Reality Crowd

Have a seat and enjoy your free virtual reality haircut (with headphones). Enjoy the amazing ability of your brain to perceive the location of a sound by calculating input from both ears.

Researchers now say they have strong evidence to suggest that the area of the brain responsible for this discerning ability is the planum temporale. Read this Science Daily article here discussing recent findings of the planum temporale and the brain’s amazing ability to locate sounds in three-dimensional space.

A new film premiering at the South By South West (SXSW) Film Festival in Austin this March will explore virtual worlds and the real people who inhabit them. Second Skin explores several different Massively Multiplayer online games (such as World of Warcraft and Everquest) as well as virtual spaces such as Second Life. As these worlds become more and more realistic people are choosing to spend more time in them than in the “real” world. The film examines this phenomenon and what it means for society at large. The questions asked in the film will only become more and more important as our technology advances and the line between real and unreal, virtual and reality becomes increasingly blurred.

The filmmakers sum up the movie nicely on their site www.secondskinfilm.com

Second Skin takes an intimate look at computer gamers whose lives have been transformed by the emerging genre of Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs). World of Warcraft, Second Life, and Everquest allow millions of users to simultaneously interact in virtual spaces. Second Skin introduces us to couples who have fallen in love without meeting, disabled players who have found new purpose, addicts, Chinese gold-farming sweatshop workers, wealthy online entrepreneurs and legendary guild leaders - all living in a world that doesn’t quite exist.

and here is the trailer for the film:

Links:

Second Skin Site
Boing Boing Story
BBC Story
Second Skin Blog

When talking to someone about the validity of religion, out of body experiences usually come up at some point. When close to death many people have the experience of floating outside their own body and observing themselves from outside their own skin. Scientology was supposedly inspired from an out of body experience L. Ron Hubbard had while under the influence of Nitrous Oxide. These experiences would seem to lend credibility to the soul / body split that nearly all religions preach. It would seem to indicate that our “self” can be separated from our body. If I can float outside my own body, it must mean that I posses a soul…right?

Well, hold on a second. Now it seems that by using virtual reality equipment, two teams of researchers have been able to induce out of body experiences in healthy test subjects. Wearing virtual reality headsets, subjects were shown a live picture of their own back. Then, two plastic rods were used to stroke the back of the subject as well as their “virtual” back. It seems that the combination of visual and tactile input easily tricked the body into believing it was behind the actual body.

Link to the scientific American Article

Hit the jump for some videos about out of body experiences
Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes even the virtual reality of video games can cause us to question what exactly reality is. In a video game world you are presented with a character or avatar to move around in a virtual space. Rules are defined and “winning” is determined by completing a certain predetermined set of actions. In the original Super Mario Brothers game for the Nintendo you accepted the rules that you only existed in two dimensional space and jumping on top of various creatures was the best way to stay alive.

Anyone who purchased the Game Genie soon found out that these rules in the virtual world were alterable. You could make yourself jump higher and become invincible. But that was just the beginning… all sorts of weird effects were possible just by playing around with the codes a bit.

Well, in this video (by way of boing boing), Japanese hackers have changed the rules for the game even more. In place of a controller, a ghostly hand moves Mario along. Then suddenly there is not one, but a sea of Marios struggling to make it to the end of the level. This drastic shift in reality is rare in the “real” world, but happens all the time in the virtual one.

Got another example of a re-imagined game being played in a totally different way? Post it in the comments!