Virtual worlds : a journey in hype and hyperreality
Computers have changed our lives; with virtual reality, they will change our very experience, recreating it in an image of our choosing. That, at least, is what the champions of virtual reality claim. It will not simply reshape our view of technology, they say, but our view of ourselves and the world we live in. It is about the increasing power of information technology to create simulated environments, new universes that are neither actual nor fictional, but somewhere in between: virtual. In Virtual Worlds, Benjamin Woolley examines the reality of virtual reality. He looks at the dramatic intellectual and cultural upheavals that gave birth to it, at the hype that surrounds it, at the people who have promoted it, and at the dramatic implications of its development. Virtual reality is not simply a technology, it is a way of thinking created and promoted by a group of technologists and thinkers that sees itself as creating our future. Virtual Worlds reveals the politics and culture of these virtual realists, and examines whether they are creating reality, or losing their grasp of it
viii, 274 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780631182146, 9780140154399, 0631182144, 0140154396
25411448
Free lunch - introductory remarks on the concept of artificial and virtual reality; flying high - the origins of computer simulation; virtually there - the concept of "virtual" in computing, the mysterious ability of computers to be able to be bigger and more powerful than they really are; computer universe - a look at the limits of what can be simulated using a computer, and at the claim that the universe itself might be in a computer; made up minds - the greatest challenge of simulation - reproducing human thought - the evidence so far seems to show that this is in practice, perhaps in principle, impossible; euphoria - the origins of the idea of virtual reality are traced back to 1960s drug culture, some of its claims are revealed to be more matters of marketing than technology; cyberspace - the concept of cyberspace, central to virtual reality, is a way of making sense of the information era and media age, what sort of space is it?; stories - the emergence of critical theory and its influence over our concept of reality; hyperreality - the Gulf War as a case study for the postmodern; reality - the scientific conception of reality is itself being forced to change in response to strange phenomena discovered in the subatomic realm; virtual reality - how the changing perspective of reality in science and cultural theory is reflected in the concept of cirtual reality, a sceptical examination of the claim that fiction is a virutal reality, that even reality is a virtual reality.