Entering the Metaverse: Considering the Implications of a Journey into a Virtual World for NYSCA at 80 years

Meta’s Horizon Worlds is among the first Metaverse platforms. Through a digital ethnography, this paper examines the contours of Horizon Worlds. Drawing upon affordances theory, the paper considers the affordances of Horizon Worlds Metaverse within the context of the user experience. Findings suggest that storytelling is central to the nature of the meaning generated inside Horizon Worlds and perhaps the Metaverse in general. But it is not storytelling in a conventional sense. Stories inside the Metaverse are not linear and there is no plot. Metaverse stories do have characters, and they travel pathways and engage in activities and sequential events, and they may generate meaning. Options inside Horizon Worlds are finite though large in number (e.g., 10,000+ user-created worlds) and growing within the parameters of the Metaverse platform. Each user constructs their own narrative. This parallels the narrative of life in the physical world. The meaning is not yet clear but may be constructed by the users themselves. Unfortunately, problems such as sexual assault violently undermine the promise of this virtual world, and unless the Metaverse can be made safe it is likely to devolve into a toxic virtual mess

Drones, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality Journalism: Mapping Their Role in Immersive News Content

Drones are shaping journalism in a variety of ways including in the production of immersive news content. This article identifies, describes and analyzes, or maps out, four areas in which drones are impacting immersive news content. These include: 1) enabling the possibility of providing aerial perspective for first-person perspective flight-based immersive journalism experiences; 2) providing geo-tagged audio and video for flight-based immersive news content; 3) providing the capacity for both volumetric and 360 video capture; and 4) generating novel content types or content based on data acquired from a broad range of sensors beyond the standard visible light captured via video cameras; these may be a central generator of unique experiential media content beyond visual flight-based news content

Experiential media and transforming storytelling: A theoretical analysis

Journalism and media content rests on a foundation of storytelling. Shaping this storytelling is the quality of the medium of content delivery and the nature of public engagement. With the development of digital, networked media, the audience’s role is transforming to be more of an active user who experiences stories as a participant rather than as a passive receiver of content. This article proposes a new model of experiential media based on six primary qualities of the digital environment. These qualities are 1) interactivity, 2) immersion, 3) multi-sensory presentation, 4) algorithmic and data-driven, 5) first-person perspective, and 6) a natural user interface. Augmented reality and virtual reality are among the most-widely discussed experiential media forms, but others include, for instance, advanced ultra-high-definition video. Experiential media bring implications for the nature, production, impact and the future of mediated storytelling

Multihop Rendezvous Algorithm for Frequency Hopping Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radios allow the possibility of increasing utilization of the wireless spectrum, but because of their dynamic access nature require new techniques for establishing and joining networks, these are known as rendezvous. Existing rendezvous algorithms assume that rendezvous can be completed in a single round or hop of time. However, cognitive radio networks utilizing frequency hopping that is too fast for synchronization packets to be exchanged in a single hop require a rendezvous algorithm that supports multiple hop rendezvous. We propose the Multiple Hop (MH) rendezvous algorithm based on a pre-shared sequence of random numbers, bounded timing differences, and similar channel lists to successfully match a percentage of hops. It is tested in simulation against other well known rendezvous algorithms and implemented in GNU Radio for the HackRF One. We found from the results of our simulation testing that at 100 hops per second the MH algorithm is faster than other tested algorithms at 50 or more channels with timing ±50 milliseconds, at 250 or more channels with timing ±500 milliseconds, and at 2000 channels with timing ±5000 milliseconds. In an asymmetric environment with 100 hops per second, a 500 millisecond timing difference, and 1000 channels the MH algorithm was faster than other tested algorithms as long as the channel overlap was 35% or higher for a 50% required packet success to complete rendezvous. We recommend the Multihop algorithm for use cases with a fast frequency hop rate and a slow data transmission rate requiring multiple hops to rendezvous or use cases where the channel count equals or exceeds 250 channels, as long as timing data is available and all of the radios to be connected to the network can be pre-loaded with a shared seed

Experiencing Cinematic VR: Where Theory and Practice Converge in the Tribeca Film Festival Cinema360

Cinematic virtual reality (VR) production has reached enough capacity to support a festival. This paper offers a theoretical framework of VR narrative structure to critically examine one such festival in cinematic VR. The spotlight here is on the fifteen entries in the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival Cinema360. Findings suggest that although the field of cinematic VR has advanced substantially in recent years in terms of narrative design and user experience, there is still a considerable distance for VR storytellers to travel to fully utilize the nature and potential of the developing medium of virtual reality

Cyber Creative Generative Adversarial Network for Novel Malicious Packets

Machine learning (ML) requires both quantity and variety of examples in order to learn generalizable patterns. In cybersecurity, labeling network packets is a tedious and difficult task. This leads to insufficient labeled datasets of network packets for training ML-based Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) to detect malicious intrusions. Furthermore, benign network traffic and malicious cyber attacks are always evolving and changing, meaning that the existing datasets quickly become obsolete. We investigate generative ML modeling for network packet synthetic data generation/augmentation to improve NIDS detection of novel, but similar, cyber attacks by generating well-labeled synthetic network traffic. We develop a Cyber Creative Generative Adversarial Network (CCGAN), inspired by previous generative modeling to create new art styles from existing art images, trained on existing NIDS datasets in order to generate new synthetic network packets. The goal is to create network packet payloads that appear malicious but from different distributions than the original cyber attack classes. We use these new synthetic malicious payloads to augment the training of a ML-based NIDS to evaluate whether it is better at correctly identifying whole classes of real malicious packet payloads that were held-out during classifier training. Results show that data augmentation from CCGAN can increase a NIDS baseline accuracy on a novel malicious class from 79% to 97% with a minimal degradation in accuracy on benign classes (98.9% to 98.7%)

Advancing Engaged Scholarship in the Media Field

Policy makers, industry leaders, and concerned citizens alike all face vexing questions about the changing nature of emerging technology and its impact on journalism, media and society. Research on this topic has never been more critical in the U.S. and around the world. The need is especially acute for engaged scholarship in this domain. By bringing their research into the broader public arena, engaged media scholars can contribute to policy debates, shape industry practices and policies, and enrich public understanding

Experiential media and transforming storytelling: A theoretical analysis

Journalism and media content rests on a foundation of storytelling. Shaping this storytelling is the quality of the medium of content delivery and the nature of public engagement. With the development of digital, networked media, the audience’s role is transforming to be more of an active user who experiences stories as a participant rather than as a passive receiver of content. This article proposes a new model of experiential media based on six primary qualities of the digital environment. These qualities are 1) interactivity, 2) immersion, 3) multi-sensory presentation, 4) algorithmic and data-driven, 5) first-person perspective, and 6) a natural user interface. Augmented reality and virtual reality are among the most-widely discussed experiential media forms, but others include, for instance, advanced ultra-high-definition video. Experiential media bring implications for the nature, production, impact and the future of mediated storytelling

Ultrasound Monitoring of Extant Adnexal Masses in the Era of Type 1 and Type 2 Ovarian Cancers: Lessons Learned From Ovarian Cancer Screening Trials

Women that are positive for an ovarian abnormality in a clinical setting can have either a malignancy or a benign tumor with probability favoring the benign alternative. Accelerating the abnormality to surgery will result in a high number of unnecessary procedures that will place cost burdens on the individual and the health delivery system. Surveillance using serial ultrasonography is a reasonable alternative that can be used to discover if changes in the ovarian abnormality will occur that favor either a malignant or benign interpretation. Several ovarian cancer screening trials have had extensive experiences with changes in subclinical ovarian abnormalities in normal women that can define growth, stability or resolution and give some idea of the time frame over which changes occur. The present report examines these experiences and relates them to the current understanding of ovarian cancer ontology, presenting arguments related to the benefits of surveillance

\u3ci\u3eSolanum jamesii\u3c/i\u3e as a Food Crop: History and Current Status of a Unique Potato

Solanum jamesii is a wild potato found in the US southwest. There is ample evidence that this potato was used by ancestral Puebloans as a food source, where some researchers think it was used as a starvation food while others consider it to be regular food source. Currently this potato is being grown by Native Americans, notably the Navajo, as a specialty food as well as a food crop. There are several attributes to this potato that make it especially suitable for development as our climate changes and food needs become more demanding, including its drought tolerance and ability to be crossed with other wild potato species and cultivars