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Virtual or real, which is true? That which you choose!

Virtual reality and Cro-Magnons

In 1986. Jaron Lanier popularized the term virtual reality. He also appeared in the documentary Synthetic pleasures (1995), a movie that explores the influence of technology on our culture in terms of virtual reality, biotechnology, plastic surgery, even mood-altering drugs. From that point, VR becomes our ‘destiny’.

But this is not the first time that VR is being questioned and explored. It doesn’t take a cutting edge technology to discuss this semantically justified oxymoron. To comprehend the world that is virtual you need to be able to visualize it and that is something that explains our inclination to virtuality.

It all began with our ancestors living in caves like Lascaux or Altamira. The walls of those caves are full of prehistoric drawings and some of them, as we know today, are great examples of paleolithic sympathetic magic. Drawings can represent the visions shamans got while being in trance or consecration of the animal that was about to be killed in hunt. Those drawing are nothing but visualizations of reality that still didn’t happen, but could or will, and the only technology available was fire which spread its light across the walls of the cave feeding the people’s need to visualize.

Again, in ancient Greece, Plato tried to explain his fellowmen that world is run by ideas and to see those ideas they need to use their spiritual eye and not their senses, they need to visualize.

In 18^th century G. W. Leibniz discussed the idea of possible worlds where the best of all possible worlds actualizes all genuine possibilities.

Today quantum mechanics talks about the power of mind and how thoughts can shape our reality, affect the creation of synapses in human brain which then affect the world around us and our perception of it. Visualization is something that is in our genes.

There’s no land, but we have it mapped

So, possibilities, visualization, consecration, ideas, all that is linked to the term VR as we see it today. But there’s one more term that can be linked to virtuality – simulacra. Mostly used by Jean Baudrillard, simulacra denies reality as we know it and determinates it as hyperreality, simulation compossed of references with no referents (like having a map of the land when there’s no land). For Baudrillard simulation is ruled by information, models and cybernetics. It is a world of new values influenced mostly by virtuality as a part of new information and communication technologies. Eros and thanatos are no longer important, there’s no need for emotions or empathy for we are “more human than human”.

I can see it, but I can also see myself seeing it

Most of the immersive systems, which are the ultimate VR systems completely immersing user’s personal viewpoint inside the virtual world, can be divided into two groups – those equipped with HMD (Head Mounted Display) or those using multiple large projection displays to create a CAVE or a room in which person is standing. In the first case you can see things in the virtual reality as if you were there, but in the second case you can see yourself seeing and interacting with people and objects in your virtual world.

Both cases can result in visual and kinesthetic discrepancy, i.e. when your senses fall behind you when you leave one world and enter another.

Play the game

Yesterday I ran into a great short movie called Play. It’s a movie about society’s obsession with gaming and how virtual environments are becoming more and more indistinguishable from the physical world. Movie is great and very interesting. It takes about 20 minutes of your time to watch it, but it’s worth every minute.

It actually confirms what many theoreticians of new media and technology are saying about the influence of virtual reality on our every day lives. How visual and kinesthetic discrepancy appears and how our perceptual sensitivity is affected by spending time immersed in virtual reality.

(P. S. I like how one of the comments describes this short movie – “It’s like Kubrick meets Freud meets Brave New World meets Willy Wonka meets GTA meets Alice in Wonderland all in one.”)

What does the future hold?

Though in the early 1990’s the MIT researchers didn’t accept the term VR, today they’re doing quite a lot to pursue it and it’s a great thing, I must admit. More and more projects around the world are developing the concept of virtual reality, sometimes even beyond our thoughts.

At the end, what is real and what is not can always be argued. Space, and therefore place, is relative term and your reality is the one you percieve as such, the one you dive into suspending your ego. When you identify yourself with the world (place, time), it becomes your reality, even if it’s virtual.

October 22, 2010

SyNAPSE Program: creating intelligent machines

I’ve been familiar with the fact that there are some projects in the field of cognitive computation trying to engineer the mind by reverse-engineering the brain. One of them is Blue Brain Project which focused on building a model of neocortical column trying to facilitate rapid modelling, simulation and experimentation of any brain region.

I got more interested in this subject while listening to episode 44 of Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour (DKSH) where she talks to Dr. Chris Kello from the Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences at UC Merced. The program is named “Synapse”, it is funded by DARPA and carried out by IBM’s team lead by Dr. Dharmendra S. Modha.

(Picture taken from http://www.noeticsciences.co.uk/)

What they believe is that brains are less neural networks and more synaptic networks. And what makes synthetic brains better in computation, memory, communication and other operations is the number of synapses. So, in order to improve machines’ perception, navigation, planning and decision making (which are four functions they’re trying to teach their robots) they need to imitate behaviour, dynamics, functions and structure of biological neural systems. Their idea is to build hardware chips based on neural circuits.

Today’s programmable machines are less efficient and their architecture requires human-derived algorithms which makes them quite limited. But the vision of electronic neuromorphic machines scalable to biological levels enables the development of novel cognitive systems and computing architectures.

To find out more about the SyNAPSE Program you can listen to DKSH podcast, episode 44 “How to teach a brain” and visit Dr. Dharmendra S. Modha’s blog on cognitive computing.

March 1, 2010