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COMMENTARY | Noah Brier

The Real Virtual Reality

December 4, 2008 | RSS | EMAIL | PRINT | 1 COMMENTS

There was a really interesting article in last month's Wired about the Wii, Guitar Hero and iPhone as our realization of virtual reality that I mentioned at the PSFK Good Ideas in Digital Salon the other day and thought I should link to here.

Essentially the idea is that in the early days of computers we imagined a virtual world where we put on big goggles and walked around this funny universe. As Levy explains in the article, "Turns out you don't need total immersion to interact naturally with a digital world: The games of Wii Sports allow you to perform the same actions you do in the athletics they simulate. When you're hitting a Wii golf shot, you simply swing the remote like it's a five iron. Tennis? Swing the Wiimote like a racket — its accelerometers and sensors translate to digital. Because your gestures are totally intuitive — no disembodied strangeness — you can focus on the screen the same way you would zero in on your opponent across the net."

Tags: culture, technology


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1L

That's the funny thing about Wii. Many people are surprised when they lose weight while playing games like Wii Sports & Wii Fit. But in actuality, they just don't realize that they are being active because of pre-existing notions surrounding video game(aka sitting on the couch, eating Doritos = lazy). Natural interaction transcends the virtual reality we all imagined the "digital experience" to be (in the future).

December 5, 2008