Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Project Natal/Augmented Reality

Look, I love the Wii as much as the next person, but my god people, can't we just go outside! I thought it was the most ridiculous thing that some kid with an actual skateboard, scanned its image into the game so that he could "ride around" on his carpet. If you want to play a video game, play a video game, but if you want to do real sports and jump around your living room pretending to do them, then why aren't you motivated enough to just go do it. This program, in combination with the Augmented Reality program really make me feel like we're all going to turn into computer zombies and never leave our house.

However, I'm a little more inclined to accept Augmented Reality as a positive advancement in technology. There seems to be a lot of interesting uses for it like the AR system of the F-35 Lightning II. According to wikipedia (so of course this may or may not be the case):
The F-35 Lightning II has no Head-up display because all targets are tracked by the aircraft's situational awareness and the sensor fusion is presented in the pilot's helmet mounted display system that provides an augmented reality system that allows the pilot to look through his own aircraft as if it wasn't there.
As with the brain scan technology, I'm not sure how far we can go with this, on one hand, our whole world becomes a video game, on the other, we become hyper-informed (we're already heading this way with Iphone/Blackberry technology) citizens and possibly function better, or at least more efficiently, in our everyday lives.
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4 comments:

  1. sargOctober 9, 2009 at 7:53 AM

    Definitely know what you mean about just going outside. I thought the exact same thing when I saw the kid with the skateboard - seems a little bit backwards.

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  2. AnonymousOctober 11, 2009 at 12:06 PM

    I completely agree with you about how illogical some of the applications of Natal are. I always considered video games as the sort of lazy alternative to physical activity that the closer the two get to being indistinguisable makes me really uncomfortable. I feel like they are trying to redefine how to have fun by recontexualizing things that kids are supposed to do without computers and technology.

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  3. ChristinaOctober 13, 2009 at 12:57 PM

    What DOES make sense about Natal is some sort of system that aggregates all of your home entertainment (This probably exists I'm just not super familiar with hardware) i.e. something that has one system with audio, tv, dvd, video games, etc. and alligns it with the rest of the home entertainement sytem and is controllable by one remote. I feel like this exists...Project Natal is too extreme though, and personally just excessive for no reason.

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  4. Bryn!JacksonOctober 13, 2009 at 2:13 PM

    I think the distinction you make between "better" and "more efficient" is awesome. We live in this world where productivity is a major virtue, and to what end, exactly? Do we need the toys we have to survive? Is survival really such a given?

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