The upcoming “Matrix”

The upcoming “Matrix”
Review to “The language of new media” by Lev Manovich

I sometimes free lucky to live in this echo. New things keep showing up. New gadgets keep changing the way we live. New technologies keep changing the way we see or communicate. Significance of “space” has changed literally, no matter deliberately or haphazard. “The language of new media” by Lev Manovich, is an essay trying to elaborate the origin of virtual space technology and its impact to human’s daily lives in an epitome.

I don’t want to rehash the point of views of Mr. Manovich, but broadly speaking, quite agree with the whole article this time. I guess one important reason is that we are the group of people who experiencing the booming of the virtual space (no matter internet or online games). We benefit from it, we also know the “harm” of it.

Manovich said it right. The internet web reincarnated “flaneur”, man who lounges meaninglessly around Paris’s street, trying to dispel the feeling of loneliness by strolling in crowd – in modern sense, the users of Facebook. I’m not that kind of person who wastes my time reading those tattles of others, but plenty friends of mine spend like 12 hours a day in the holiday keep posting things and leaving comments (and thumbs). It is the same way how people immerse themselves in noisiness to dispel loneliness. Previous comments (decades ago) about the communication role of internet were mostly negative, somehow the appearance of Facebook and Twitter negate the theory. (What can you ask for when chatting with a primary school old friend who lost contact since twelve via Facebook?)

Another matter I found it interesting is how antecedent people achieve perfect virtual space. Of course, since the birth of 3D graphic, people try their hardest to represent reality in the virtual world, and the progress is still ongoing. In Mr. Manovich’s essay, he mentioned “Aspen Movie Map”, a simulator, showing photos of the street which was taken precedently every 3 meters, store and change according to viewer’s position in the virtual world navigating by a joystick. Seven years after the article, Google Earth’s street view seized on the idea again, even extending the world scale to global, which user simply sit in front of the computer roaming about the street of Manhattan, the plaza of Rome. What a marvelous achievement of technology, isn’t it?

Anyway, the journey of creating a perfect virtual world is not over yet. Crysis 2 and Dirt 3 publish this March, former the graphic progenitor of first person shooting game, latter the transcendence of rally racing game. LOL, it seems my only focus is game, but I seriously think that game is the leading role of virtual reality, based on the huge amount of audiences and great popularity and profit. By occasion of programmer’s chasing of “real”, and the player’s pursue for furniture virtual fun (that you can do something you cannot do in daily lives, like killing people), the upcoming emergence of “Matrix” is affirmed, just the matter of time.