Virtual reality is ready to manipulate your emotions

[3bid]

Imagine our forum beta-testing a technology that maximizes the depth and effect of member interaction.  A virtual reality rumor mill distributing enriched fuel to a CMKX world of bashers, truthers, and believers.  With features such as: the revival of dead members through artificial intelligence [immortal] clones better matched to the infinite imminent soon.  A virtual family with eternal hope, flexible to the impossible demands of an everlasting story, with Acca forever falling down the wishing well abyss!  Perhaps Al is heavily invested in advanced virtual reality technology, to generate the big payout. 

 Just one of many positive ways of looking at things when trying to imagine clo$ure in the final chapter of such a bizarre story.  "There are reasons for it which will become known after your payment is received."   

Virtual reality is ready to manipulate your emotions

by Chelsea Stark

[...]
According to Oculus VR, developers have ordered more than 85,000 Oculus Rifts. Others, like Sony, are entering the virtual reality space, too. The technology could be ready for mass market introduction by the end of this year or the next.

But as a culture, are we ready for the more realistic, powerful, emotionally manipulative or violent experiences the platform is capable of?

De la Pena thinks so, but also says consumers will need to learn how to think critically about virtual reality experiences. Just like all media, we can’t assume there isn’t a motive beyond the message.

Of course, it's hard to conceive of a world that has adopted virtual reality en masse. Many of our experiences and conceptions are based on the media we already know.

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan says when a new medium is created, instead of trying to figure out how to play to that medium's strengths, content creators just try to replicate the old experience on the new medium. (If you don't think that's true, someone has already built a "virtual reality movie theater," complete with seats.)

Game developers still struggle to adapt to the relatively new tablet and phone phenomenons. At first, they attempted to graft virtual buttons and joysticks to the game experience, with minimal success. But once game makers started experimenting with gesture-based experience, games for mobile devices boomed with creativity.

Still, popular video games in their current forms may be "too violent" to exist in virtual reality, Bolas says. He said game creators want to make a fun, impactful experience, and that sometimes leads to "cartoonishly high" violence. But if the player really feels like he is murdering tons of people in hyper-violent ways, it may feel too real.

“You want to minimize violence, tone it down, because instinctually you really believe you are doing this stuff," Bolas says. "Machine-gunning a bunch of people and blood splattering all over the place is just too much stimuli."

Bolas hopes game creators will dial the knob down on violence, and up on experiences that are really meaningful. "I got into virtual reality 25 years ago because I want to make really beautiful places."

full story:  mashable.com/2014/06/26/virtual-reality-memory/

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Newspaper Experiments With Virtual Reality in Remote Iowa

By Rex Santus/

Here are some words that don’t seem to cohere: newspaper and virtual reality.

Yet The Des Moines Register has completed a virtual reality project called Harvest of Change that uses today’s technology to explore an old-word place, a virtual tour of — strangely enough — an Iowa farm.

And the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset is the best way to experience the project, according to Gannett, the Register's parent company.

The landscape is the Dammann farm in southwest Iowa, which includes a family’s more-than-a-century-old farmhouse, an assortment barns, machinery and a few animated animals. It's not exactly the most exotic location, but there's a reason for that.

"We could have gone to Mardi Gras; we could have gone to a rodeo," said Mitch Gelman, vice president/product at Gannett Digital. "But I was concerned that people in the industry ... would think that it was a gimmick. So we selected this important story and challenged ourselves to make it meaningful."

The project seeks to illuminate problems posed by genetically modified crops and other rapid changes facing a sixth-generation farming family.

Anthony DeBarros, director of digital applications at Gannett, said Des Moines is one of the company's most digitally advanced newsrooms and the project was inexpensive. Two summer interns did most of the virtual rendering.

On the tour, there are infographics, photos and video segments. The farm essentially acts as a virtual landscape by which to navigate editorial content. It’s a newspaper article crossbred with a video game.

There are 12 360-degree videos that, according to a company news release, appear to physically surround the viewer. Total Cinema 360, a New York film production company, used cameras that record audio and video from all directions at once.

The idea of using virtual reality for journalism isn’t a totally new concept. Immersive Journalism, for example, seeks to make people feel like they’re in the middle of news situations (like a simulation of border agents beating Anastasio Hernandez Rojas to death after he illegally crossed the U.S. border) by way of virtual reality and 3D environments.

For those of us without an Oculus headset, there's also two-dimensional version available for Mac and PC users here.


mashable.com/2014/09/25/virtual-iowa-farm/