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🔵 FS 🌀 DTech

It has become almost impossible to separate the effects of digital technologies from our everyday experiences. Reality is parsed through glowing screens, unending data feeds, biometric feedback loops, digital protheses and expanding networks that link our virtual selves to satellite arrays in geostationary orbit. Wristwatches interpret our physical condition by counting steps and heartbeats. Phones track how we spend our time online, map the geographic location of the places we visit and record our histories in digital archives. Social media platforms forge alliances and create new political possibilities. And vast wireless networks – connecting satellites, drones and ‘smart’ weapons – determine how the wars of our era are being waged. Our experiences of the world are soaked with digital technologies.

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🔵 FS

When we imagine “the future”, what do we conjure up? Some may think five years ahead and struggle to imagine a world much different than today. Others may dream of a better world and wonder how it could be brought into being. Alas, these ideas focus on the content of the future. But what about the very shape of the future itself? Is it linear? Branching? Circular? Throughout history, people have tried to give shape to the future.

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🟣 SC

VR studio and label Creature announced Starship Home, a plant-filled mixed reality adventure that turns your living room into a spacecraft on a mission to save alien flora. In it, we get a look at the virtual windows, control panels, and other components, which are placed strategically around your room to make it feel like you’ve blasted off into space.

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🌀 DTech 🟤 PP

Surveys show that members of Gen Z are shyer and more risk averse than previous generations, too, and risk aversion may make them less ambitious. In an interview last May, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison noted that, for the first time since the 1970s, none of Silicon Valley’s preeminent entrepreneurs are under 30. “Something has really gone wrong,” Altman said. In a famously young industry, he was baffled by the sudden absence of great founders in their 20s.

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🟣 SC

Journalists keep asking me the same question these days: What’s the difference between Spatial Computing and Mixed Reality? As soon as I answer, it triggers even more questions about the language of immersive media and the various phrases in use today. To reduce confusion, I believe it’s helpful to review the history and perceptual meaning of core language.

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🟣 SC

Why the term Metaverse took hold, specifically, is an unknowable question. “Cyberspace” seems to have been left behind — probably because it was too commonly used to skeuomorphically describe where online “things” “resided” in the 1990s — while the “Matrix” was likely impaired by the blockbuster success of the film of the same name. Maybe the “Grid” was too similar to other already-popular terms such as the “power grid.” Virtual reality never really went away, which is problem number one, but it was also too firmly associated with hardware, problem two, and those products were typically considered flops and “uncool.” Three strikes. VR-adjacent terms, such as AR, the newer MR, and newest XR, brought their own taxonomy problems and, in an inversion of VR’s problem, lacked products that would have given consumers an intuitive understanding of one versus another.

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🟣 SC

The mixed reality headsets with video passthrough — which allow you to see through a goggles screen to the outside world — don’t have as severe a problem when it comes to motion sickness, according to a qualitative study by Stanford University‘s Jeremy Bailenson and ten other researchers. But it can still cause visual impacts and some simulator sickness.

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🟤 PP 🌀 DTech 🔴 HCI

Multicultural UX design is complex.

To get a profound comprehension of our target culture, we need to understand its history.

Which country can be better used than Japan to illustrate this case?

Japan has a rich history. It’s an intriguing country. It perfectly explains why historical comprehension is tremendously important for us UX designers.

In this article, I will discover Japan’s past and how historical events influence today’s digital behaviour.

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