Play has always been at the centre of the metaverse. Gaming technology has a clear place in the history of virtual reality and worlds. From Oculus Rift’s role in reinvigorating interest in virtual reality (Evans, 2018), to persistent virtual worlds like Second Life shaping our perception of virtual worlds (Boellstorff, 2015), games and gaming technology…
The performer Sarah Nicolls sits poised at a piano at a darkened concert hall in London. This is no ordinary recital—strapped around her arms are Myo Armbands that track her arm movements, allowing her to generate curious and unnerving sounds through gesture as she plays Atau Tanaka’s (2019) biometric piano piece Suspensions. In Madrid, Marco…
The governance of the ‘metaverse’, underpinned by extended reality (XR) technology, has garnered increasing attention from policymakers, industry, and regulators. Despite highly productive critiques of industrial governance practices and initiatives – such as those focused on responsible innovation and diversity, equity, and inclusion within XR – there has been limited comprehensive examination of XR governance…
Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Extended Reality (XR) are mediating technologies uniquely positioned to explore and experience death and where death might be rehearsed. Like an illusionist’s suitcase of magic tricks, what you see may not be real, but imagination of the intangibility of death is possible with ‘artificial’ design propositions through technological…
What is Apple’s spatial computing getting us into? Apple’s first mixed reality headset combines and relates digital visual and auditory information with your surroundings launched this week. Despite despite critics questioning its actual use cases, desire for the device has seemingly blown through pre-order availability with deliveries now tracking more than a month out from…
According to Evans (2019), the re-emergence of virtual reality (VR) began in 2015. A few years earlier, in 2012, multiple large technology companies (such as Google, Samsung and Sony) announced new extended reality (XR) products that would be released in subsequent months/years. In particular, 2016 was a key year for the industry as multiple dedicated…
In September 2023, Unity had to eat its words as the game production community “united” against the platform (Parrish, 2023b). Developers vociferously proclaimed boycotts and that the company was greedy, adding that titles made from its software of the same name would be removed from distribution store shelves (Parrish, 2023a). Their angst, directed at the…
Over the past few years, my research has been focused on exploring the imagined futures of XR technologies. Beyond just trying to understand what kind of future projects industry envisions, I’ve been particularly interested in studying the values and logics that anchor these visions. There’s an essential set of questions that emerges when industry enthusiasts…
Recently, we submitted our VR book – Fantasies of Virtual Reality – to the publisher, at which point we turned our mind to the much-neglected art log. This has been, for Marcus in particular in the past week, quite the rabbit hole, where we learnt more about the earliest history of VR and further developed…
(Or, have we ever been physical?) Still from Shinjuku Calling (Yamagami Yukihiro 2014) Layering of the virtual on to the real is usually how Augmented Reality is described and explained, but layering is a strange metaphor to understand what is at stake when considering the physical-digital environments we live with. As provocation, consider when typographic ink lands on physical paper;…