New Media Third Reading Response

Chapter 2 of New Media contains some fascinating musings about the nature of the screen, and how it functions as a window to virtual content. Virtual reality is also discussed as being somewhat different in that the human is turned into the mouse, or joystick. The discussion of the screen and virtual reality lead me to think of a few different things in terms of both the past and present nature of virtual worlds and how we connect to them in video games.

In terms of comparing a human to a joystick in existing virtual reality models, a virtual reality game that comes to mind is a game I saw in some kind of video arcade/playground establishment. It had a virtual reality game where the viewer, upon standing in the designated area, basically within a room with no ceiling, had their own image transposed into the virtual world, say underwater. Their actions are mimicked on screen and affect their movement, thrusting their arms upward resulted in upward movement. I remember being fascinated that your body could translate commands to the game, but being the critical adolescent gamer that I was, thinking the game was juvenile in scope, and story. Such interesting technology was being used, but all you could was float your body up and down arbitrarily collecting bits of underwater detritus.

Now, probably ten years later, such technology is available to the average human with some money to spend on a Ps3, or any other console. Playstation's eyetoy comes to mind. Similar technology where it 'sees' you and puts you in a game and you become the controller. However there is still the drawback of the screen separating you from the reality, the technology places your image in the game, but you don't actually get in it, and flailing your body around awkwardly in real life to virtual ends has proven to be rather unpopular. I don't know a single person that owns an eyetoy.

So the next logical step seems to be the abolishment of the screen, and in the reading it is hypothesized that we will end up with chips in our retina allowing us to carry around virtual space, becoming prisoners of always being in touch, connected. Then our eye, and the screen, according to the reading, become as one.

The page, the screen, I think are not as insurmountable as the reading might make me initially feel. Console developers are already hurtling towards new and exciting ways to get to the populace's dollars. The reading also mentions earlier in the chapter that the nature of perspective on screens is almost always linear, besides an artist that had experimented with other methods of perspective in some films, Tamas Waliczky. I think his ideas could have some interesting applications in methods of 'seeing' in videogames. As I try now to think of a game that I could say doesn't really have a linear perspective when it comes to imaging, I'm coming up short. When I think of one regarding that, or the lack of differentiation in videogame perspectives, I'll do a blog post on it.