The Immersive Enclosure

The Immersive Enclosure PDF

Author: Paul Roquet

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2022-05-24

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0231555962

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Winner, 2023 Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics, Media Ecology Association Although virtual reality promises to immerse a person in another world, its true power lies in its ability to sever a person’s spatial situatedness in this one. This is especially clear in Japan, where the VR headset has been embraced as a way to block off existing social environments and reroute perception into more malleable virtual platforms. Is immersion just another name for enclosure? In this groundbreaking analysis of virtual reality, Paul Roquet uncovers how the technology is reshaping the politics of labor, gender, home, and nation. He examines how VR in Japan diverged from American militarism and techno-utopian visions and became a tool for renegotiating personal space. Individuals turned to the VR headset to immerse themselves in three-dimensional worlds drawn from manga, video games, and genre literature. The Japanese government promised VR-operated robots would enable a new era of remote work, targeting those who could not otherwise leave home. Middle-aged men and corporate brands used VR to reimagine themselves through the virtual bodies of anime-styled teenage girls. At a time when digital platforms continue to encroach on everyday life, The Immersive Enclosure takes a critical look at these attempts to jettison existing social realities and offers a bold new approach for understanding the media environments to come.

In the Land of the Unreal

In the Land of the Unreal PDF

Author: Lisa Messeri

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2024-02-02

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 1478059222

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In the mid-2010s, a passionate community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, media artists, and tech innovators formed around virtual reality (VR), believing that it could remedy society’s ills. Lisa Messeri offers an ethnographic exploration of this community, which conceptualized VR as an “empathy machine” that could provide glimpses into diverse social realities. She outlines how, in the aftermath of #MeToo, the backlash against Silicon Valley, and the turmoil of the Trump administration, it was imagined that VR—if led by women and other marginalized voices—could bring about a better world. Messeri delves into the fantasies that allowed this vision to flourish, exposing the paradox of attempting to use a singular VR experience to mend a fractured reality full of multiple, conflicting social truths. She theorizes this dynamic as unreal, noting how dreams of empathy collide with reality’s irreducibility to a “common” good. With In the Land of the Unreal, Messeri navigates the intersection of place, technology, and social change to show that technology alone cannot upend systemic forces attached to gender and race.

Toward a Gameic World

Toward a Gameic World PDF

Author: Ben Whaley

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2023-05-03

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 047205614X

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Examines the ways in which Japanese video games engage with social issues and national traumas

Exploring Animal Crossing

Exploring Animal Crossing PDF

Author: Bruce Baer Arnold

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2024-06-11

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 1839980087

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Animal Crossing is an innovative virtual world with a global audience beyond traditional online gamers. The book is the first major study, offering an interdisciplinary exploration of copyright and other laws, user creativity and sociability, psychology, the virtual world’s economic and technological basis, uptake during COVID-19, gamification of offline brands, relationships with past/contemporary computer games, and Animal Crossing as an example of the Japanification of online popular culture. The book provides insights for students, researchers and non-specialist readers.

Ambient Media

Ambient Media PDF

Author: Paul Roquet

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2016-02-01

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 1452945470

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Ambient Media examines music, video art, film, and literature as tools of atmospheric design in contemporary Japan, and what it means to use media as a resource for personal mood regulation. Paul Roquet traces the emergence of ambient styles from the environmental music and Erik Satie boom of the 1960s and 1970s to the more recent therapeutic emphasis on healing and relaxation. Focusing on how an atmosphere works to reshape those dwelling within it, Roquet shows how ambient aesthetics can provide affordances for reflective drift, rhythmic attunement, embodied security, and urban coexistence. Musicians, video artists, filmmakers, and novelists in Japan have expanded on Brian Eno’s notion of the ambient as a style generating “calm, and a space to think,” exploring what it means to cultivate an ambivalent tranquility set against the uncertain horizons of an ever-shifting social landscape. Offering a new way of understanding the emphasis on “reading the air” in Japanese culture, Ambient Media documents both the adaptive and the alarming sides of the increasing deployment of mediated moods. Arguing against critiques of mood regulation that see it primarily as a form of social pacification, Roquet makes a case for understanding ambient media as a neoliberal response to older modes of collective attunement—one that enables the indirect shaping of social behavior while also allowing individuals to feel like they are the ones ultimately in control.

Human-Animal Interactions in Zoos

Human-Animal Interactions in Zoos PDF

Author: Eduardo J. Fernandez

Publisher: CABI

Published: 2024-05-30

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1800622686

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In the past couple of decades, Animal-Visitor Interactions (AVI), a type of Human-Animal Interaction (HAI), have become one of the major topics of interest for researchers working in zoos, especially in relation to animal welfare. This thought-provoking book summarizes the latest research concerning the impacts on HAIs in zoos, including the effects of visitors on animals and the effects of animals, exhibits, and the place itself on visitors. An invaluable resource for ethologists and animal behaviour and welfare students and practitioners, as well as social scientists and indeed anyone working with zoo animals.

Advances in Robotics and Virtual Reality

Advances in Robotics and Virtual Reality PDF

Author: Tauseef Gulrez

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2011-11-13

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 3642233635

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A beyond human knowledge and reach, robotics is strongly involved in tackling challenges of new emerging multidisciplinary fields. Together with humans, robots are busy exploring and working on the new generation of ideas and problems whose solution is otherwise impossible to find. The future is near when robots will sense, smell and touch people and their lives. Behind this practical aspect of human-robotics, there is a half a century spanned robotics research, which transformed robotics into a modern science. The Advances in Robotics and Virtual Reality is a compilation of emerging application areas of robotics. The book covers robotics role in medicine, space exploration and also explains the role of virtual reality as a non-destructive test bed which constitutes a premise of further advances towards new challenges in robotics. This book, edited by two famous scientists with the support of an outstanding team of fifteen authors, is a well suited reference for robotics researchers and scholars from related disciplines such as computer graphics, virtual simulation, surgery, biomechanics and neuroscience.

Aural Experience and Soundscape Management

Aural Experience and Soundscape Management PDF

Author: Diana Grgurić

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2024-03-19

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1040022081

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Since technological progress is characterized by the dual effects, positive and negative, it is precisely by sustaining the balance between such binaries that ecologically responsible resource management is restored as a solution for excessive human impact on the environment. Sound and music became relevant from the perspective of management, within the meaning of controlling their negative effects on human beings and their environment as well as utilizing them for meeting human needs. This book integrates the fields of technology, humanities, and social sciences and defines the challenges of noise control from the perspective of acoustic ecology. It discusses the concept of acoustic ecology applied to evoke sound and music management and design solutions for well-being. It will be equally useful for students of electrical engineering, music, and economics; equally challenging to those with a particular prior knowledge and practice; and as much as comprehensive and stimulative for those who are barely embarking upon a new adventure.

The Immersive Worlds Handbook

The Immersive Worlds Handbook PDF

Author: Scott A. Lukas

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0240820932

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Industry insider Scott Lukas teaches you how to design exciting, believable, authentic themed spaces. Make your immersive worlds come alive with the gems in this book, including key industry interviews and case studies!

Seeing Red

Seeing Red PDF

Author: Jose P. Zagal

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2024-05-14

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 0262045060

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The curious history, technology, and technocultural context of Nintendo’s short-lived stereoscopic gaming console, the Virtual Boy. With glowing red stereoscopic 3D graphics, the Virtual Boy cast a prophetic hue: Shortly after its release in 1995, Nintendo's balance sheet for the product was "in the red" as well. Of all the innovative long shots the game industry has witnessed over the years, perhaps the most infamous and least understood was the Virtual Boy. Why the Virtual Boy failed, and where it succeeded, are questions that video game experts José Zagal and Benj Edwards explore in Seeing Red, but even more interesting to the authors is what the platform actually was: what it promised, how it worked, and where it fit into the story of gaming. Nintendo released the Virtual Boy as a standalone table-top device in 1995—and quickly discontinued it after lackluster sales and a lukewarm critical reception. In Seeing Red, Zagal and Edwards examine the device's technical capabilities, its games, and the cultural context in the US in the 1990s when Nintendo developed and released the unusual console. The Virtual Boy, in their account, built upon and extended an often-forgotten historical tradition of immersive layered dioramas going back 100 years that was largely unexplored in video games at the time. The authors also show how the platform's library of games conveyed a distinct visual aesthetic style that has not been significantly explored since the Virtual Boy's release, having been superseded by polygonal 3D graphics. The platform's meaning, they contend, lies as much in its design and technical capabilities and affordances as it does in an audience's perception of those capabilities. Offering rare insight into how we think about video game platforms, Seeing Red illustrates where perception and context come, quite literally, into play.