Coming of Age in Second Life Boellstorff, Tom
2015, 2008., 20150825, 2005, 2008-12-31, 2015-08-25, 20080101
eBook
Millions of people around the world today spend portions of their lives in online virtual worlds. Second Life is one of the largest of these virtual worlds. The residents of Second Life create ...communities, buy property and build homes, go to concerts, meet in bars, attend weddings and religious services, buy and sell virtual goods and services, find friendship, fall in love—the possibilities are endless, and all encountered through a computer screen. Coming of Age in Second Life is the first book of anthropology to examine this thriving alternate universe. Tom Boellstorff conducted more than two years of fieldwork in Second Life, living among and observing its residents in exactly the same way anthropologists traditionally have done to learn about cultures and social groups in the so-called real world. He conducted his research as the avatar "Tom Bukowski," and applied the rigorous methods of anthropology to study many facets of this new frontier of human life, including issues of gender, race, sex, money, conflict and antisocial behavior, the construction of place and time, and the interplay of self and group.
Is reality TV a coherent genre? This book addresses this question by examining the characteristics, contexts and breadth of reality TV through a history of its programming trends. Paying attention to ...stylistic connections as well as key concepts, this study breaks reality television down into three main 'generations': the camcorder generation, the competition generation and the celebrity generation. Beginning with a consideration of the applicability of the term 'genre' for this televisual hybrid, the book takes a transnational approach to investigating the forms and formats of reality TV framed by relevant popular and critical discourses.
Key Questions
What formal characteristics broadly define reality TV?Can reality TV be considered a genre when it relies so heavily on mixing together elements of established television genres, film practices and even industries unrelated to television, such as pop music and modelling?How can the genealogy of reality TV programming trends help us to understand the cultural discourses and concepts with which reality TV is associated for example surveillance, performance, voyeurism, celebrity and even reality itself?
What does it mean to be modern outside the West? Based on a wealth of primary data collected over five years, Reality Television and Arab Politics analyzes how reality television stirred an explosive ...mix of religion, politics, and sexuality, fuelling heated polemics over cultural authenticity, gender relations, and political participation in the Arab world. The controversies, Kraidy argues, are best understood as a social laboratory in which actors experiment with various forms of modernity, continuing a long-standing Arab preoccupation with specifying terms of engagement with Western modernity. Women and youth take center stage in this process. Against the backdrop of dramatic upheaval in the Middle East, this book challenges the notion of a monolithic 'Arab Street' and offers an original perspective on Arab media, shifting attention away from a narrow focus on al-Jazeera, toward a vibrant media sphere that compels broad popular engagement and contentious political performance.
Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Mixed Reality, and Extended Reality (often – misleadingly – abbreviated as XR) are commonly used terms to describe how technologies generate or modify ...reality. However, academics and professionals have been inconsistent in their use of these terms. This has led to conceptual confusion and unclear demarcations. Inspired by prior research and qualitative insights from XR professionals, we discuss the meaning and definitions of various terms and organize them in our proposed framework. As a result, we conclude that (1) XR should not be used to connote extended reality, but as a more open approach where the X implies the unknown variable: xReality; (2) AR and VR have fundamental differences and thus should be treated as different experiences; (3) AR experiences can be described on a continuum ranging from assisted reality to mixed reality (based on the level of local presence); and (4), VR experiences can be conceptualized on a telepresence-continuum ranging from atomistic to holistic VR.
•XR should not be used as an abbreviation for “Extended Reality”; X should be the placeholder for “all” new reality formats.•AR and VR have fundamental differences and thus should be treated as different experiences.•AR experiences can be described on a LOCAL PRESENCE continuum ranging from Assisted Reality to Mixed Reality.•VR experiences can be conceptualized on a TELEPRESENCE-continuum ranging from atomistic to holistic VR.
Mobile augmented reality (Mobile AR) is gaining increasing attention from both academia and industry. Hardware-based Mobile AR and App-based Mobile AR are the two dominant platforms for Mobile AR ...applications. However, hardware-based Mobile AR implementation is known to be costly and lacks flexibility, while the App-based one requires additional downloading and installation in advance and is inconvenient for cross-platform deployment. In comparison, Web-based AR (Web AR) implementation can provide a pervasive Mobile AR experience to users thanks to the many successful deployments of the Web as a lightweight and cross-platform service provisioning platform. Furthermore, the emergence of 5G mobile communication networks has the potential to enhance the communication efficiency of Mobile AR dense computing in the Web-based approach. We conjecture that Web AR will deliver an innovative technology to enrich our ways of interacting with the physical (and cyber) world around us. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art technology and existing implementations of Mobile AR, as well as enabling technologies and challenges when AR meets the Web. Furthermore, we elaborate on the different potential Web AR provisioning approaches, especially the adaptive and scalable collaborative distributed solution which adopts the osmotic computing paradigm to provide Web AR services. We conclude this paper with the discussions of open challenges and research directions under current 3G/4G networks and the future 5G networks. We hope that this paper will help researchers and developers to gain a better understanding of the state of the research and development in Web AR and at the same time stimulate more research interest and effort on delivering life-enriching Web AR experiences to the fast-growing mobile and wireless business and consumer industry of the 21st century.
This manuscript identifies and documents unsolved problems and research challenges in the extended reality (XR) domain (i.e., virtual (VR), augmented (AR), and mixed reality (MR)). The manuscript is ...structured to include technology, design, and human factor perspectives. The text is visualization/display-focused, that is, other modalities such as audio, haptic, smell, and touch, while important for XR, are beyond the scope of this paper. We further narrow our focus to mainly geospatial research, with necessary deviations to other domains where these technologies are widely researched. The main objective of the study is to provide an overview of broader research challenges and directions in XR, especially in spatial sciences. Aside from the research challenges identified based on a comprehensive literature review, we provide case studies with original results from our own studies in each section as examples to demonstrate the relevance of the challenges in the current research. We believe that this paper will be of relevance to anyone who has scientific interest in extended reality, and/or uses these systems in their research.
Recently, the use of extended reality (XR) systems has been on the rise, to tackle various domains such as training, education, safety, etc. With the recent advances in augmented reality (AR), ...virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) technologies and ease of availability of high-end, commercially available hardware, the manufacturing industry has seen a rise in the use of advanced XR technologies to train its workforce. While several research publications exist on applications of XR in manufacturing training, a comprehensive review of recent works and applications is lacking to present a clear progress in using such advance technologies. To this end, we present a review of the current state-of-the-art of use of XR technologies in training personnel in the field of manufacturing. First, we put forth the need of XR in manufacturing. We then present several key application domains where XR is being currently applied, notably in maintenance training and in performing assembly task. We also reviewed the applications of XR in other vocational domains and how they can be leveraged in the manufacturing industry. We finally present some current barriers to XR adoption in manufacturing training and highlight the current limitations that should be considered when looking to develop and apply practical applications of XR.
An examination of our many modes of online identity and how we live on the continuum between the virtual and the real.Hello Avatar! Or, {llSay(0, "Hello, Avatar!"); is a tiny piece of user-friendly ...code that allows us to program our virtual selves. In Hello Avatar, B. Coleman examines a crucial aspect of our cultural shift from analog to digital: the continuum between online and off-, what she calls the "x-reality" that crosses between the virtual and the real. She looks at the emergence of a world that is neither virtual nor real but encompasses a multiplicity of network combinations. And she argues that it is the role of the avatar to help us express our new agency-our new power to customize our networked life.By avatar, Coleman means not just the animated figures that populate our screens but the gestalt of images, text, and multimedia that make up our online identities-in virtual worlds like Second Life and in the form of email, video chat, and other digital artifacts. Exploring such network activities as embodiment, extreme (virtual) violence, and the work in virtual reality labs, and offering sidebar interviews with designers and practitioners, she argues that what is new is real-time collaboration and copresence, the way we make connections using networked media and the cultures we have created around this. The star of this drama of expanded horizons is the networked subject-all of us who represent aspects of ourselves and our work across the mediascape.
Extended reality (XR) is a general term for virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR). By converting abstract digital expressions into intelligent feedback through figures, ...one can effectively compensate for the poor performance of traditional learning in deep cognitive processing and operational skills training. However, the extant results are uncertain, and only a limited number of studies have investigated the influence mechanism of heterogeneity among VR, AR, and MR on procedural knowledge learning, higher-level presence and generative cognitive processing, higher-quality operational behaviour and knowledge transfer. This study explored and analysed the influence of XR heterogeneity on procedural knowledge gain and operation training. Participants (n = 127) were recruited from among junior undergraduate students majoring in rail traffic signal and control. Based on the procedural disassembly and assembly of the ZD6 electric switch machine, an XR pre-training system and a 3D-printed combined virtual-real procedural training system were developed to collect three types of data regarding knowledge gain, procedural training and a set of questionnaires. Subsequently, a one-way analysis of variance was conducted with XR as the moderator variable. The results indicate that fully immersive VR is more conducive to procedural operation training; however, space and real factors must be considered. AR is consistent with the learner's operating habits, but the corresponding lack of immersion and interactivity restricts the improvement of procedural learning effects. MR multimodal perception leads to an increase in cognitive load, but moderate cognitive pressure is conducive to the cultivation of procedural cognition skills. Furthermore, this study proposes suggestions for using XR to intensify the perception and understanding of procedural cognitive actions.
Successful drug development relies on accurate and efficient clinical trials to deliver the best and most effective pharmaceuticals and clinical care to patients. However, the current model for ...clinical trials is outdated, inefficient and costly. Clinical trials are limited by small sample sizes that do not reflect variations among patients in the real world, financial burdens on participants, and slow processes, and these factors contribute to the disconnect between clinical research and clinical practice.
On November 28-29, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a workshop to investigate the current clinical trials system and explore the potential benefits and challenges of implementing virtual clinical trials as an enhanced alternative for the future. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.
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