#i simply think. the mouse is now old. as ive had it for a v long time now

[snowflakeb0ttles]

computer mouse being so laggy and jittery roight now i need a new one sooooo bad

[larksinging]

circle of fire mix notes

circle of fire

im going to be vague because i dont wanna explain stuff for 500 paragraphs. also i keep adding songs so w/e

i. memory - undertale ost [instrumental]

overture. the circle begins

ii. letter from the lost days - silent hill 3 ost hey there to my future-self, if you forget how to smile /i have this to tell you, remember it once in a while / ten years ago, your past-self prayed for your happiness / please don't lose hope [...] we weren't put on this earth to suffer and cry/ we were made for being happy, so be happy 

iris, or probably more accurately iris to holly. or iris to the hypothetical future? idk. not the most chronological placing, but iris is so important that her song gets to be second 

ii. may your hearts stay strong -  cloud cult  he wants to die in the place where she first said "I love you." / spread his ashes with the breath of the last kiss that she blew / they decorate when featherless / they celebrate through hungriness [...] may your lives be long / may your wishes all be simple / and may your hearts stay strong

more picked for the mood than anything, but iris’ group gets picked off one by one. 

iii. transatlanticism - death cab for cutie the distance is quite simply much too far for me to row / it seems farther than ever before / oh no [...] i need you so much closer /  i need you so much closer 

amaranth and cherry’s predecessors, who will have names one of these days i swear, are left behind. particularly amaranth -> iris

iv. only if for a night - florence + the machine and I had a dream / about my old school / and she was there all pink and gold and glittering / i threw my arms around her legs / came to weeping (came to weeping) [...] it was all so strange / and so surreal / that a ghost should be so practical / only if for a night

wow i should have put another song for holly in here beforehand, but uh. amaranth thinks she sees the Ghost and makes a decision

v. in all my dreams i drown - devil’s carnival ost "oh, I will sleep when we reach shore," / "and pray we get there soon." / he said,  "now hush love, here's your gown." / "there's the bed, lantern's down." / but I don't want to go to sleep; in all my dreams, I drown.

laurel and the burden of a half-remembered past life 

vi. yellow cat/red cat - say anything i watch my yellow cat invade my red cat in the yard/ the feline war has raged for years so I assume it’d be to hard / for me to drive my foot between them / i would never risk the scratch / just to prove to one or both of them a cat is just a cat [...]  these are my friends, this is who they have been for always / these are my days, this is how they stay /hey, hey / these are my friends, this is who they remain forever / this is how we stay / hey, hey. 

the marked club are stuck in a kind of limbo before everything goes down. years of back and forth and not-quite-anything and being stuck in cycles 

vii. dramamine - modest mouse and that you'd killed the better part of me / if you could just milk it for everything / i've said what I'd said and you know what I mean / but I still can't focus on anything / we kiss on the mouth but still cough down our sleeves [...] look at your face like you're killed in a dream / and you think you've figured out everything / i think I know my geography pretty damn well

“viola” is not so happy with her life before it starts again. even if they don’t realize who she is (any of them, actually!), she’s still being used and hates it

viii. sad machine - porter robinson on a lonely night / was a blinding light / a hundred leaders would be borne of you [...] and though I know, since you've awakened her again / she depends on you, she depends on you / she'll go alone, and never speak of this again / we depend on you, we depend on you [...] this girl who's slept a hundred years has something after all

holly wakes up. 

ix. told you so - paramore is it enough? / to keep on hoping when the rest have given up? / and they go / i hate to say I told you so / but they love to say they told me so [...]  throw me into the fire / throw me in, pull me out again / throw me into the fire / throw me in, pull me out again

even with holly there, things are still kinda rough. the whole marked club’s bitterness (including holly)

x. believer - imagine dragons by the grace of the fire and the flames  / you’re the face of the future, the blood in my veins / but they never did, ever lived, ebbing and flowing  / inhibited, limited / till it broke up and it rained down, it rained down, like  / (PAIN!)  / you made me a, you made me a believer, believer

the basis of both religions, really, but moreso the church of the burned god. and really anything surrounding holly’s role as a holy figure. the inexorable link between the suffering of the marked club and the doctrines

xi. heaven help us - my chemical romance and would you pray for me?/ (you don't know a thing about my sins / how the misery begins) / or make a saint of me? / (you don't know / so I'm burning, I'm burning)

sort of the same as above - it’s a little messed up to make a religion on the suffering of a bunch of kids, huh? at least that’s better than the religion that had them sacrificed in the first place

xii. donut hole - hachi (english lyrics by DomNeeke) and in the end I start to feel complete / with a face I remember / I take a deep breath / and I open my eyes now to confess / i have opened my eyes / i have opened my eyes / i remember your name

holly and the others remember.

xiii. fever dreams - circa survive all my life / passing / before my eyes / all the time / i was awake / i was awake / i was awake

holly remembers everything, and realizes her last time was spent sleeping and existing as the Ghost. none of it was a dream

xiv. alex theme - silent hill homecoming ost your promise is broken / i drank your sacred water / my mission is holy i'm back [...] the hate I hate believing / the hate I hate believing / i never saw it coming / i never saw it coming

holly returns to where it began so she can finally end the cycle. or: holly realizes her full potential

xv. his theme - undertale ost [instrumental]

epilogue. the circle ends. 

[newmedia-janesun]

Virtual Reality History & Interview with Ken Perlin, founder of the NYU Future Reality Lab

this post was originally created for my New Media Research Studio course taken Spring 2016 under the guidance of Professor Carlin Wing.

"Imagine 10 years ago trying to envision the way we use cellphones today. It’s impossible. That’s the promise VR has today. VR at its best shouldn’t replace real life, just modify it, giving us access to so much just out of reach physically, economically. If you can dream it, VR can make it." (Drummond et al.)

Such is the optimistic viewpoint of The Verge on the effect of virtual reality on our daily lives. Virtual reality is defined as the immersive, artificial environment that is created with software, experienced through sensory stimuli, primarily sight and sound, and allows users to determine outcomes using interaction (source: Merriam-Webster Online). We most commonly think of helmet-like headsets, popularized by Oculus Rift (left) and Sony's Playstation VR (formerly known as Morpheus) (right)

But VR technology has been decades in the making, with a long and storied history that has allowed us to experience the innovations being created and consumed today.

A Brief Timeline of the History of VR:

Late 1950s to early 1960s: Douglas Engelbart, US Naval radar technician, posits that computers can be used for digital display. As computers merged with graphics technology and the fears of nuclear attack mounted, many different sources worked on bridging the gap between computation and visual representation. Tom Furness works on the VR technology within the U.S. air force, later to become flight simulators. Radar defense system, data modeling, etc.

1962: Ivan Sutherland invented the “light pen” & Sketchpad software, creating a marketable software for computer graphics. This leads to the possibility of coding immersive visual environments.

1968: Sutherland creates a very basic “head-mounted display” (video below), famously known as "The Sword of Damocles;" the same year, Engelbart releases the first pointing device, or a mouse as we now call it at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in his presentation, known as "The Mother of All Demos." [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtwZXGprxag&w=420&h=315]

1970s: Flight simulators become common practice in the U.S. military; Evans & Sutherland establish themselves at University of Utah to research computer graphics, animation & interactivity. The release of Star Wars IV: A New Hope in 1977 causes people to start noticing the potential of computer-generated graphics. The NASA Ames "Dataglove"

1980s: NASA Ames research group, under Scott Fisher, creates the dataglove, able to track motion of your fingers in a glove and link it to a music synthesizer. Nintendo becomes the biggest buyer of the dataglove technology to create Powerglove, which allowed interactive video gameplay.

1985: Jaron Lanier founds VPL Research, Inc. – one of the first pioneers for a native visual-programming language and commercial sales of VR goggles & gloves. Lanier is credited for popularizing the term “virtual reality.” Eventually, his company goes on to collaborate with NASA's Ames group, linking VPL's head-mounted goggles with the technology of the dataglove.

Limitations of the 1980s: Computer hardware at the time, simply did not have enough processing power necessary to create high-quality graphics at any speed. Since we’ve now entered an era where processing power has virtually zero limits, VR has taken off in the 21st century.

1990s: 1991-93: Virtuality Group created a line of VR-equipped arcade game machines with stereoscopic 3D visuals; head-mounted display visor had two displays (capable of 276×372 resolution) Cost of deployment is prohibitively high for regular consumers to adopt VR technology (not the case anymore!) causing the bubble to burst in the late 90’s to early 2000s. Most famously, Nintendo's epic flop attempt in 1995 at commercializing virtual-reality gameplay using a console called "Virtual Boy," convinced video game companies that virtual reality was a dead end. Boy, were they wrong...

2007-present: A critical turning point was the introduction of the smartphone; with the rollout of the first iPhone in 2007, VR suddenly had a new display medium that people used on the daily. This allowed for rapid prototyping of head-mounted displays such as Samsung's GearVR (developed in conjunction with Oculus) and easy consumer testing, since everyone already knew the operating systems of smartphones. At the moment, multiple companies are specializing in immersive virtual-reality-gaming experiences, with the frontrunners being Sony and Oculus (mentioned/pictured at top) and HTC's Valve Vive system (pictured below). These companies also make joysticks with motion-sensing technology to allow the user to use their limbs in the immersive environment--in the future, I suspect that they will use technologies like the Xbox Kinect or Playstation Move to allow user autonomy while still tracking motion. The largest hurdle is still the sheer processing burden of VR visual rendering on gaming consoles; adding motion-track to the mix will prove to be a challenge that will be solved in the near future.

Update 2/29: Sony just filed a patent on VR gloves indicating their heavy research into tactile experience; in particular, their patent states that the glove can sense "a flex of at least one finger portion...as well as contact sensors" allowing a user to have more articulate control.

In 2016, Oculus has already begun personal consumer preorders for the Oculus Rift gaming system, after its wild Kickstarter success in 2012. While many tech news outlets report hiccups and delays in the preorder release, Oculus' popularity from Palmer Luckey's basement pet project and ever-increasing pool of supporters and funders (such as Facebook's acquisition in 2014) are a very promising sign that virtual reality is the future.

Implications & Questions Arising from VR: I interviewed Ken Perlin on 2/18/16 with some questions about his involvement and research in virtual reality at Courant at NYU. 

Perlin has been hesitant to dive into virtual reality, with a background in computer graphics & animation, until he felt that display & computer graphics to get fast enough & small enough for the platform to reach multitudes (approx. September 2014)--now that we have an amazing graphics machine in every pocket via smartphones, we can start making VR/AR widespread. In the future, people will spend a lot of time in a "resynthesized" reality meshing what physically exists (chairs, tables) with things that can be modified by VR/AR (the color of the walls, the objects and people in the room). He also pitches the idea that we could all have VR contact lenses or eye implants, something that would be ubiquitous in a couple decades (Facebook is already exploring these avenues). I asked him if he felt that idea dystopian; he explains: "technology" is what comes after we were born, but what comes before us is normalized--we don't consider speaking to "John" on the phone as unusual, we just think/say "I spoke to John," even though we were really speaking to some electrical signals and not John himself. So this idea can be extended to a conversation with visual virtual reality representation of "John" in our room and we aren't speaking to "a representation of John," we are just "having a chat with John." Once our society normalizes this idea, we no longer worry about the dystopian aspect of it (like smartphones). He focuses his research & development on "shared social reality:" in his words, he says that "I'm interested in life, and life is other people." That last statement really impacted me. His games & VR environments often involve two people wearing restrictive helmets/headsets who cannot see each other, interacting in a virtual environment. How can our interactions with others be enriched by virtual reality? By breaking the geographic boundaries and allowing us to be "in the same room" with those we love? What about when a roomful of people are all experiencing something in VR but not interacting with each other in the moment? (See this creepy photo here)... What do we gain & lose when we promote, as Ken does, the idea that VR and AR are "bringing people together?" The notion that such a seemingly restrictive experience, where you are often in a helmet that limits your sight, can be considered a 'shared social experience' is still troublesome for me: the old traditions of interpersonal social interaction being something that takes place in person has been worn down for the past few decades since the advent of the telephone, but the changes in our social fabric and our ability to interact with each other seems to be deteriorating as we become more and more reliant on devices to keep us connected to those we care about while blocking out those we do not. My thoughts on imaging art & creation in the VR & 360 environments are better found on the 360 Collaborative Travelogue so I've focused more on the social implications in my reflection. I think VR is going to be a hot new "media trend" in the coming decade. Just the fact that Facebook has poured energy into Oculus, the rise of Unity gaming graphics & Steam has allowed more accessibility to VR games for those who own headsets, and Google created Cardboard as a low-cost entry into VR viewing have shown that the tech industry is very optimistic about the future of virtual reality. I think it's important to remember why we use these technologies, whether it is to stay connected with one another or stay engaged and participatory in the world at large or escape from the world into a fantasy game for a little bit. I'm looking forward to see what is coming, but I don't want to evangelize about it as a "game-changer" because we've had new technologies coming out constantly. VR is only at the infancy of its development and adoption, and I'm curious to see how it influences our lives as it matures.

Citations: Burke, Steve. "The History of Virtual Reality & The Future: Rift, Omni, STEM, CastAR | Gamers Nexus - Gaming PC Builds & Hardware Benchmarks."GamersNexus. GamersNexus, LLC, 28 Oct. 2013. Web. 28 Feb. 2016. Link.

 Drummond, Katie, Ellis Hamburger, Thomas Houston, Ted Irvine, Uy Tieu, Rebecca Lai, Dylan Lathrop, Christian Mazza, Casey Newton, Adi Robertson, Matthew Schnipper, Melissa Smith, Sam Thonis, and Michael Zelenko. "The Rise and Fall and Rise of Virtual Reality."The Verge. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Feb. 2016. Link.

"Keynote Remixed: What Happened to Virtual Reality." MxR Keynote Remixed What Happened to Virtual Reality Comments. USC Institute for Creative Technologies, n.d. Web. 28 Feb. 2016.

Perlin, Ken. Personal interview. 26 Feb. 2016.

"VIRTUAL REALITY - History." VIRTUAL REALITY - History. University of Illinois NCSA & EVL, 1995. Web. 28 Feb. 2016. Link.