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Showing posts with label the Holodeck. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the Holodeck. Show all posts
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Today I learned about panoramas. Originally, panoramas were buildings that housed a 360 degree painting. These were super popular in the 19th century, and they sound a bit awesome.
Check out this cross-section of a standard panorama. The cupola overhead prevents the viewer from seeing the border of the painting on top, the artificial floor conceals the border on bottom.
Fancier panoramas used projection, meaning massive amounts of Victorian mechanicalness and gas flames and roaring motors, and all in all were less like a tranquil view of the countryside and more like an awesome way to get conflagrated.
I am wondering about the Allegory of the Cave. For half a century, a significant chunk of the population has been first introduced to Plato through the Chronicles of Narnia. I'm sure this affects interpretation - the Cave and the Shadowlands are synonymous for me. There's no real conclusion to be drawn here, but I just think it's fascinating that C.S. Lewis gets to be the gatekeeper of Plato.
Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?
Check out this cross-section of a standard panorama. The cupola overhead prevents the viewer from seeing the border of the painting on top, the artificial floor conceals the border on bottom.
Fancier panoramas used projection, meaning massive amounts of Victorian mechanicalness and gas flames and roaring motors, and all in all were less like a tranquil view of the countryside and more like an awesome way to get conflagrated.I am wondering about the Allegory of the Cave. For half a century, a significant chunk of the population has been first introduced to Plato through the Chronicles of Narnia. I'm sure this affects interpretation - the Cave and the Shadowlands are synonymous for me. There's no real conclusion to be drawn here, but I just think it's fascinating that C.S. Lewis gets to be the gatekeeper of Plato.
Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Today I learned academic things! I had the first meeting of my class at the design school, which is on the history of immersive entertainment spaces - aka the history of awesome. We were discussing various attributes of immersive experiences, including artificial synesthesia, loss of boundaries between self and context or others, and cognitive overload.
Also on the list was the loss of agency. I argued that this attribute should be more accurately listed as just a change in one's level of personal agency, not necessarily a loss, because some immersive experiences (I specifically named Sleep No More and the holodeck) are characterized by extremely high levels of agency within a narrative space. The professor pointed out that what I identified is really just the flip side of the same coin - in order to have the illusion of agency, the designer must have an incredibly high level of control over all the elements. The greater the illusion of agency, the less agency the individual actually has.
This blew my mind, a little.
Also on the list was the loss of agency. I argued that this attribute should be more accurately listed as just a change in one's level of personal agency, not necessarily a loss, because some immersive experiences (I specifically named Sleep No More and the holodeck) are characterized by extremely high levels of agency within a narrative space. The professor pointed out that what I identified is really just the flip side of the same coin - in order to have the illusion of agency, the designer must have an incredibly high level of control over all the elements. The greater the illusion of agency, the less agency the individual actually has.
This blew my mind, a little.
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