Defining (x) Realities
Tony Liao
Anyone who studies or talks about augmented reality and virtual reality technologies will inevitably get asked the question: but how is that augmented/mixed/virtual reality? Isn’t that more AR than VR?…
Avoiding the (Virtual) Hype
Maxwell Foxman
Inevitably, a big 2023 story will be Apple’s release of their long-rumored XR headset. For years, news and tech websites have published minutiae of the project, quoting supply chain analysts’ claims it will be …
Facing the socialisation of augmented reality
Luke Heemsbergen
Fifteen years ago, a grad student named danah boyd was finishing off her dissertation titled Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics exploring how teens were leveraging…
On media Genealogy and Forecasting
Dooley Murphy
Last year, I wrote reviews of Reality Media: Augmented and Virtual Reality by Jay David Bolter, Maria Engberg, and Blair MacIntyre (2021), and The Aesthetics of Virtual Reality by Grant Tavinor (2021). While the books aim to do different things, a shared feature is that they each dedicate a chapter to media genealogy. Both delve into immersive technologies’ developmental lineages. It’s noted how XR headsets are preceded by general-purpose computers, 3D computer-generated imagery, and cinema.
Cinema is preceded by photography. Photography follows from developments in linear perspective, and so on.
Sexual assault in the metaverse is not a glitch that can be fixed
Kate Euphemia Clark and Trang Le
A growing body of research has documented multiple challenges with commercial content moderation conducted by social media platforms today, from appalling working conditions for moderators who are overwhelmingly…
MIFF70: Extended reality and storytelling
Kate Euphemia Clark
The Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) celebrated its 70th year of operation this year. In recent years, the festival has been expanding to include extended reality (XR) content. This year marked…
Work and immersive technologies
Marcus Carter, Ben Egliston, and Kate Euphemia Clark
Both augmented reality and virtual reality have increasingly pushed to become key players in the workplace. AR has had a much longer history within the workplace, particularly as an assistive technology in manufacturing…