Tag: Avatar

Posted in Articles and Links

How Virtual Reality Will Change Who We Are

Posted on by Marjorie Kaye Noble

FROM BIG THINK

Parag and Ayesha Khanna on April 5, 2011, 7:22 PM

Today marked the publication of the new book Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution by Jeremy Bailenson and Jim Blasocovich.

Infinite Reality gets inside all of the technologies and animation that we now take from granted, from Wii video games to movies like the Matrix and Avatar, and explains how this virtual reality is changing our reality.

In this video on the book’s website, the authors discuss how the human mind perceives interaction with digital avatars as real, opening a whole new world of possibilities for shaping the mind outside of normal social contexts:

Jeremy is the director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL), and Jim, one of the original pioneers of virtual reality, teaches at the University of California in Santa Barbara. Very much related to the scope of this book, Jeremy’s recent research has shown the surprising ways in which just a few minutes spent in the virtual environments he has constructed change how we view ourselves and each other once we step back into the real world.

Unafraid to forecast decades into the future, Bailenson and Blascovich are at the forefront of showing how the lines between physical and virtual are blurring in our emerging hybrid reality. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in how the next generation of the Web – 3D immersive reality – will shape and transform us as we engage with it.

Posted in Articles and Links

Avatars and Virtual Immortality By William Sims Bainbridge

Posted on by Marjorie Kaye Noble

“As people gain more and more avatars, agents, and other technology-based expressions of themselves, the scope for action during their lives increases, and the possibility of life after death becomes progressively more real. Buckminster Fuller said, ‘I seem to be a verb.’

I say, “I am a plural verb, in future tense.”

This quote is from  an  online article by William Bainbridge, a sociologist involved in online games. Bainbridge’s  article focuses on our present use of avatars as well as our future use. The article is from the online journal which is part of THE WORLD FUTURIST SOCIETY, an organization of scientists and those non-scientists who are interested in technology and how it will impact and ultimately redefine humanity. Because so much of this  science is part of the setting of Babylon Dreams, a novel I wrote because of my own fascination with this technology, I am now a member (non-scientist–you need to be an actual scientist to be a big kid member, but then that’s a lot more expensive).

If you’re interested in joining, here’s the link: http://www.wfs.org/faq