The Immersive Enclosure

Download or read book The Immersive Enclosure written by Paul Roquet and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-24 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2023 Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics, Media Ecology Association Although virtual reality promises to immerse a person in another world, its true power lies in its ability to sever a person’s spatial situatedness in this one. This is especially clear in Japan, where the VR headset has been embraced as a way to block off existing social environments and reroute perception into more malleable virtual platforms. Is immersion just another name for enclosure? In this groundbreaking analysis of virtual reality, Paul Roquet uncovers how the technology is reshaping the politics of labor, gender, home, and nation. He examines how VR in Japan diverged from American militarism and techno-utopian visions and became a tool for renegotiating personal space. Individuals turned to the VR headset to immerse themselves in three-dimensional worlds drawn from manga, video games, and genre literature. The Japanese government promised VR-operated robots would enable a new era of remote work, targeting those who could not otherwise leave home. Middle-aged men and corporate brands used VR to reimagine themselves through the virtual bodies of anime-styled teenage girls. At a time when digital platforms continue to encroach on everyday life, The Immersive Enclosure takes a critical look at these attempts to jettison existing social realities and offers a bold new approach for understanding the media environments to come.

Download or read book The Immersive Enclosure written by Paul Roquet and published by . This book was released on 2022-05-24 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although virtual reality promises to immerse a person in another world, its true power lies in its ability to sever a person's spatial situatedness in this one. This is especially clear in Japan, where the VR headset has been embraced as a way to block off existing social environments and reroute perception into more malleable virtual platforms. Is immersion just another name for enclosure? In this groundbreaking analysis of virtual reality, Paul Roquet uncovers how the technology is reshaping the politics of labor, gender, home, and nation. He examines how VR in Japan diverged from American militarism and techno-utopian visions and became a tool for renegotiating personal space. Individuals turned to the VR headset to immerse themselves in three-dimensional worlds drawn from manga, video games, and genre literature. The Japanese government promised VR-operated robots would enable a new era of remote work, targeting those who could not otherwise leave home. Middle-aged men and corporate brands used VR to reimagine themselves through the virtual bodies of anime-styled teenage girls. At a time when digital platforms continue to encroach on everyday life, The Immersive Enclosure takes a critical look at these attempts to jettison existing social realities and offers a bold new approach for understanding the media environments to come.

Download or read book In the Land of the Unreal written by Lisa Messeri and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-02 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the mid-2010s, a passionate community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, media artists, and tech innovators formed around virtual reality (VR), believing that it could remedy society’s ills. Lisa Messeri offers an ethnographic exploration of this community, which conceptualized VR as an “empathy machine” that could provide glimpses into diverse social realities. She outlines how, in the aftermath of #MeToo, the backlash against Silicon Valley, and the turmoil of the Trump administration, it was imagined that VR—if led by women and other marginalized voices—could bring about a better world. Messeri delves into the fantasies that allowed this vision to flourish, exposing the paradox of attempting to use a singular VR experience to mend a fractured reality full of multiple, conflicting social truths. She theorizes this dynamic as unreal, noting how dreams of empathy collide with reality’s irreducibility to a “common” good. With In the Land of the Unreal, Messeri navigates the intersection of place, technology, and social change to show that technology alone cannot upend systemic forces attached to gender and race.

Download or read book Multisensory Landscapes written by Lara Koegst and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-06-21 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a broad view on multisensory landscapes from multiple perspectives. It includes theoretical perspectives as well as case studies. Different theoretical perspectives on landscape emerging from research in the last decades also require a differentiated approach to landscape phenomena, going beyond the visual. For example, a social constructivist approach to the social world foregrounds the processes of negotiating social ‚realities‘. This is not limited to visual aspects, and is not based on a clear physical measurability with an accompanying (purely quantitative) recording. A phenomenological approach, for example, places the synesthetic experience of landscape at the core of interest. This approach to the topic of multisensory via ‚landscape‘ is obvious for several reasons. Firstly, landscape is created (from a constructivist perspective) through the synthesis of sensory impressions on the basis of social patterns of interpretation and evaluation. Secondly, communication about ‚landscape‘ is also accessible to people who do not have any ‚expertlike special knowledge‘ in this regard. Thirdly, landscape as a changing concept is not only a concept of landscape but also of landscape itself. Fourthly, landscape as a changeable concept is particularly suitable for conceptually framing the highly fleeting non-visual stimuli.

Download or read book Aural Experience and Soundscape Management written by Diana Grgurić and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2024-03-19 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since technological progress is characterized by the dual effects, positive and negative, it is precisely by sustaining the balance between such binaries that ecologically responsible resource management is restored as a solution for excessive human impact on the environment. Sound and music became relevant from the perspective of management, within the meaning of controlling their negative effects on human beings and their environment as well as utilizing them for meeting human needs. This book integrates the fields of technology, humanities, and social sciences and defines the challenges of noise control from the perspective of acoustic ecology. It discusses the concept of acoustic ecology applied to evoke sound and music management and design solutions for well-being. It will be equally useful for students of electrical engineering, music, and economics; equally challenging to those with a particular prior knowledge and practice; and as much as comprehensive and stimulative for those who are barely embarking upon a new adventure.

Download or read book Toward a Gameic World written by Ben Whaley and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2023-05-03 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the ways in which Japanese video games engage with social issues and national traumas

Download or read book Seeing Red written by Jose P. Zagal and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-05-14 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The curious history, technology, and technocultural context of Nintendo’s short-lived stereoscopic gaming console, the Virtual Boy. With glowing red stereoscopic 3D graphics, the Virtual Boy cast a prophetic hue: Shortly after its release in 1995, Nintendo's balance sheet for the product was "in the red" as well. Of all the innovative long shots the game industry has witnessed over the years, perhaps the most infamous and least understood was the Virtual Boy. Why the Virtual Boy failed, and where it succeeded, are questions that video game experts José Zagal and Benj Edwards explore in Seeing Red, but even more interesting to the authors is what the platform actually was: what it promised, how it worked, and where it fit into the story of gaming. Nintendo released the Virtual Boy as a standalone table-top device in 1995—and quickly discontinued it after lackluster sales and a lukewarm critical reception. In Seeing Red, Zagal and Edwards examine the device's technical capabilities, its games, and the cultural context in the US in the 1990s when Nintendo developed and released the unusual console. The Virtual Boy, in their account, built upon and extended an often-forgotten historical tradition of immersive layered dioramas going back 100 years that was largely unexplored in video games at the time. The authors also show how the platform's library of games conveyed a distinct visual aesthetic style that has not been significantly explored since the Virtual Boy's release, having been superseded by polygonal 3D graphics. The platform's meaning, they contend, lies as much in its design and technical capabilities and affordances as it does in an audience's perception of those capabilities. Offering rare insight into how we think about video game platforms, Seeing Red illustrates where perception and context come, quite literally, into play.