Virtual Reality Goggles – Digital Video Eyewear

4 Comments

1. shhecc
   Posted February 12, 2011 at 10:23 am | Permalink

   Ahhh! Oh no! I just realized that I never left a comment, so here it goes…

   I love the quote that Jamie stated from the essay, “Plato and Aristotle agree that the illusion of being elsewhere is not good” (Gibson 3). I also agree with this concept, which I further explained in my blog. Engaging in virtual reality can be harmful to society and detrimental to human minds. At first, I agreed with Jamie that virtual reality can be harmful for young minds, however, it can be just as detrimental for adults as well as kids. Jamie's explanation is a prime example. People will get used to the fact that in a virtual reality game, after a character dies, he/she can come back to life. She brings up a valid point that “there is no reset button in reality.” People are getting accustomed to the concepts of video games. After being engaged in a virtual realistic battle or a street fight, people will become excited to witness a real fight or to participate in one. Virtual reality will contribute to the deterioration of peoples' sense of what's good and what's bad in a real life situation.

2. rdwebster
   Posted February 13, 2011 at 12:08 pm | Permalink

   Clark & Lois take a flight around virtual Metropolis while time is running out to return to reality. A "Clois" moment. #Smallville

3. Cindy
   Posted February 20, 2011 at 8:52 am | Permalink

   Hey. This is not fair. I want to hear Dale on Gary Eichten but I have to listen to his last RH morning rebroadcast. (Well, plus I am supposed to be working. I mean, I am working.)For the space capsule thing, I’d need Valium and vodka — lots of it. And noise blocking headphones, and some kind of virtual reality visor so I could pretend to be outside.

4. Fjordo
   Posted March 5, 2011 at 12:15 pm | Permalink

   It’s not a matter of “liking” or “disliking,” it’s still a broken window fallacy and adding in the engineers who design weapons, scientists who research them, manufacturers to make them, etc, that all just digs the lost opportunity cost deeper. To say that we need to spend so much money on war because the US is a war economy is the tail wagging the dog. If all those resources were, say, instead making virtual reality entertainment systems and paying some number of people to play them all day, you would be here saying: > Not just the people who use the headsets (vr-corps), The engineers who design the VR systems, scientists who research them, tons of manufacturers to make them, secretaries and other office people to run the business, lobbyists and other washington personell to secure more and more funding. You may not like it, but the US is a Virtual Reality entertainment economy, VR sim is our thing. That’s just with making the blind stupid authoritarian idea of replacing the Department of Defense with the Department of Virtual Entertainment. If we actually opened up these human resources to the market, we might actually be able to make something efficient. > It led us out of the depression and made us the world power we are today. This *feeling* is probably the most egregious misuse of the false idea that correlation implies causation. Yes, we happened to have a war after the depression, and we happened to come out of the depression after that war. But maybe, just maybe we would have come out of it even sooner without the war. Or maybe there were other factors like all of Europe being offline and our factories running strong. Let me tell you about a psychological phenomenon called superstition. Psychologists noticed that sometimes when they have a rat push a bar to get some food, they co-incidentally have another behavior added. For example, the first time they push the bar, they might be lifting their back left leg. Well, after that, this rat will always lift their back left leg while pushing the bar to get their food. Even though lifting their leg has nothing to do with the bar-food mechanism, and even though lifting their leg expends more energy, they continue to do it. If you introduce an amount of randomness (the does not always give food, but food only comes from a bar press) then these rats develop these superstitions more quickly and hold onto them much longer. Well, let me tell you something, throughout all of our monetary history we have had problems with the boom-bust cycle. We would try tons of different things to ward it off and when that failed to quicken recovery. When this happened, it somehow got ingrained in our collective consciousness that this is the way out of depression and to economic prosperity. But the truth is, that it’s just us lifting our left back leg. There are some legitimate reasons why defense can lead to economic recovery. There are scientific advances that come from it. World war 2 not only ramped up our industrial capacity, but also got us to create efficiencies in energy. But 1) we then gave that industrial capacity and advances in energy to the private sector to create industry and 2) it’s hard to know if we wouldn’t have built it up anyway if we had never been involved in the war and the outcome of the war was the same (Germany defeated, Europe in ruins), as the demand for industry could have still pushed us in the same way. So, yeah, I know we have a problem with shoveling money at a part of the economy that usually gives little in return. But because of this one thing, the people in power will just keep on lifting that back leg until we are too tired and fall over.