What is it like to be a (digital) bat?

Could a person ever transcend what it is like to experience and understand the world as a human being? Could humans ever know what it is like to be another entity? In the last century, similar questions about human subjectivity have often been raised within the context of post-metaphysical thinking. In particular, the ones presented at the beginning of this paragraph were tackled from the perspective of philosophy of mind by Thomas Nagel in his 1974 essay What is it Like to Be a Bat? Nagel’s reflections and answers to those interrogatives were elaborated before the diffusion of computers and could not anticipate the cultural impact of a technology capable of disclosing interactive and persistent experiences of virtual worlds as well as virtual alternatives to the ‘self’. This paper utilizes the observations, the theoretical insights and hypothetical suggestions offered in What is it Like to Be a Bat? and Martin Heidegger’s framework for a philosophical understanding of technology as its theoretical springboards. The scope of my reflection is precisely that of assessing the potential of interactive digital media for transcending human subjectivity. The chosen theoretical perspectives lead to the preliminary conclusion that, even if there is no way of either mapping or reproducing the consciousness of a real bat, interactive digital technology can grant access to experiences and even systems of perception that were inaccessible to humans prior to the advent of computers. In this context, Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein is employed in order to define in which specific ways the experience of virtual worlds enables humans to experience and understand previously unattainable aspects of reality. What is it Like to Be a (Digital) Bat? proposes a modal realist perspective, where digital media content is recognized as having an expanding and fragmenting influence on ontology. At a higher level of abstraction, this paper advocates the use of digital technology as a medium for testing, developing and disseminating philosophical notions which is alternative to the traditional textual one. Presented as virtual experiences, philosophical concepts cannot only be accessed without the mediation of subjective imagination, but take an entirely new projective dimension which I propose to call ‘augmented ontology’.peer-reviewe

A Content-Analysis Approach for Exploring Usability Problems in a Collaborative Virtual Environment

As Virtual Reality (VR) products are becoming more widely available in the consumer market, improving the usability of these devices and environments is crucial. In this paper, we are going to introduce a framework for the usability evaluation of collaborative 3D virtual environments based on a large-scale usability study of a mixedmodality collaborative VR system. We first review previous literature about important usability issues related to collaborative 3D virtual environments, supplemented with our research in which we conducted 122 interviews after participants solved a collaborative virtual reality task. Then, building on the literature review and our results, we extend previous usability frameworks. We identified twelve different usability problems, and based on the causes of the problems, we grouped them into three main categories: VR environment-, device interaction-, and task-specific problems. The framework can be used to guide the usability evaluation of collaborative VR environments

Performance of grassed swale as stormwater quantity control in lowland area

Grassed swale is a vegetated open channel designed to attenuate stormwater through infiltration and conveying runoff into nearby water bodies, thus reduces peak flows and minimizes the causes of flood. UTHM is a flood-prone area due to located in lowland area, has high groundwater level and low infiltration rates. The aim of this study is to assess the performance of grassed swale as a stormwater quantity control in UTHM. Flow depths and velocities of swales were measured according to Six-Tenths Depth Method shortly after a rainfall event. Flow discharges of swales (Qswale) were evaluated by Mean- Section Method to determine the variations of Manning’s roughness coefficients (ncalculate) that results between 0.075 – 0.122 due to tall grass and irregularity of channels. Based on the values of Qswale between sections of swales, the percentages of flow attenuation are up to 54%. As for the flow conveyance of swales, Qswale were determined by Manning’s equation that divided into Qcalculate, evaluated using ncalculate, and Qdesign, evaluated using roughness coefficient recommended by MSMA (ndesign), to compare with flow discharges of drainage areas (Qpeak), evaluated by Rational Method with 10-year ARI. Each site of study has shown Qdesign is greater than Qpeak up to 59%. However, Qcalculate is greater than Qpeak only at a certain site of study up to 14%. The values of Qdesign also greater than Qcalculate up to 52% where it shows that the roughness coefficients as considered in MSMA are providing a better performance of swale. This study also found that the characteristics of the studied swales are comparable to the design consideration by MSMA. Based on these findings, grassed swale has the potential in collecting, attenuating, and conveying stormwater, which suitable to be applied as one of the best management practices in preventing flash flood at UTHM campus

I Probe, Therefore I Am: Designing a Virtual Journalist with Human Emotions

By utilizing different communication channels, such as verbal language, gestures or facial expressions, virtually embodied interactive humans hold a unique potential to bridge the gap between human-computer interaction and actual interhuman communication. The use of virtual humans is consequently becoming increasingly popular in a wide range of areas where such a natural communication might be beneficial, including entertainment, education, mental health research and beyond. Behind this development lies a series of technological advances in a multitude of disciplines, most notably natural language processing, computer vision, and speech synthesis. In this paper we discuss a Virtual Human Journalist, a project employing a number of novel solutions from these disciplines with the goal to demonstrate their viability by producing a humanoid conversational agent capable of naturally eliciting and reacting to information from a human user. A set of qualitative and quantitative evaluation sessions demonstrated the technical feasibility of the system whilst uncovering a number of deficits in its capacity to engage users in a way that would be perceived as natural and emotionally engaging. We argue that naturalness should not always be seen as a desirable goal and suggest that deliberately suppressing the naturalness of virtual human interactions, such as by altering its personality cues, might in some cases yield more desirable results.Comment: eNTERFACE16 proceeding

The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram

This thesis identifies and analyses the key creative protocols in translocal performance practice, and ends with suggestions for new forms of transversal live and mediated performance practice, informed by theory. It argues that ontologies of emergence in dynamic systems nourish contemporary practice in the digital arts. Feedback in self-organised, recursive systems and organisms elicit change, and change transforms. The arguments trace concepts from chaos and complexity theory to virtual multiplicity, relationality, intuition and individuation (in the work of Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Massumi, and other process theorists). It then examines the intersection of methodologies in philosophy, science and art and the radical contingencies implicit in the technicity of real-time, collaborative composition. Simultaneous forces or tendencies such as perception/memory, content/ expression and instinct/intellect produce composites (experience, meaning, and intuition- respectively) that affect the sensation of interplay. The translocal event is itself a diagram - an interstice between the forces of the local and the global, between the tendencies of the individual and the collective. The translocal is a point of reference for exploring the distribution of affect, parameters of control and emergent aesthetics. Translocal interplay, enabled by digital technologies and network protocols, is ontogenetic and autopoietic; diagrammatic and synaesthetic; intuitive and transductive. KeyWorx is a software application developed for realtime, distributed, multimodal media processing. As a technological tool created by artists, KeyWorx supports this intuitive type of creative experience: a real-time, translocal “jamming” that transduces the lived experience of a “biogram,” a synaesthetic hinge-dimension. The emerging aesthetics are processual – intuitive, diagrammatic and transversal

Ambient learning and self authorship : human minds, cultural tools, immersive worlds

This thesis begins with an examination of the Marinetta Ombro project, a lengthy exercise in building a virtual culture, carried out by staff and students at Arcada, a university of applied science. Arcada's experience in Second Life revealed much about the ways people think, feel and act inside synthetic worlds, and about the ways in which they live their lives as narrative. The second part of the thesis examines the implications of these findings with reference to the work of artists and writers, philosophers, theologians and neuro-scientists. It looks at how we relate to the world, where our ideas come from, what "it is like to be" us; and concludes that, in contrast to our usual view of ourselves, "we are stories all the way down". In the final part of the thesis the author looks at how we can apply this knowledge socially and politically, in a world of ambient learning; and what tools we can build to assist us in authoring our (social) selves

Blurring the boundaries: Prosumption, circularity and online sustainable consumption through Freecycle

© The Author(s) 2015. This article explores the digital exchange and moral ordering of sustainable and ethical consumption in online Freecycle groups. Through interactive exchanges in digital (online posts) and material (consumer items) modes, Freecycling blurs three common binaries in analyses of consumption: (1) consumption/production, (2) digital/material and (3) mainstream/alternative. Drawing on Ritzer's notion of 'implosions' as well as practice theory, I show that Freecycling practices reimagine and reproduce both products and consumers, practising prosumption through mixed digital and material practices in a performative economy, and how mainstream and alternative ways of consuming are entangled in pursuit of more sustainable, ethical consumption. This challenges us to think beyond these traditional binaries and to conceptualise a more blurred, less analytically clean and more circular approach to studying consumption