Sims characters, but also media installations by artists Claudia Hart, Myfanwy Ashmore, Melissa Ramos and Rhys Turner, and Tobias Bernstrup, as well as photography by Daniel Handal and performance documentation by Justin Shoulder. Two artists' works that themselves gained a foothold in greater internet culture are also included: screenshots from Tale of Tales' gentle multiplayer game The Endless Forest (2006), in which players take the roles of deer, and Aram Bartholl's First Person Shooter (2005), a pair of custom specs that give you the look of Doom. - Ed Halter

Ben X: Augmented Reality in Reality Fiction

I will be giving a short presentation at an international workshop that is being held at Umeå university soon. The workshop is on Creative Spaces and I will be talking about augmented reality, that is shared virtual and actual space in projects we have done in HUMlab in the last few years. I began yesterday looking around for materials to present in relation to augmented space, the work of Sheldon Brown and Mary Flanagan comes to mind as well as the ARG scene, I will show some pieces by Jane Mcgonigal. Then this morning on the radio came a review for a Belgian film from 2007 that premiers in Sweden today, Ben X:

Ben X is a 2007 Belgian film about an autistic boy (played by Greg Timmermans) who retreats into the fantasy world of the MMORPG ArchLord to escape bullying. The film's title is a reference to the leet version of the Dutch phrase "(ik) ben niks", meaning "(I) am nothing".

The film won three awards at the 31st Montreal World Film Festival: the Grand Prix des Amériques, the Prix du Public for the most popular film, and the Ecumenical Jury Prize for its exploration of ethical and social values. It is based on the novel "Nothing is all he said" [1] by Nic Balthazar, who also directed the film. The novel was inspired by the true story of an autistic boy who committed suicide because of bullying.

This film is mainly seen through Ben's (Greg Timmermans) point of view, especially with the frequent use of Ben's voiceover for narrating the story. It also uses flashbacks and sequences from Archlord (as an intercut), to parallel his real life with the sequences. Ben is a teenage boy who is being bullied at school very often. To escape his harsh reality of being bullied, he turns to his virtual world by playing a online game called Archlord. In his virtual world, he is more confident and brave. Moreover, he collaborates his adventures with another online user named Scarlite. (Wikipedia)

Watching the trailer I get the impression that the use of scenes from the MMORPG work in a near dream-sequence like technique. However, it is an attempt to capture an augmented sense of reality.

Arrested for Stealing Virtual Furniture

"It is a theft because the furniture is paid for with real money" Sulake spokesman

A Dutch teenager has been arrested for allegedly stealing virtual furniture from "rooms" in Habbo Hotel, a 3D social networking website. The 17-year-old is accused of stealing 4,000 euros (£2,840) worth of virtual furniture, bought with real money.
BBC

Does it Get any More Real Than This?

If anyone doubts that shared online worlds like Second Life and the world we share here in Real Life are not blending, check out these two videos:





The Second Life video seems to pay more attention to traditional concepts associated with the ritual of a wedding (church, heterosexual, christian, vows, and so on) than the Real Life ritual does. Could it be that we will come in future years to preserve our traditions in high resolution immersive media, while in real life we live out our desires and identities according to our own particular preferences and beliefs? The holodeck of Startrack will come to be where we preserve our ideals in a sort of laboratory of "Truth" and the mission of the starship (our real bodies) is to find out who we are becoming rather than who we once perhaps were or could be......

Out of Body Experience by VR

The latest issue of Science has three research texts on out of body experience (OBE) being induced or simulated by virtual reality technology. The idea of being able to experience sensory perception from outside the physical body seems to have created a wave of interest in the press:

Scientists have induced the age-old phenomenon of out-of-body experiences in healthy volunteers for the first time.

The technique, which uses a virtual-reality-style set up of cameras linked to a head-mounted video display, will help researchers understand how the brain assimilates sensory information to determine the position of its body.

The technique could also improve virtual reality games and remote surgery by creating the illusion that a person is somewhere other than in their own body.The Guardian

An out of body experience is

an experience that typically involves a sensation of floating outside of one's body and, in some cases, seeing one's physical body from a place outside one's body (autoscopy). About one in ten people claim to have had an out-of-body experience at some time in their lives.

In some cases the phenomenon appears to occur spontaneously; in others it is associated with a near-death experience, use of psychedelic drugs, or a dream-like state. It is possible to induce the experience deliberately, for example through visualization while in a relaxed, meditative state. Recent studies have shown that experiences somewhat similar to OBEs can be induced by direct brain stimulation. Relatively little is known for sure about OBEs. Wikipedia

The articles in Science are

The Experimental Induction of Out-of-Body Experiences
H. Henrik Ehrsson
Visual and sensory stimuli that mimic subjects viewing themselves from a distance produced a center of awareness (or sense of self) outside their bodies.


Video Ergo Sum: Manipulating Bodily Self-Consciousness
Bigna Lenggenhager, Tej Tadi, Thomas Metzinger, and Olaf Blanke
Visual and sensory stimuli that mimic subjects viewing themselves from a distance produced a center of awareness (or sense of self) outside their bodies.


Out-of-Body Experiences Enter the Laboratory
Greg Miller
Out-of-body experiences are associated more with tabloid newspapers, New Age Web sites, and large doses of hallucinogenic drugs than serious scientific discussion. Yet they're often reported by reputable people who suffer from migraine headaches, epilepsy, and other neurological conditions. Intrigued by such accounts, some researchers are trying to figure out how the brain creates an aspect of human consciousness so fundamental that we take it for granted: the perception that the "self" conforms to the borders of the physical body.

Virtual Text Object 1886

In 1886 Henry Rider Haggard asked his sister-in-law to make a ceramic vessel, break it in half and then fix it together again using metal thongs. He also asked his former school headmaster to translate a passage from English to Ancient Greek. Haggard then inscribed this translated passage onto the vessel his sister-in law had made as well as adding names in Greek, Latin and Middle and Modern English with dates stretching over thousands of years. He then included images of this creation in the opening pages of his next novel.

This object then became the departure point and central referent to the best selling novel She. By today's standards it is a very dated work in many ways, being imperialistic, sexist, racist and anti-Semitic. But it is an important text as it is an early embodiment of several modernist principles. Among these is the ceramic piece, the so called 'Sherd of Amenartas' which manifests as a sort of virtual text object. Information is attached to the object which is central to the narrative of She, and indeed the subsequent volumes Haggard produced using the same resurrected character (such as Wisdoms Daughter from 1922). The object actually existed in real life as a three dimensional narrative construction, unlike in the contemporary text The Picture of Dorian Grey (1881)by Wilde where the decaying picture was a trope and nothing more.

This is an interesting early example of a mixed reality narrative and the presence of a virtual object existing in the diegetic field of the narrative and in a spatial form renders She a very early proto-hypertext.

 The actual 'Sherd of Amenartas' on display in Norwich Castle Museum.