Realty- actual, potential and virtual

By Fion Tse

Virtual is something outside what we see and know? As what we have seen, advanced technology nowadays has caused great changes to our daily lives. Concepts of telepresence and telexistence has been applied, providing us the opportunity to experience virtual presence in remote communication environments. VR games, 3D movies and the use of CAD has become increasingly popular. However, due to the technical limitation on processing power, it is believed that there is difficulty in creating a high fidelity virtual reality experience.

Virtual reality development

“The World as Clock” by Murphie further explained this week’s topic on virtual reality. He talks about the network society through elaborating on transversality and transduction. It is important that we learn to think transversally (Guattari, 2000, 43). Guattari also emphasized that nature cannot be separated from culture. In my opinion, culture often affects the transversal nature of individualisations and for institutions such like universities, disciplines also restrict a potentially transdisciplinary materialism. According to my understanding, transduction is the ongoing process of individuation. We can see that media ecologies are not just neat collections of things that happen to be next to each other but rather something which can be converged and differentiated. The model Lobster On The March best illustrated the media ecologies. Messages are like lobsters marching in a line and they move and connect things together. Murphy’s reading tends to address that ecologies can be seen as of the self (actors), of the socius (the gallery, the audience, the technologies) and of the environment (the ants).

In today’s world, it is obvious that virtual reality is integrating into our lives. Technology allow us to extend our basic human rights as well as promoting ones freedom. Furthermore, the gradual migration of virtual space changes people way of thinking. Some people say virtual is just imagination but from my perspective, it is something waiting to be actualized and something in which we often head towards to replenish our lives.

Murphie, Andrew (2004) ‘The World’s Clock: The Network Society and Experimental ecologies’, Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 11, Spring