After a period of dormancy, this long-standing blog, founded in 2008, is being resurrected. In the past, our focus centered on the exploration of virtual worlds, with particular attention paid to Second Life and the burgeoning field of online education epitomized by the advent of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)…. Continue reading
I’m reading the book Homo Deus these days, written by Yuval Noah Harari, the author of another bestselling book,Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Homo Deus is about “a brief history of tomorrow”, it goes back to the hunter-gatherers and leaps into a largely unknown future of a possible successor… Continue reading
The Financial Times runs an intriguing portrait of Philip Rosedale, the founding father of Linden Lab and Second Life and these days building a VR-compatible virtual world called High Fidelity. The article not only focuses on the virtual world ambitions of Rosedale but also on his renovation and building projects… Continue reading
You’re a new media expert, specializing in video, social media, liveblogging or infograhics? Get ready for the final breakthrough in virtual reality, which is starting to impact sectors such as education and even the newspaper industry. As a columnist about new media for the business newspaper De Tijd in Belgium,… Continue reading
Bruce Sterling is a tremendously inspiring science fiction author, futurist, design thinker and cultural critic. Menno Grootveld and Koert van Mensvoort had a great interview on nextnature.net with him about Artificial Intelligence, the Technological Singularity and all things convergence of humans and machines. In this interview, Sterling explains in very… Continue reading
Imagine that you don’t have to search for each individual app, select it, then use it according to its own little system. Instead you would speak to your device (smart phone, watch, headset, whatever) using natural language, and the thing would do whatever you instructed it to do. You could… Continue reading
Crazy times for virtual reality, or so it seems. ‘It’s the future’, people at Facebook say. Users will not only be able to experience immersive Facebook-experiences, but will also create them, Eric David posts on SiliconAngle. ‘Users’ means not just developer-types, but the average user. However, it is totally unclear… Continue reading
Don’t miss the latest episode of The Coode Street Podcast as it features author William Gibson. One of the topics is of course his latest book, The Peripheral, a story set in multiple futures. I guess ‘multiple futures’ sounds complex and the first part of the book is indeed bewildering…. Continue reading
Dieter Bohn and Tom Warren at The Verge had an amazing mixed realities experience at Microsoft. They tried out the HoloLens, a headset that projects holograms into real space. They report about having Minecraft on a coffee table and about an amazing experience during which an engineer who was communicating… Continue reading
A short but beautiful video featuring the grandfather of virtual reality, professor Tom Furness. He can be situated directly into a tradition which goes back to Vannevar Bush, who in 1945 described the Memex-device in As We May Think – a technological dream of making knowledge accessible in ways corresponding… Continue reading