Rod Munday
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History
- Blog
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- Member for
- 4 years 23 weeks
My Profile
- Title
- Mr.
- Occupation
- Researcher: PhD
- Discipline(s)
- Media, Communication, Cultural Studies, Virtual Reality, Digital Media, Semiotics, Pragmaticism
- University
- University of Wales - Aberystwyth
- Department
- Thetre Film and Television
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Town / City
- Aberystwyth
- Previous Universities
- none
- my website
- http://syntheticknowledge.blogspot.com
- RESEARCH INTERESTS
- Virtual Reality, Digital Media, Peirce, Semiotics, mirror neurons, Kant, McLuhan, Foucault, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Butler, Edelman, Zizek, Consciousness Studies, Neural Darwinism, Phaneroscopy, Online Communities, MMOPRGs, Videogames, Ludology, Computer Games, Emergence, Recursion, Chaos, Science Fiction, Cinema, Kubrick
Research
- Member for
- 4 years 23 weeks
I am a PhD student at the University of Wales Aberystwyth. My research topic is virtual reality. Here is a bit about my thesis:
My inquiry into virtual reality takes place at a phenomenological level. Virtual Reality is stereotypically defined as a computer-generated environment which access by wearing a head mounted displays and data gloves. This view, tied as it is to a specific historical manifestation of the technology misses many important aspects of virtual reality as it exists today. For example videogames and the internet are both virtual realities, because they can be regarded as computer-generated environments (the internet metaphorically so) in which a person can have an experience. My thesis is that virtual reality functions to occasion an experience, not to represent one as is the case with more traditional media like cinema, books and television. Although virtual environments are computer-generated, virtual reality experiences have the same efficiency of real experiences, because at a pre conscious level people do not distinguish between a mediated stimulus and an actual one. To create an experience two things are needed: a self that can do the experiencing and a world that can be experienced. Neither the world nor the self come before experience, but rather both come to the fore in experience. Notions of the interplay of ‘self’ and ‘world’ represent more than the sum of their parts, for they are descriptive of the actions of consciousness. Virtual reality does not reproduce consciousness (it is not artificial intelligence), but it does simulate the conditions for consciousness.
