Week 13 Response

1. Just because we have things like video games and virtual reality doesn’t mean that we aren’t happy with our current reality. These alternate realities actually allow us to live a different life and do things we wouldn’t normally have the opportunity to do. With that in mind I think there is happiness in our alternate realities. In most cases the alternate realities have no severe consequences and we can get away with pretty much whatever we want.

As for the Holodeck, that seems pretty far off. In class, Whurley said that we probably would not see something like the Holodeck in the near future. To pull it off we would need a room full of cameras with walls created of screens. Although it’s not entirely impossible, the thought of it seems highly unfeasible. If we were to have a room like this, it would take a lot of programming and a lot of RAM.

2. The business cards looked like they had promise in the world of augmented reality, but they faded out pretty quickly. It was just a gimmick. BMW created a paper that allowed you to see one of their cars while holding the paper up to a webcam on a particular site. This seemed like a more reasonable use for augmented reality as users could interact with the car on a level they would not be able to interact unless they went to an actual car dealership. With this in mind I think companies will come up with some way to get users to continue to use augmented reality in the future.

3. ARrrr was a pretty cool augmented reality game. The user uses a piece of paper as the map and zombies walk down the street. The user is looking through a monitor as a helicopter and has to shoot the zombies. It’s a typical zombie game but adds an extra element. The problem with augmented reality games is that you have to have a lot of extra things in order to play. In the case of ARrrr you have to have a piece of paper that is the map, along with a table and space to move around. Doesn’t seem like the most reasonable piece of technology, I mean, why all the extras if you can just have everything on the screen that you need. The Kinect pretty much is augmented reality. It is applying graphics to a users real world and is manipulated through their movements.