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? Isnât 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…
Inevitably, a big 2023 story will be Appleâs release of their long-rumored XR headset. For years, news and tech websites have published minutiae of the project, quoting supply chain analystsâ claims it will be âthe most complicated product Apple has ever designedâ as well as âa game-changer for the headset industry.â While fans may be…
Fifteen years ago, a grad student named danah doyd was finishing off her dissertation titled Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics exploring how teens were leveraging newly forming social media to live their lives in novel ways; boyd spotted people and publics coming of age in new ways. Itâs useful to…
We have no way of knowing exactly what form the metaverse will eventually take but that doesnât mean we canât start regulating it. What we know about the metaverse The term metaverse might invoke visions of gaming platforms and virtual worlds in which people socialise in real time as unique digital avatars. Platforms such as…
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 industries. There is a body of research in the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) that presents experimental cases â with Funk…
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 MIFFâs most ambitious XR offering to date, with twelve XR pieces presented both in-person and in a digital recreation of Melbourneâs iconic art-deco Capitol…
According to Mark Zuckerberg, the âmetaverseâ â which the Meta founder describes as âan embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content â you are in itâ â will radically change our lives. So far, Metaâs main metaverse product is a virtual reality playground called Horizon Worlds. When Zuckerberg announced his companyâs metaverse push in October 2021, the prevailing sentiment was that it was something nobody had asked for, nor particularly wanted.
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 located in the Global South, to the issue of biased algorithms, and the lack of transparency and accountability in moderation decisions. Moderation is no doubt an incredibly difficult task.
Gender in extended reality Kate Euphemia Clark, Marcus Carter and Ben Egliston Gender-based discrimination in mixed reality is a pernicious problem, both at the level of experiencing gameplay, and more deeply at the level of the technology itself. This will only become more pervasive as metaverse products become more entwined in our work and social…
It’s been over 20 years since the original release of PokĂ©mon Red and Green for the Gameboy, in which players travel the virtual environment to catch virtual creatures called PokĂ©mon. Unlike the Gameboy game, where this encounter with PokĂ©mon takes place in the virtual space resembling the Japanese region of KantĆ, players of PokĂ©mon Go…