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, 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…