Rethinking Virtual Places

Erik M. Champion

Description

How would the humanities change if we grappled with the ways in which digital and virtual places are designed, experienced, and critiqued?

In Rethinking Virtual Places, Erik Malcolm Champion draws from the fields of computational sciences and other place-related disciplines to argue for a more central role for virtual space in the humanities. For instance, recent developments in neuroscience could improve our understanding of how people experience, store, and recollect place-related encounters. Similarly, game mechanics using virtual place design might make digital environments more engaging and learning content more powerful and salient. In addition, Champion provides a brief introduction to new and emerging software and devices and explains how they help, hinder, or replace our traditional means of designing and exploring places.

Perfect for humanities scholars fascinated by the potential of virtual space, Rethinking Virtual Places challenges both traditional and recent evaluation methods to address the complicated problem of understanding how people evaluate and engage with the notion of place.

Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Rethinking Virtual Places
1. A Potted History of Virtual Reality
2. Dead, Dying, Failed Worlds
3. Architecture: Places Without People
4. Theories of Place & Cyberspace
5. Rats & Goosebumps: Mind, Body & Embodiment
6. Games are not Interactive Places
7. Do Serious Gamers Learn From Place?
8. Cultural Places
9. Evaluating Sense of Place, Virtual Places & Virtual Worlds
10. Place-Making Interfaces & Platforms
Conclusion: Dwelling, Culture, Care
Glossary
Index

Sujets

• Computer Graphics
• Software Development
• Computers
• Subjects
• Teaching
• EDUCATION
• Informatique
• Subject
• Humanities
• Engineering
• Infographie

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 30 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253058379
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 8 Mo

Extrait

RETHINKING VIRTUAL PLACES
THE SPATIAL HUMANITIES
David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, and Trevor M. Harris, editors

This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.org
2021 by Erik M. Champion
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2021
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Champion, Erik, author.
Title: Rethinking virtual places / Erik M. Champion.
Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, [2021] | Series: The spatial humanities | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021022473 (print) | LCCN 2021022474 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253058348 (hardback) | ISBN 9780253058355 (paperback) | ISBN 9780253058362 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Human-computer interaction. | Virtual reality-Philosophy. | Environmental psychology. | Cyberspace. | Computer games-Design.
Classification: LCC QA76.9.H85 C4243 2021 (print) | LCC QA76.9.H85 (ebook) | DDC 004.01/9-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021022473
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021022474
CONTENTS
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Rethinking Virtual Places
one A Potted History of Virtual Reality
two Dead, Dying, Failed Worlds
three Architecture: Places without People
four Theories of Place and Cyberspace
five Rats and Goosebumps: Mind, Body, and Embodiment
six Games Are Not Interactive Places
seven Do Serious Gamers Learn from Place?
eight Cultural Places
nine Evaluating Sense of Place, Virtual Places, and Virtual Worlds
ten Place-Making Interfaces and Platforms
Conclusion: Dwelling, Culture, Care
Glossary
Index
FOREWORD
I WROTE MY FIRST COMPUTER GAMES ( ONE WAS A TEXT - BASED SPORTS GAME based on simple physics; the other, a single-player Dungeons & Dragons-type game, was inspired by the Stephen Jackson interactive books) around 1982. They were on a programmable calculator with a huge one-and-a-half-kilobyte memory and a twenty-digit display, so graphics were an impossible dream; the operations had to do all the work. I had to use mathematic commands to extract ten different values from a single number to create a large number of rooms, treasures, and monsters. They were both very popular with my high school classmates, but I had no idea why they worked.
I discovered virtual reality (VR) around the end of 1990 while I was working in Japan building roads. During a brief break, a friend and I found a VR system (CyberGlove and headgear) running in the back of a furniture shop in a giant downtown building. In 2004, I had the opportunity to revisit Japan and attend VSMM2004 in Gifu, where Professor Bob Stone recounted a history of VR and its usability and decried that very system for its chunkiness and user unfriendliness. And yet even now I can remember the shock of putting my hand under a running virtual tap and feeling the water.
My encounter with this VR system was a kind of personal Ragnar k. I had just finished a master s project in three-dimensional computer-aided design and stage design, and it struck me with some dread that this crude VR system could do away with professional spatial designers. In the last three decades, my fears do not seem to have been realized, and I am very interested as to why this is so. Game design and online worlds have destroyed virtual reality modeling language (VRML) and the other would-be contenders, technical wonders have appeared and disappeared overnight, and the ongoing debate over presence versus immersion is still being fought. The graphics technology has leaped ahead, and yet what we are doing inside these games and virtual worlds, and how these worlds are being presented to us, is still flat and caricatured. And what we learn from these experiences is not sensorially evocative or personalized and spatially shared but rather projected onto the flat box of a computer screen.
As members of the general public, do we truly get the opportunity to interact with digital media in a thematically appropriate and meaningful way? Is there a way in which we can dissolve the screen? Can we create experiences that aren t entered and modified by typing on an electric keyboard? Can the content itself be imaginatively reschematized so that it physically or virtually molds the user experience without destroying individual feelings of exploring, contributing, and sharing? How does this data come alive?
I am also very interested in what salient details, features, and triggers help immerse people and to what extent the rich detail from their immersive experience can be shared with others inside a world or communicated to spectators outside that world. How can virtual creations involving huge changes in scale and perspective over space and time be presented to people in such a way that they are not dwarfed by the experience but can fluidly explore and reposition these changes in dimension, scale, and perspective?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I AM GRATEFUL TO THE TEAM FROM I NDIANA U NIVERSITY P RESS FOR THEIR work on this publication. I would especially like to thank Jennika Baines for her guidance and support in developing this book as well as the series editors for their support. Many anonymous reviewers and experts assessed this book for its applicability and impact to academia, industry, and the public sector; I thank them and those who graciously allowed me to include their images. Your support and feedback have been greatly appreciated. I would like to thank Dr. Jakub Majewska and Dr. Jeffrey Jacobson for their suggestions and feedback on some of the ideas outlined in this book.
RETHINKING VIRTUAL PLACES
INTRODUCTION
Rethinking Virtual Places
Why Design Virtual Places?
Why should we design virtual places? For distant places hard to reach, discarded, incomplete, or contested, constraints and affordances can be added that reveal some of the potential experiences they offer with none or little of the risk of physically going to them. While it is possible that one day, the development of overpowering virtual sensations and vivid imagery may compel us to lose interest in the real world, or become manipulated by other, unreal ones (a favorite theme of Hollywood writers), such days are far in the future. Of more immediate concern are the risks to social skills, health, and our ability to concentrate and pay attention for long periods of time.
This book was originally planned to be titled Designing the Place of Virtual Space, but Rethinking Virtual Places: Dwelling, Culture, Care is more appropriate. Rather than providing a guide or even a mantra for designing (and developing) virtual places, this book is a collection of essays that tries to push the writing and practice of place philosophy and place design toward a more directly useful and testable set of hypotheses and heuristics. The aim is to provide something to chew on for those of you who wish to design virtual places in answer to theories of the real world or critique virtual places as a not entirely new field that has both more and less in common with real-world place design than many have suspected.
I will also investigate why so many virtual places are sterile, dead, or lifeless and why, despite all the criticism of virtual museums and other simulations, we keep building them and hosting them on the web or as standalone virtual environments. Each chapter aims to focus on a central argument and cover a central term and its related definition or theoretical premise, prove or disprove at least one previous understanding or proposal, or critically examine at least one case study.
Why a Book if So Many Virtual Places and Virtual Worlds Have Failed?
Despite the many architects talking about virtual environments in the early 1990s (Novak 2002, 2015; Packer and Jordan 2002; Wiltshire 2014), there is relatively little publicly accessible research on making, experiencing, and critiquing virtual places, and what is available is scattered among conference papers, book chapters, and edited collections (Champion 2011). The most relevant research literature is more likely to be found in the computational sciences and is not often or easily accessed by humanities scholars. As for the projects these papers discuss, they, too, are difficult to find (a point explored further in chapter 10 ).
I have an overall purpose here: to communicate with humanities scholars the importance of understanding how digital and virtual places are designed, experienced, and critiqued. I suggest that technology is not the fundamental problem in designing virtual places. Are there specific needs or requirements of real places that prevent us from relying on digital media and online world experts? Or is it not so much that the new tools are currently too cumbersome or unreliable but that our conventional understanding of place design and place-related knowledge and information needs to change?
Arguably, the subject areas of the humanities have traditionally been dominated by, or have exclusively been in, two dimensions. I suggest the terms place , cultural presence , game , and world ar