This is Ray Kurzweil’s expansion of ideas from his book, veering off into a virtual reality/augmented reality science fiction plot. The movie is surprisingly cheesy and the quality of this upload isn’t ideal, but it’s still interesting. Some of the film was shot in Second Life, though of course this was a few years ago…
By way of a story link, I found myself at Reason magazine’s site. There I discovered that the theme of the June 2014 issue was “Video Game Nation”. My reaction was Then I saw the cover art for the print edition: And my reaction became The image is a riff on a Grand Theft Auto…
Earlier today I was daydreaming about online and real world identity and anonymity. My daydream followed the theme of the short film from 2010 below: what if people appeared in the offline world like their primary online persona? In the “Avatar Day” of my musing, there would be visual indications of the digital identity one…
Ha! Apparently Chris Hardwick and/or his writing team on Comedy Central’s @midnight had a similar reaction to the current Oculus Rift design as I did in yesterday’s post. Hardwick opened last night’s show with a bit about Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus and then proceeded to show “what the new Facebook will look like”: Here’s the full…
I had drafted the post below and saved it for a final edit before I saw the news that Facebook bought Oculus. Hmm. I treasure the interactions and possibilities of virtual worlds and I’ve watched Facebook devolve into a jumble of ads, requests for Candy Crush lives, and out of sequence zombie posts. This is not exciting news…
Next month, the movie Transcendence hits theatres. The trailer below seems to give the major plot points: in a future where technology is omnipresent, a radical protest group called RIFT attacks the creators of that technology, resulting in the death of a scientist played by Johnny Depp. Before he dies, his consciousness is uploaded and…
A few days ago, after a mention of the Second Life 10 year anniversary, io9 put together a memory-jogging post about how our concept of virtual worlds — as seen through movies and television — has evolved in the past 40 years. It’s worth a look and some thought. Below: Anthony Hopkins in Freejack (1992),…