When Apple introduced their Vision Pro it represented another iteration of the immersive head-mounted display dating back to Ivan Sutherlandās experiments in the 1960s, but with a difference. Appleās Vision Pro is not only a high-resolution immersive display for the person wearing it, but also features an external display that gives the impression for those…
Marcus: Thank you so much for joining us. Could you give us a bit of a brief introduction to your research on VR? What have you been interested in in the past and what are you working on now? Leighton: My interest in VR goes back. Personally, a hell of a long way. I remember…
Virtual and Augmented Reality technology has seen rapid advances in the past decade. Previously, entering into a virtual environment often meant that users had to put on a heavy enclosed headset connected to a desktop PC through thick cables or wear 3D glasses and walk into a specially constructed video-theatre like room where the 3D…
RIP Metaverse. Not my headline, but the leading line of an article in Business Insider in May 2023. As I write this at the end of May, I can look back on a month of relentless articles informing us of the death of the metaverse. Requests for a momentās silence for the death of the…
Evolutionary tree of tech (Authors-Midjourney) There is no shortage of diagrams that purport to explain the evolution of technology in society. One fun diagram in the academic study of emerging technology is Geelās (2002) ādynamic multi-level perspective on [Technology Transitions].ā The diagram sure beats popular industry sources like the Gartner Hype Cycle diagram in terms…
In October 2022, Forbes reported that 100,000 people had stopped using Metaās social VR app, Horizon Worlds. This wasnāt surprising, given that Metaās employees apparently weren’t using it either. In internal memos, Vishal Shah, Metaās VP of Metaverse, reprimanded employees for not using (and not āfalling in loveā with) the app, arguing that āthe aggregate…
AR and VR intersect (and often conflict) with expectations of privacy in public space in ways that will only become more salient over time. There is a varied and sustained engagement with the topic in the AR literature, which act as sophisticated surveillance systems. As Mark Pesce notes ā ā[f]ar less a new beginning than…
Most people who spend significant time with virtual reality become familiar with the queasiness that VR experiences can leave you with long after you remove the headset. In my case, I can locate this feeling in a very precise spot in my stomach: a knotted, vaguely poisoned sensation that sometimes takes hours to wear off….
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…
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? Isnāt that more AR than VR? How one talks about these technologies is continually evolving. With every application/device that is released a version of this debate gets kicked up again, whether…