Week 4 Blog

Week 4 Blog:

What I got from reading the article titled “Immersion vs. Interactivity: Virtual Reality and Literary Theory,” is that virtual reality is a lot like novels. The whole idea of immersing your self and becoming interactive with the virtual reality is very similar to what one can do with a book while reading. When part of a VR a participant is able to interact with the surrounds and become a part of the surroundings as if they were real and this was just a part of the participants life. When reading a book, a reader can become deeply involved with the characters and sub-plots just as if it were a VR. The reader is in my mind actually participating in a VR that exists within their own mind. Readers create images for what characters and places look like and they create their own ideas as to how the plot takes place and how every interaction would look. Although a VR reality provides the image for you and allows you to “touch” object in the VR, I feel that the mind of a reader can do pretty much the same thing.

Assuming that I have the right understanding of what Marie-Laure Ryan is discussing in the article then there are a couple of thoughts that I have on virtual reality. First I found this article to be interesting because of the whole topic of virtual reality and the idea of physically being able to interact with a virtual environment. While reading this article I remembered the time I went to the NCAA Final Four Fan fest from 1995 when it was at the Convention Center in Downtown Seattle. At the fan fest there were all sorts of basketball related activities including one activity, which I believe was VR. I was only 9 at the time but remember putting on a glove and a “helmet” so to speak and “entering” a virtual world where I got to play one-on-one basketball against a computer created athlete. This was still 1995 and the VR was not that great but it created a whole new world essentially, that I was able to be a part of. While that was fun and all, looking back on it has also raised some questions. I wonder with the evolution of VR what sort of restrictions would be applied because it would be very easy to cross some boundaries that would not be appropriate. If you look at the internet, think about how much “adult material” is out there and think about what could be done with a VR of that material. Who would censor this sort of thing? What would you do if a child came into contact with the VR of that “adult material?” It even stretches beyond that material and into the realm of video games. I can say that I think it would be really cool to have VR video games where you are interacting with the players, sort of along the lines of Nintendo’s Wii, but even more so with the player actually being a part of the action. But what do you do when the games are not age appropriate and involve violence and sex. With all the games in the world there are hundreds of them that involve violence involving weapons and physical interaction. Do we, as a society, want games that allow users to actually be in the reality where we beat up or kill someone, or get beat up or killed ourselves. There are also games like the Mansion and the Guy Game, that involve living in the Playboy Mansion and running the magazine and also a cross between the television show Street Smarts and the Girls Gone Wild series. Where do we draw the line? Who is in charge of any restrictions? If this is like the internet then we can’t really censor it because there would be numerous ways to get around any restrictions. All of these create problems that people would want to stop but they can only be answered when VR becomes more prominent.