Long Live the New Flesh

There is a ramping up of motion capture hype in regards to Philip Rosedale's new VR Hi-Fi.

And of course, it is all another sign of what Mediabastard (another SL alumnus) calls the aptly named Media Induced Psychosis or MIPS for short.  Mediabastard was the one who really tuned me into Marshall McLuhan and the Medium is the Message theory.



Watch the video, then read the comments...also read Ciaran Laval's blog about the video here.

Now imagine if you were face to face with someone in deep conversation.  But what you saw were the "expressions" that were "captured" for the Hi-Fi avatars.  Honestly...would you accept those expressions in every day life?  Or would you deduce that there was something wrong with your conversation partner if his/her mouth continually hung open?

One of the things that Mediabastard and Jaron Lanier write about is dumbing ourselves down to accept the new media hype, the latest thing.  Lanier wrote that current AI is only acceptable because we have to take ourselves down to its level.  In a way that we would never do for another human being.  In essence, we are denying our own humanity and highly evolved senses to buy into AI/VR media hype.  Because it is cool and the idea is exciting, we are willing to accept the good enough, the very large shortcomings.  People may think, that it is only temporary but it isn't.  It changes us.  This technology is not making us better.  It is devolving our own advanced social processes.  This would not be the first time we have all degenerated because of technology.  Lanier pointed out that people now feel more comfortable typing into devices rather than having conversations.  That young people have a harder time with eye contact due to technology.  He also concluded that this is no surprise since technology is developed by a group of people who by and large have problems with the interpersonal aspects of life.

Technology people are more likely to suffer from forms of autism or have conditions on the spectrum.  They use technology to cope with a world that at times baffles them or even frightens them.  I have nothing but empathy for them.  Not being able to hold a comfortable level of eye contact nor being able to properly read facial expressions is akin to being blind on a very basic level.  Imagine all the visual information about friends, loved ones, and strangers that is lost simply because you can not see it.

These are the kind of people now involved with motion capture in VR technology.  They can't see where they are going wrong.  But they are asking people who do know, to get excited over the promise of Mocap not the shoddy way it is designed.  The great majority of it depending upon all of us dumbing ourselves down to accept a facsimile of "human expression" in VR that in real life we would rightly conclude is evidence of mental disability.

Mocap could lead to problems of a new generation not being properly able to read real facial expressions much in the way young people now cannot hold eye contact.

Where Mediabastards MIPS theory comes in, is that no one can see that they are making gargantuan amends to accept these poor simulacrums because the ideas are so alluring.  We are embracing the illusion, the psychosis over the reality.  THAT is quite frightening.

So...death to videodrome...long live the new flesh indeed.