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, Iāve 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;…
‘Pop Beauty Stains, Filter” Heemsbergen L. 2023 (Midjourney) While using apps like TikTok or Instagram, if you decide to include an augmented reality (AR) filter (or lens) onto your image the top filters that come up, algorithmically targeted to users, will almost always include at least one ābeauty filterā. A beauty filter is an AR…
Last month, Apple revealed its long-teased Vision Pro headset, a device that uses augmented reality technology to project a digital image onto the physical world. But, Apple revealed, it wonāt work ā at least out of the box ā if you wear glasses. Instead, youāll need to buy inserts to attach to the device lens. Appleās…
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…
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…
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….