PhD study opportunity* at the University of South Australia (in Adelaide, South Australia) https://unisa.edu.au/research/degrees/leveraging-audio-augmented-reality
“lead tourists around past & present live music hotspots & live music history locations of Adelaide with directed thematic or user-driven audio tours”
*Sorry, there are no degree fees for locals but there is also no scholarship funding attached to this one.
In this essay, I review key concepts in Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard, 1994), their relation to the Matrix film series, and their importance in terms of hacking, especially regards to Virtual Reality (VR)…
Ok, it is a very short abstract but 3,500 words of very condensed text. Probably should expand it back to 5,000 and seek publication. It reviews Baudrillard’s famous book in the light of the move from VR to XR, and the rise in computational creativity, cybercrime and hacking. With references to the Matrix trilogy and the film Possible Worlds.
I was intending to propose the following book proposal to a major publisher. I think, with recent events, I will wait until the end of 2020 before I revisit the project/proposal, but any feedback would be useful (too simplistic, not relevant, missing important key ideas etc)..
Below is an abridged extract:
At various conferences over the years, in game studies, virtual worlds, or philosophy of place, I am continually reminded how easily philosophy has been haphazardly inserted into presentations by game, VR, and media studies scholars. But I have also been surprised at the low level of engagement in VR concepts (in terms of computer science and user experience design) by philosophers.
For example, the famous philosopher Hubert Dreyfus conflated the Internet with the World Wide Web in his book On the Internet. The public may not see a distinction between an international organization of servers, and the software that links the webpages that runs on these servers but it is a crucial distinction to make when you are building and deploying VR. However, Professor Dreyfus also made a philosophical and historical error: using Kierkegaard’s and Nietzsche’s criticisms of the 19th century press to extrapolate that they would have hated the Internet (Dreyfus probably meant webpages, not the Internet).
The Internet is now merging, in fits and starts, with VR. There are massive gaps between the popular concept of VR, the development of VR “in the trenches” and the contextual soundness of the philosophers who talk to the public about VR. And very little literature bridging these communities at an accessible and useful level for university students.
This book aims to clarify conflicting interpretations of virtual reality (VR) in a way that would allow beginning scholars to quickly find key philosophers or methods and apply them appropriately to conceptual problems in the development and evaluation of VR projects. It is not a manual to design VR environments, nor a treatise on philosophy to philosophers, but a guide to explaining how even traditional philosophical questions can be re-examined using current and future VR technologies.
Time for a quick update on recent tech offerings
I have been in an interesting twitter conversation on the Swayze effect in Virtual Reality (see https://www.oculus.com/story-studio/blog/the-swayze-effect/)
Very thought-provoking article and it is a real problem, engagement in VR, but Swayze as ghost actually cares, the VR audience doesn’t..
So I suggest to redefine the Swayze Effect: where one wants to interact in VR but cannot, and to use the term Rickman Effect where one cannot or can only slightly interact but one has no great desire to. Alan Rickman’s character in the movie Truly Madly Deeply is a ghost who returns for his partner, but permanently feels cold and spends most of his time on the sofa aimlessly watching TV. See this youtube clip of Alan Rickman in the movie for more of a visual explanation.
Event: GLAMVR short talks and workshop (Friday 26 August, THE HIVE, from 9:00AM)
On Friday 26 August (just before Curtin Research week) a School of Media Culture and Creative Arts academics, Curtin University Library and friends will host at the HIVE a morning series of short presentations.
The main themes are:
Primary Objectives:
Friday Morning: Short Presentations (on Digital Heritage, Scholarly Making & Experiential Media)
Speakers include
Friday Afternoon: Digital Workflows/Augmented Reality WORKSHOP (3-3.5 hours)
In the afternoon Mr Michael Wiebrands will present workflows on importing digital records and other media assets into the UNITY game engine and he will be followed by Mr Dominic Manley, who will demonstrate Augmented Reality (AR) technology and how to use AR in research projects.
Cultural Hackathon, October/November 2016
In October or November we plan to host a CULTURAL HACKATHON. Academics propose ideas, and provide datasets (and so can Libraries, Galleries, Archives and Museums). Hobbyists, programmers, students will spend the entire day in teams working on application prototypes using that data and the VR/AR equipment provided. Proof of concept ideas will be presented and the best project will win a prize and the chance to work with the academics in the near future.
PLEASE NOTE: The event is free for attendees but they will have to register at EVENTBRITE (link to follow) for either the morning presentations or the afternoon workshop. We recommend people register and attend both but having separate registrations is to encourage those who can only make one session. Numbers will be limited.
Our internal small grant (School of Media Culture and Creative Arts, Curtin University) was successful!
Here is a synopsis of the application (redacted):
Digital Heritage, Scholarly Making & Experiential Media
We propose
The above would help progress the below research projects:
On Thursday the new Perth chapter of the Australian Virtual Reality Network (AVRN: http://avrn.net.au/) met and were going to do demos of the HTC Vive.
They Skyped with the Sydney chapter who apparently have 80-100 attend the monthly meetings.
The Sydney speaker (leader of StartVR) showed his project and he and another developer ranked the VIVE their favorite, the Samsung Gear best of the phone-based VR (and I did not realize it comes bundled with the Samsung S7 phone, the phone acting as a form of external graphics processor to the display) and the Rift now showing its age and Google Cardboard (really just cardboard box around an android or iOS phone) good as $5 marketing/corporate handouts. They are most interested in the upcoming Playstation 4 HMD, as it works with existing Playstations (not the older version I assume) and hence will have a large ready market.
I instead then left this rather corporate group for the other meeting, a game developer launch -LEVEL ONE [http://www.levelone.org.au/[ at 167 Fitzgerald St Perth, a more indie game incubator/studio/community that has some connection to Film TV Interactive and the State Library.
A local game company had a music interface game in the VIVE which I played with and I quite liked the setup, good resolution, head tracking and very light responsive controllers I thought.
I did not ask how easy it is to develop for and am quite interested.
How do you measure the reach, quality and effectiveness of journals in the areas of game studies and virtual environments? Many of them do not clearly feature impact factors, but by using commercial software one may be able to get a better idea of how well they help the h-index of submitted papers. I won’t get into the debate here on open access journals but as some of the below journals are open access, and some are extremely expensive, this should also be a consideration, especially if one is writing also for a non-academic audience (such as game designers).
I have been reading a few articles on how book chapters do not get cited (Anderson, 2012; Bishop, 2012) and whether academics should write book reviews (Toor, 2012). In Virtual Heritage research many conferences are not fully published and indexed, while the book chapters are seldom cited. There are some good articles out there on how to get published (Armstrong, undated), but why bother if one is not cited? Lack of citations probably also means that one is not read by a serious professional audience.
And I note in (my) area, some of the more famous journals appear to be
NB related VR/VE/ graphics journals impact factors here.
*I am on the editorial boards of the above journals.
UPDATE: you can compare the above journals at SCIMAGOJR website.
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