virtual spaces

In this 21 minute podcast, we feature an interview with Ulrich Rauch, Director of Arts Instructional Support & Information Technology at The University of British Columbia. He has recently been involved in a project called Ancient Spaces at UBC, which uses gaming and virtual world technology to recreate locations from antiquity. He also participated in a session at the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference entitled, "Indigenous Cultures: From Observing to Experiencing, from Videography to 3D VR Immersion".

Ulrich Rauch organizes the implementation of educational technologies for instructors, students and staff in the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia. As the director of a technical and an instructional support unit, and as trained sociologist, Ulrich combines his experience as an instructor with his perspective on learning technologies to research and apply e-learning strategies in support of collaborative learning.

A 15 minute interview with Stephen Murray, Professor of Art History & Archeology at Columbia University. Professor Murray has developed an online database that presents his unique research — chronicling the documentation of over 100 Romanesque structures through comprehensive digital photography and three-dimensional QuickTime Virtual Reality panoramas.

This project, developed with teams of student helpers in the framework of a summer field school, brings the student to the monument with new questions, new techniques and new enthusiasm. Conversely, it brings the monument to the student not as a single isolated edifice, but as part of much larger enterprise that can be understood as the production of space.

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their

So I was just reading an article on Wired Science and it really got me thinking.  The article in itself talks about a new mass storage (10-20GB) device that can be hooked up to cell phones.  All that space would potentially create room for an operating system to run, but you still have one lingering problem with cell-phones becoming the computer of the future... the screen size.  Even a full-size iPhone screen is still small... how do we get past this? 

Well, my idea is to virtualize the screen... virtualize the whole computer.  We need to create a way to just hook the cell-phone up to our head so we can virtually navigate.  I'm not talking about wires, I'm talking wirelessly.

I read an article a couple of months past (which I can't seem to find again... anyone?) about researchers that were able to type letters by having a computer monitor their brain waves.  The process was long and tedious but it worked.  That technology, adapted to moving the mouse around, is a next step.  After that the sky's the limit!  Why not just think "My Documents" and it opens... visualize that picture of the ski trip and you found it... think of a webpage and it's up.  The speed of thought... now that is real speed!