🔘 Arch 🟤 PP
“We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”
Winston Churchill originally delivered this line in reference to the rebuilding of the House of Commons, which had been destroyed in a Nazi air raid in 1941. With it, he hoped to persuade Parliament to rebuild the bombed-out building exactly as it was — or in his words, to restore “its old form, convenience and dignity.”
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You don’t have to look far to find reports of people who have used VR headsets and then felt ‘off’ after removing them. While motion sickness is surely the most well-known post-VR symptom, a subset of people say they have experienced feelings of being ‘stuck in VR’ after taking off their headsets. It’s tempting to brush off such reports as someone having seen The Matrix (1999) one too many times, but it turns out there is a clear scientific basis for the sensation.
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For as long as we have existed, human beings have looked up at the stars with both wonder and longing, often with more regard than the ground beneath us. It is perhaps one of the greatest ironies of our time that we now look to the sky not only for inspiration, but for escape. As we continue to deplete the Earth’s resources, a pressing question emerges: if we fail the planet, where do we go next?
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DeepMind, Google’s AI research lab, announced the release of Genie 3, a new AI system capable of generating interactive virtual environments in real-time—and bringing us one step closer to the Holodeck.
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Researchers at Meta Reality Labs and Stanford University have unveiled a new holographic display that could deliver virtual and mixed reality experiences in a form factor the size of standard glasses.
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So what the hell is embodiment and why am I boring you talking about it rather than just talking about all the cool shooting, and explosions, and smart design in the game? Well, it’s going to help us understand why certain design decisions in Synapse are so effective. So stick with me here for just a minute.
Embodiment is a term I use to describe the feeling of being physically present within a VR experience. Like you’re actually standing there in the world that’s around you.
And now your reasonable response is, “but don’t we already use the word immersion for that?”
Well colloquially people certainly do, but I want to make an important distinction between ‘immersion’ and ‘embodiment’.
‘Immersion’, for the purposes of our discussion, is when something has your complete attention. We all agree that a movie can be immersive, right? When the story or action is so engrossing it’s almost like nothing outside of the theater even exists at that moment. But has even the most immersive movie you’ve ever seen made you think you were physically inside the movie? Certainly not.
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Let me double down on that statement a little bit. I have always looked at the technologies evolving out of AR as a solution for VR locomotion and discomfort. When consumers are finally living with ‘all-day XR glasses,’ which can map their living or working spaces in real-time and allow them to dip in and out of VR and MR modally, users will begin to actively reskin their real-world environments (spaces, objects, people, etc.) to look and behave however they want. It won’t be enough to look at anchored apps against the backdrop of a dirty laundry bin or a sink full of dishes; consumers will customize their living rooms to be castles, resorts, Minecraft landscapes, etc. They will dine in the halls of gods and have meetings at the bottom of the ocean. Some may think it dystopian, but I believe the true Metaverse levels the playing field between the haves and have nots, allowing for a landscape of human activities in fantastic environments custom tailored to the user, or a consensual experience tailored to a group. It will eventually be done completely on the fly, and will likely be the true ‘killer app’ of future XR devices.
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Interestingly, cinema has long served as a testing ground for such ideas. While often dramatized for effect, sci-fi films offer surprisingly sharp insights into what it takes to live on Mars. They explore everything from structural resilience and closed-loop systems to the psychological impacts of isolation and the importance of community. Some even undertake agriculture (potatoes, anyone?). For architects, science fiction becomes a speculative lab where imagination meets problem-solving and storytelling becomes a tool for prototyping the future.
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Highlights include the fact that 27 percent of U.S. adults have used VR – up from 25 percent in Wave 8 of the research. 32 percent of those engage monthly, 25 percent do so weekly, and 26 percent daily. However, the engaged behavior of VR users is contrasted by non-users, who signal low interest. Specifically, only 20 percent of non-users report a desire to try VR in the near term.
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Google's approach with Android XR devices today is to augment existing phones, not replace them. "I know some people think about glasses one day replacing smartphones," says Izadi. "I think it will be this growing ecosystem approach. But we do feel that XR is going to be the next frontier for Gemini, and for AI."
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