Showing posts with label virtual reality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label virtual reality. Show all posts

The Matrix Has You Review

The Matrix Has You
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The Matrix Has You ReviewThe Matrix Has You As a novice to the Matrix world, I was fascinated by this book. It explains the virtual reality world in terms the layman can understand and appreciate. It made the viewing of the movie Avatar even more exciting and realistic. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wonders what our futures will look like.The Matrix Has You OverviewThe Matrix Has You by Thomas Ousterhout brings the fringes of cutting edge technology and the human imagination together and creates a revolutionary vision of the future that blurs the lines between man and machine. Using the popular film The Matrix as the metaphor, Ousterhout builds an impeccably supported argument that humans and machines, and virtual world technology, are headed for a common future where human perceptions and virtual experience will merge. The resulting "Matrix-like" reality is not only possible, according to the author, it is closer than we imagine. Using the most recent references in popular and scientific literature, as well as the input and prognostications of leaders in the field of cognition, robotics, artificial intelligence, and brain-computer research, The Matrix Has You paints a future for humanity that is both awesome and ominous. Written in clear and accessible prose, author Ousterhout has produced a book that is both provocative and entertaining.

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Saga Review

Saga
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Saga ReviewEric and his new girlfriend are vacationing when a new computer game infiltrates the system of EPIC. Everything except Cindella disappears, and a new game is left in its place. The new game of Saga has similarities to the old game; it revolves around class and trying to improve one's standard of living.
However, Cindella begins to realize that this new game - is not really a game. She also learns that the mastermind behind the game put a little something extra into it that seeps out into New Earth, infecting the players so they become addicted to the game. Cindella could kill the Queen of Saga, but in doing so would have to kill two million of her people simultaneously.
With the help of Ghost, a girl who doesn't know her own power, Eric must find a way out of this disaster.
The twists and turns of life on Saga make this science fiction novel a quick and enjoyable read, especially for those who play video games.
Reviewed by: Jennifer RummelSaga Overview

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A Beginner's Guide to Second Life version 1.1 Review

A Beginner's Guide to Second Life version 1.1
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A Beginner's Guide to Second Life version 1.1 ReviewWhen I first tried Second Life, I was a little overwhelmed by the complexity of it. Sure, there are help files and forums and such, but I really needed a step by step guide to help keep me from running around naked with a box on my head. This book was just what I was looking for. I highly recommend it. I think I'm going to buy an island today.A Beginner's Guide to Second Life version 1.1 OverviewMillions and millions of people from all over the world have discovered the new virtual universe of Second Life. There you can meet new people, make friends, conduct business, build empires, whatever your imagination can conjure.This easy to use Beginner's Guide takes you step-by-step through the process of going from embarrassingly unprepared "Newbie" to a seasoned resident in no time.Learn how to design an Avatar for your new appearance. You can look like anyone or anything you desire. Buy land, build a house, a fortress, or even an entire city. Buy and island. Create new products and services and sell them to other residents for Linden Dollars, which can be converted to real US dollars. This book shows you how, with step by step exercises, examples, loads of illustrations, everything you need to get started and having fun.

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The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World Review

The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World
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The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World ReviewIt can be hard to justify buying a book about a place as fluid and temporal as Second Life. In a world with a constantly-shifting, user-created landscape, what could one write that will be of any use in the next few years?
Given this challenge, Wagner James Au crafts an excellent book about the history and nature of Second Life. Leveraging his status as a former employee and virtual embedded journalist, Au shares with the reader his well-researched subjective viewpoint into a world of fluid forms and fluid personalities. Touching on such topics as the economy, socialization, politics, the nature of self, and the interaction between the real world and the artificial one, the book weaves a narrative that is one part company history, one part personal experience, and one part industry commentary.
While the book overall is an interesting read, I found myself having to swallow some significant typos and informational errors. This is a pet peeve of mine, and I feel the book really could have used a second editorial pass and some fact-checking (for instance, the 3D embedded content viewer inDuality ([...]) is made by Pelican Crossing, not Penguin Crossing). Print is not the web, and sadly, once one publishes an edition of a book with this many errors, it's published forever.
But if you have a tolerance for typos and a willingness to do your own fact-checking (which will be necessary anyway, given the changeable nature of the subject matter), this book is a good read and can serve as a starting point for further forays into the field of 3D interactive worlds, and Second Life specifically.The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World Overview

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Developing Virtual Reality Applications: Foundations of Effective Design Review

Developing Virtual Reality Applications: Foundations of Effective Design
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Developing Virtual Reality Applications: Foundations of Effective Design ReviewVirtual Reality is a subdivision of computer graphics and the latter is intensely mathematical. But this book eshews a mathematical bent. Instead it offers a sweeping survey of recent [2008-9] applications of VR. You can easily read this and get a good understanding of where VR is being used. The survey spans both academic and industrial/commercial efforts.
The book is also aided by a heavy use of illustrations, many in colour. Quite appropriate given that we are talking about graphics. The figures greatly help the understanding of the text.
One interesting subtopic is augmented reality. Where typically a user wears a special pair of glasses and walks around the real world. Depending on her location and perhaps orientation, the glasses communicate wirelessly with a GIS-aware database that downloads information to be displayed in an overlay fashion on her vision.Developing Virtual Reality Applications: Foundations of Effective Design Overview
Virtual Reality systems enable organizations to cut costs and time, maintain financial and organizational control over the development process, digitally evaluate products before having them created, and allow for greater creative exploration. In this book, VR developers Alan Craig, William Sherman, and Jeffrey Will examine a comprehensive collection of current,unique, and foundational VR applications in a multitude of fields, such as business, science, medicine, art, entertainment, and public safety among others.

An insider's view of what works, what doesn't work, and why, Developing Virtual Reality Applications explores core technical information and background theory as well as the evolution of key applications from their genesis to their most current form. Developmental techniques are cross-referenced between different applications linking information to describe overall VR trends and fundamental best practices. This synergy, coupled with the most up to date research being conducted, provides a hands-on guide for building applications, and an enhanced, panoramic view of VR development. Developing Virtual Reality Applications is an indispensable one-stop reference for anyone working in this burgeoning field.


Dozens of detailed application descriptions provide practical ideas for VR development in ALL areas of interest!
Development techniques are cross referenced between different application areas, providing fundamental best practices!
Includes a media-rich companion website with hours of footage from application demonstrations


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Understanding Virtual Reality: Interface, Application, and Design (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics) Review

Understanding Virtual Reality: Interface, Application, and Design (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics)
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Understanding Virtual Reality: Interface, Application, and Design (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics) ReviewUnderstanding Virtual Reality" is the definitive, authoritative, and exhausive exploration of the field by two insiders and practioners, Sherman and Craig. Virtual reality, a uniquely viewer-centric, large field-of-view, dynamic display technology has evolved over the past decade in many physical formats, driven by many software applications using a variety of operating systems, computers, and specialized libraries. Sherman and Craig capture them all in this substantial volume.
Most writing about virtual reality involves summarizing and interpreting interviews and demos, with massive doses of the speculative and the spectacular, and lots of historical fuzziness. Sherman and Craig, however, lived in the world of actual VR production at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where corporate researchers, educators, scientists, and artists make use of this technology in their daily work. They have personally suffered with VR tech and benefited greatly from access to it as well as to amazing amounts of computing, engineering, and scientific talent. They were held to real deadlines of corporate contracts, scientific conference demonstrations, and the design of IMAX productions. While they were doing all this, they were also writing this book. As a result, "Understanding Virtual Reality" has the integrity and feel of a long-term, eyewitness account and a personal journal, because these production-oriented researchers were documenting the times contemporaneously, rather than trying to reconstruct the details years later.
I know all this because I was their group leader for a couple of years in the mid-90's at NCSA, and their colleague in VR the years before and after. I co-invented the CAVE hardware, among other things, with Dan Sandin at the University of Illinois at Chicago, in 1991.Understanding Virtual Reality: Interface, Application, and Design (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics) Overview
Understanding Virtual Reality arrives at a time when the technologies behind virtual reality have advanced to the point that it is possible to develop and deploy meaningful, productive virtual reality applications. The aim of this thorough, accessible exploration is to help you take advantage of this moment, equipping you with the understanding needed to identify and prepare for ways VR can be used in your field, whatever your field may be.
By approaching VR as a communications medium, the authors have created a resource that will remain relevant even as the underlying technologies evolve.You get a history of VR, along with a good look at systems currently in use. However, the focus remains squarely on the application of VR and the many issues that arise in the application design and implementation, including hardware requirements, system integration, interaction techniques, and usability.This book also counters both exaggerated claims for VR and the view that would reduce it to entertainment, citing dozens of real-world examples from many different fields and presenting (in a series of appendices) four in-depth application case studies.* Substantive, illuminating coverage designed for technical and business readers and well-suited to the classroom.* Examines VR's constituent technologies, drawn from visualization, representation, graphics, human-computer interaction, and other fields, and explains how they are being united in cohesive VR systems.* Via a companion Web site, provides additional case studies, tutorials, instructional materials, and a link to an open-source VR programming system.

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Mobilizing Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using Web 2.0: Technologies to Recruit, Organize and Engage Youth Review

Mobilizing Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using Web 2.0: Technologies to Recruit, Organize and Engage Youth
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Mobilizing Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using Web 2.0: Technologies to Recruit, Organize and Engage Youth ReviewEdit of 18 May to recommend Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies as a different book, with more practical tips and annecdotal support, but in no way does that reduce my appreciation for this book. Both are excellent, I think of them as truly complementary of one another.
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I *like* this book. Although I have years of exposure to advanced information technology and read everything by gurus like Paul Strasssman (cf. Information Productivity: Assessing Information Management Costs of U. S. Corporationsand Steve Arnold (Arnold IT, look for "Google 2.0: The Calculating Predator, not sold on Amazon), I learned stuff from this book, and I found it to be exactly right for getting an old-school CEO or other management skeptic "oriented."
In 268 well-organized and well-presented pages, the book covers:
+ Blogging
+ Social Networking
+ Video and Photo Sharing
+ Mobile Phones
+ Wikis
+ Maps
+ Virtual Worlds
Each chapter has extremely clear headlines, gray boxes, figures, and endnotes. To get a sense of the book and the online offerings that back it up, visit mobilizingyouth.org, just add the www.
A special value is short essays from top practitioners including Mitch Kapor whose essay, next to last, focuses on the coming convergence of virtual worlds and social networking. Visit BigPictureSmallWorld for a sense of the possibilities there--I have very deep admiration for Medard Gabel, who built the analog World Game with Buckminster Fuller, and I am so very eager to see him create EarthGame(TM) in which we all play ourselves and have access to all information in all languages all the time--at that point, we will end looting of our commonwealth, end corruption, and create invite wealth or as he puts it in the title of his new book, "Seven Billion Billionaires."
Most useful to me were the following:
+ Use all these tools internally to get a sense of them, before trying to do something with the broader online population
+ One billion people are connected, the rest are not, but what the billion do with their connections could impact on how quickly we get the other 5-6 billion connected and creating wealth
+ 55% of teens are active online, 80% of college students have a Facebook profile
+ Digg is an example of a global intelligence service in which every citizen is an intelligence consumer, collector, and producer
+ Cool examples that I will certainly look into include Care2, Causes, Hi5, and Gather
+ Politicians (including the three running for President now) simply do not get it. They are still using phone banks that call at all hours and spamming (Obama does less of it) instead of asking permission and then building on the relationship
+ I am very impressed by the natural manner in which the book communicates the relationship between having a good story with heroes, villians, and catalysts, and the sequence of fund-raising via text connection and follow-up. This book strikes me as both a very very good elementary text for digital immigrants (us old guys) and also a useful "once over" for the more experienced who may be overlooking a couple of pieces of the overall campaign.
+ The book emphasizes the many uses of the wiki, many of them internal, some external, but the most important being that wikis are a way of crowd sourcing. See the first book from Earth Intelligence Network, Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace (free at oss.net/CIB just add the www, but utterly lovely here at Amazon) and especially the later chapters on large scale collective and collaborative intelligence in action.
+ Tag clouds are vital, as is the selection of unique tags for clusters of informaiton you want to make easily available.
+ Virtual worlds are in their infancy, and when they finally develop, will be extraordinary as nuanced immersive learning environments (low cost low risk environmental, I would add).
The last essay from Katrin Verclas is great, and I selected the following quote with which to end this review--it captures the essence:
"Web 2.0 describes a participatory, bottom-up, decentralized world full of individual expression where people have direct access to one another and enjoy an unprecedented ability to organize, meet, and coordinate without centralized control or traditional hierarchies."
YES!
See also:
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
The Change Handbook: The Definitive Resource on Today's Best Methods for Engaging Whole Systems
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political--Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption
Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in AmericaMobilizing Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using Web 2.0: Technologies to Recruit, Organize and Engage Youth OverviewUse new media to attract and mobilize young people!Explore and examine the gamut of new media and the ways in which it can be used to recruit, organize, and mobilize young people--who represent the majority of new media users. Answer the questions: What is it? How is it being used? How does it work? How to get started? You'll get concise descriptions, screenshots, case studies, resources, and best practices in language that is easy for non-technical people to understand. You'll also gain a sense of the technology--without requiring any downloads, software or plug-ins.
Includes a Foreword by Rock the Vote and contributions from Beth Kanter, Evan Williams, danah boyd, Fred Stutzman, Steve Grove, Jonah Sachs, Seth Godin, Zack Exley, Marty Kearns, Jason Fried, Mitch Kapor, and Katrin Verclas.
Chapters cover Blogging, Social Networking, Video and Photo Sharing, Mobile Phones, Wikis, Maps, Virtual Worlds.

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Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book) Review

Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book)
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Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book) ReviewI came to _Snow Crash_ on the recommendation of a few people who had read it (they called it "great!" and "hilarious!," and knowing that Neal Stephenson is sometimes listed as a "cyberpunk" writer along with William Gibson et al.
I had liked William Gibson's books, so I gave _Snow Crash_ a try.
_Snow Crash_ is primarily about Hiro, a young man who delivers pizzas and collects information for the Central Intelligence Corporation (freelance), for a living. He lives in a storage unit with a cult-hero rockstar named Vitaly Chernobyl. He owns a futon, two awesome Japanese swords, and a laptop computer, where he stays "jacked in" to the "Metaverse" a lot of the time, where he is the world's greatest swordfighter.
Hiro witnesses a crime while interacting with others in the Metaverse. One of his friends is deliberately exposed to a dangerous block of text, which fries his brain (in the real world), and renders him a vegetable. Hiro and his friend Y.T. (15-year old skateboarding female, and knee-slappingly funny smartaleck) set off to find out why, and save the world in the process.
From the getgo this is a funny book. Sure, the vision of the near-future is dark, a little alarming, and at times depressing (there are NO general laws in _Snow Crash_, for example, and private corporations run everything, even the police, just as an example). That's what cyberpunk is like. But the HUMOR is one thing that sets Neal Stephenson aside. Hiro Protagonist? Come on, that's FUNNY, PEOPLE! One reviewer called it an 'odd' name. Yes, it's odd, and it's absurd, and it's funny! Did this author mean it is an unusual choice for a character name? I don't know. I hope not. It would be an odd choice for a character's name in a Jane Austen novel, sure. But this is cyberpunk, or something like it. Among this genre's leading inspirations are the works of Thomas Pynchon, and "Hiro Protagonist," as a character name, would fit in perfectly among his merry bands of misfits, especially in _V._ or _Gravity's Rainbow_.
Repeatedly reviewers are slamming Stephenson for his use of Sumerian myth, exploration of Sumerian culture, etc. in the book... calling it inaccurate, poorly connected to the rest of the story, and, (my personal least favorite), BORING. I tell you, besides the great sense of humor, the Sumerian-myth link is what sets this novel heads above so much other cyberpunk. I don't care if it's inaccurate (this is FICTION, see?). Stephenson "traces" computer/textual viruses and biological viruses quite nicely back to Sumerian times, and he links them to one another, biological virus to digital/informational virus (a debt to another pre-cyberpunk luminary, William Burroughs, who said "Word is Virus?")-- it's all very well connected to the metaverse/here-and-now portion of _Snow Crash_'s plot.
This is a funny, riproaring tale. I raced through this nearly 500-page paperback in half the time I read most books of this length. I enjoyed it beginning-to-end. My only complaint with the book was that, at times, it too much resembled a Hollywood action movie, what with all sorts of incredible stunts being performed, by boat drivers, skateboarders, swordsmen, etc.
I say, if you like William Gibson or Thomas Pynchon, or if any of this review makes _Snow Crash_ seem a bit appealing to you, give it a chance. I enjoyed it 10 times as much as I thought I would.
ken32Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book) Overview

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Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution Review

Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution
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Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution ReviewThis is the kind of book that blows your mind on a regular basis. The studies that Bailenson and Blascovich design and report on are difficult to stop thinking about. These authors look at technology as a way to understand who we are and who we will become, answering key philosophical and psychological questions along the way.
They have described their approach as Transformative Social Interaction, and if anything, this is an understatement. These researchers use the virtual world as a testbed to examine psychological issues in ways that simply were not possible before. And rather than this being reported to you through the lens of a journalist, this comes straight from the pioneers in the field.
And while its easy to imagine this kind of heady stuff being dense and difficult to read, or full of techie jargon, your imagination would be wrong. The book is a delight to read, with humor and insight and intellectual curiosity mixed in equal doses.
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the human condition, in how technology is transforming our future, or in reading some of the most cutting-edge, fascinating psychology out there.Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution Overview
How do The Matrix, Avatar, and Tron reveal the future of existence? can our brains recognize where "reality" ends and "virtual" begins? What would it mean to live eternally in a digital universe? Where will technology lead us in five, fifty, and five hundred years?

Two innovative scientists explore the mystery and reality of the virtual and examine the profound potential of emerging digital technologies

Welcome to the future . . .

The coming explosion of immersive digital technology, combined with recent progress in unlocking how the mind works, will soon revolutionize our lives in ways only science fiction has imagined. In Infinite Reality, Jeremy Bailenson (Stanford University) and Jim Blascovich (University of California, Santa Barbara)-two of virtual reality's pioneering authorities whose pathbreaking research has mapped how our brain behaves in digital worlds-take us on a mind-bending journey through the virtual universe.

Infinite Reality explores what emerging computer technologies and their radical applications will mean for the future of human life and society. Along the way, Bailenson and Blascovich examine the timeless philosophical questions of the self and "reality" that arise through the digital experience; explain how virtual reality's latest and future forms-including immersive video games and social-networking sites-will soon be seamlessly integrated into our lives; show the many surprising practical applications of virtual reality, from education and medicine to sex and warfare; and probe further-off possibilities like "total personality downloads" that would allow your great-great-grandchildren to have a conversation with "you" a century or more after your death.

Equally fascinating, farsighted, and profound, Infinite Reality is an essential guide to our virtual future, where the experience of being human will be deeply transformed.


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