The idea of virtual realities has a long and complex historical trajectory, spanning from Plato's concept of the cave and the simulacrum, to artistic styles such as Trompe L'oeil, and more recently developments in 3D film, television and gaming. However, this book will pay particular attention to the time between the 1980s to the 1990s when virtual reality and cyberspace were represented, particularly in fiction, as a wondrous technology that enabled transcendence from the limitations of physical embodiment. The purpose of this critical historical analysis of representations of virtual reality is to examine how they might deny, repress or overlook embodied experience. Specifically, the author will contend that embodiment is a fundamental aspect of immersion in virtual reality, rather than something which is to be transcended. In this way, the book aims to challenge distorted ideas about transcendence and productively contribute to debates about embodiment and technology.

A Survey of Augmented Reality summarizes almost fifty years of research and development in the field of Augmented Reality (AR). From early research in the 1960's until widespread availability by the 2010's, there has been steady progress towards the goal of being able to seamlessly combine real and virtual worlds. This monograph provides an overview of the common definitions of AR, and shows how AR fits into taxonomies of other related technologies. A history of important milestones in Augmented Reality is followed by sections on the key enabling technologies of tracking, display, and input devices. The author also review design guidelines and provide some examples of successful AR applications. The work concludes with a summary of directions for future work, and a review of some of the areas that are currently being researched. This is an invaluable resource for researchers and practitioners. It provides an ideal starting point for those who want an overview of the technology and to undertake research and development in the field.

Design, develop and deploy a highly available vSphere environment for VMware Horizon View About This Book * Enhance your capability of meeting various Service Level Agreements in VMware Horizon View * Get acquainted through all the necessary considerations for building a View environment * Cover VMware High Availability hurdle by hurdle along with the checklists for verification of the environment being ready for production Who This Book Is For If you manage, plan or deploy VMware Horizon View or are looking for tips for best practices and configuration details this book is for you. This book is intended for administrators who design and deploy VMware Horizon View or administrators who are looking for ways to improve their existing View environment. What You Will Learn * Install and configure a VMware Horizon View Connection Server and redundant pair * Discover the networking requirements for View and learn how to build redundancy into your network * Analyze each of the View user pool types and how each one can be made highly available and survivable. * Get to know about storage protocols such as NFS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel * Deploy Virtual SAN, and find out how to effectively couple Virtual SAN with View * Learn about View monitoring tools to allow fast responses to various crises * Plan, analyze and upgrade VMware Horizon View * Analyze network services required for VMware Horizon View and build them in a redundant manner In Detail The increasing movement to virtualize workloads and workstations has put VMware Horizon View into a central mission critical role in many environments. Administrators may be overwhelmed with planning for outages and dealing with failure scenarios. It's easy to miss small details that will result in outages down the road. Following VMware Horizon View best practices and planning ahead with network infrastructure will allow you to avoid these common pit falls. This book will walk you through the setup and configuration of View in a highly available configuration. It will provide you with the skills to analyze and deploy configurations that can stand up to rigorous failure standards. The book starts with deploying and basic configuration of VMware Horizon View in a redundant setup, then moves on to cover high availability for networking, fibre channel, NFS, and iSCSI. We finish this book with monitoring and upgrade planning. At the end we also learn about maintaining the uptime and minimizing the downtime that can be caused due to various factors. Each topic comes with a list of best practices and failure scenarios to test. Administrators will learn the intricacies of protecting a View environment. Style and approach This book provides configuration and installation steps for administration and installation of a Horizon View server. It includes high-level overviews of any protocols, services used by Horizon View, and best practices and high availability checklists for each chapter.

This book uses a step by step approach to teach you how to design, deploy, and manage a Horizon Workspace based on real world experience. Written in an easy to follow style, this book explains the terminology in a clear and concise manner. Each feature is explained starting at a high level and then drilling down into the technical detail, using diagrams and screenshots. This book is perfect for IT administrators who want to deploy a solution to centrally manage access to corporate applications, data, and virtual desktops using Horizon Workspace. You need to have some experience in delivering BYOD initiatives and delivering applications from the Cloud (SaaS).

This book gathers a collection of selected works and new research results of scholars and graduate students presented at the 6th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality (AIVR 2022) via the Internet, during July 22-24 2022, hosted and organized by Sojo University in conjunction with other three universities and Beijing Huaxia Rongzhi Blockchain Technology Institute. The focus of the book is interdisciplinary in nature and includes research on all aspects of artificial intelligence and virtual reality, from fundamental development to the applied system. The book covers topics such as system techniques, performance, and implementation; content creation and modelling; cognitive aspects, perception, user behaviour; AI technologies; interactions, interactive and responsive environments; AI/VR applications and case studies.

This book is a step-by-step tutorial filled with practical examples which will show readers how to configure and manage IaaS and DBaaS with Oracle Enterprise Manager. If you are a cloud administrator or a user of self-service provisioning systems offered by Enterprise Manager, this book is ideal for you. It will also help administrators who want to understand the chargeback mechanism offered by Enterprise Manager.An understanding of the basic building blocks of cloud computing such as networking, virtualization, storage, and so on, is needed by those of you interested in this book

An easy-to-use guide, filled with tutorials that will teach you how to set up and use iCloud, and profit from all of its marvellous features. This book is for anyone with basic knowledge of computers and mobile operations. Prior knowledge of cloud computing or iCloud is not expected.

How much time does your organization waste in unfocused, unengaging and unproductive virtual meetings?

Virtual meetings are on the rise. Unfortunately, most meeting leaders don't know the strategies for executing masterful virtual meetings. As a result, most virtual meetings: Don't start on time because people have difficulty with the technology Don't have a defined purpose due to lack of preparation Don't keep people engaged due to escalated multi-tasking Don't address conflict because the leader often doesn't see the body language information that communicates silent disagreement Don't deal with dysfunction because the meeting leader is distracted with the technology

CLICK for Strategies

"CLICK: The Virtual Meetings Book" provides meeting leaders with 60 comprehensive strategies for planning and executing masterful virtual meetings. In its twelve chapters, you'll find strategies and answers to these questions and more: How do you keep engagement high in a virtual meeting? How do you eliminate unnecessary virtual meetings? What are the key features that differentiate various online meeting platforms? How do you reduce the likelihood that your meeting will be derailed by technical issues? What if only a few people are remote? Or, what if you, the meeting leader, are the only one remote? How do you ask questions that receive lots of responses instead of that dreaded silence? What are the common virtual meeting dysfunctions, and how do you prevent them? How do you make sure you get quality results from every virtual meeting?

Authors Michael Wilkinson and Richard Smith, leaders in the #1 meeting facilitation and facilitation training company in the US, show you how to deliver masterful virtual meetings, every time.

Drag those windows from your screen and into the air in front of you. Use a simple glance to switch lights, open doors or surf the web. Virtual devices, virtual objects will surround us, anywhere. Only one piece of real hardware will do it all, replace anything. From application concepts to technical design to even a fiction chapter carrying us into the future, "this book is a blueprint for an entire technology." The new edition has been greatly extended, with many new ideas and materials. From the foreword by Oliver Bimber, professor of augmented reality: "I was captivated by the last edition of 'The End of Hardware' on a round-trip flight to Los Angeles. This book is not only an in-depth introduction to the concept of head-attached displays for augmented reality (AR), but also a great source of inspiration for many professionals - at least it is for me. Being a technical guy, I particularly enjoyed reading the technical design chapter which, in this new edition of the book, has been greatly extended with many details on holography, light fields and MEMS. Despite a technological focus, the book is written in a popular-scientific style - and therefore allows easy access to the material - even for non-experts. If I were to characterize this book in a single word, that word would be 'inspiring'. I can only hope that one day, someone will pick up and realize these ideas. For although, this might not be the 'End of Hardware' - it could well be the beginning of many new and exciting interfaces to the digital world in which we all live in."

This is the story of the life and experiences of Fran's avatar, Ayo. Ayo is her name within Second Life. Ayo will first describe what Second Life is, how she and Fran relate, then she will tell stories of her experiences in Second Life with each of them illustrating a point about life in Second Life. All these themes are centered around the encounter of Ayo with her "twin soul" Ludwig and the reactions of their Real Life creators hidden behind their laptops. A touch of romance thrown in... What will Ayo and Ludwig's future be ? makes Ayo's Aventures pleasant and interesting to read.

Step into the world of virtual reality with your newly created avatar and begin to experience the tools that make this world interactive! During their infancy stage, virtual environments were largely based upon the gaming community and over time have been adapted to meet the growing number of users and educators. The Virtual Worlds Handbook, with CD-ROM, provides a user-friendly approach that will help trainers and educators create an effective and interactive environment within the Second Life virtual world. This book was written to help the novice user tackle the natural learning curve while providing the experienced user with tips, tools, and tricks to help any educator or trainer meet their professional goals faster. The opportunities using virtual reality are limitless and provide online students with a unique opportunity to connect both physically and educationally to one another, to faculty, to university, and to a worldwide market.

Within the rapidly-growing arena of 'virtual worlds', such as Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOs), individuals behave in particular ways, influence one another, and develop complex relationships. This setting can be a useful tool for modeling complex social systems, cognitive factors, and interactions between groups and within organizations. To study these worlds effectively requires a cross-disciplinary approach that integrates social science theories with big data analytics. This broad-based book offers a comprehensive and holistic perspective on the field. It brings together research findings from an international team of experts in computer science (artificial intelligence, game design, and social computing), psychology, and the social sciences to help researchers and practitioners better understand the fundamental processes underpinning social behavior in virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft, Rift, Eve Online, and Travian.

A comprehensive guide to computer assisted exercises

Readers can turn to this indispensable reference guide for comprehensive and lucid coverage of the operational, technical, and organizational knowledge needed to harness successful and constructive computer assisted exercises (CAX) and war games. It is geared also toward large civilian organizations that are looking to teach and test their strategies and procedures without the added cost of manpower. Divided into two clear parts, the book covers:

Fundamentals and Theory--conflict and warfare; probability and statistics; simulation; distributed simulation; and experimentation and analysis

Combat Modeling, Computer Assisted Exercises, and Practice--CAX architectures; CAX process; combat modeling; CAX support tools; communications/information system issues, technical risks, and risk miti-gation; and exercise centers and facilities

Computer Assisted Exercises and Training: A Reference Guide is indispensable reading for research engineers, computer scientists, software engineers working with modeling and simulation, homeland security specialists, staff in simulation training centers, military strategists and commanders, and many others. It also serves as a valuable textbook for modeling and simulation courses at the upper-undergraduate and graduate levels.

Virtual Reality systems enable organizations to cut costs and time, maintain financial and organizational control over the development process, digitally evaluate products before having them created, and allow for greater creative exploration. In this book, VR developers Alan Craig, William Sherman, and Jeffrey Will examine a comprehensive collection of current, unique, and foundational VR applications in a multitude of fields, such as business, science, medicine, art, entertainment, and public safety among others.

An insider s view of what works, what doesn t work, and why, Developing Virtual Reality Applications explores core technical information and background theory as well as the evolution of key applications from their genesis to their most current form. Developmental techniques are cross-referenced between different applications linking information to describe overall VR trends and fundamental best practices. This synergy, coupled with the most up to date research being conducted, provides a hands-on guide for building applications, and an enhanced, panoramic view of VR development. Developing Virtual Reality Applications is an indispensable one-stop reference for anyone working in this burgeoning field.

Dozens of detailed application descriptions provide practical ideas for VR development in ALL areas of interest Development techniques are cross referenced between different application areas, providing fundamental best practices Includes a media-rich companion website with hours of footage from application demonstrations"

The past decade has seen phenomenal growth in the development and use of virtual worlds. In one of the most notable, Second Life, millions of people have created online avatars in order to play games, take classes, socialize, and conduct business transactions. Second Life offers a gathering point and the tools for people to create a new world online.

Too often neglected in popular and scholarly accounts of such groundbreaking new environments is the simple truth that, of necessity, such virtual worlds emerge from physical workplaces marked by negotiation, creation, and constant change. Thomas Malaby spent a year at Linden Lab, the real-world home of Second Life, observing those who develop and profit from the sprawling, self-generating system they have created.

Some of the challenges created by Second Life for its developers were of a very traditional nature, such as how to cope with a business that is growing more quickly than existing staff can handle. Others are seemingly new: How, for instance, does one regulate something that is supposed to run on its own? Is it possible simply to create a space for people to use and then not govern its use? Can one apply these same free-range/free-market principles to the office environment in which the game is produced? "Lindens" as the Linden Lab employees call themselves found that their efforts to prompt user behavior of one sort or another were fraught with complexities, as a number of ongoing processes collided with their own interventions.

In Making Virtual Worlds, Malaby thoughtfully describes the world of Linden Lab and the challenges faced while he was conducting his in-depth ethnographic research there. He shows how the workers of a very young but quickly growing company were themselves caught up in ideas about technology, games, and organizations, and struggled to manage not only their virtual world but also themselves in a nonhierarchical fashion. In exploring the practices the Lindens employed, he questions what was at stake in their virtual world, what a game really is (and how people participate), and the role of the unexpected in a product like Second Life and an organization like Linden Lab."

As Web-based interactive 3D graphics, popularly referred to as Virtual Reality (VR), continue to become more affordable, research and development groups in various fields have been adopting Web-based VR technology. Despite substantial adoption, how and how much the technology benefits target users and the providers who choose to adapt the technology is not well understood. Previous research has established that VR provides users with unique human-computer interaction. However, little is known about how users experience the Web-based VR technology and how user-system interaction contributes to system usability. This book investigates user perception of Webbased VR comparing to conventional 2D graphics and system usability affected by the user-system interaction process. The impact of Web-based VR on system usability was empirically examined from an integrated view of technology acceptance in information systems and human-computer interaction. In addition, the impact of user characteristics on user-system interaction while using a VR system was examined. This book provides new knowledge about usability, sense of presence and technology acceptance in VR and provides insights for future research, which should be important to anyone designing, developing and evaluating a VR system in general and to an electronic commerce or market research system in particular.

How does virtuality affect reality? Fourteen experts consider this question from the perspective of law, architecture, rhetoric, philosophy, and art. Nearly all of the contributors have been online since before Netscape and a graphical World Wide Web; thus they have a thorough understanding of the cultural shifts the Internet has produced and been affected by, and they have a keen appreciation for the potential of the medium. Most scholarship on cyberculture has repeatedly emphasized that our offline selves determine how we are able to use technology, that real life affects what we do online. This volume is an attempt to reverse that discussion, to demonstrate that how we live online affects our lives offline as well. A virtual public is not an unreal one.

2003 Susan Koppelman Award given by the Joint Women's Caucus of the Popular Culture/American Culture. Most writing on cyberculture is dominated by two almost mutually exclusive visions: the heroic image of the male outlaw hacker and the utopian myth of a gender-free cyberworld. "Reload" offers an alternative picture of cyberspace as a complex and contradictory place where there is oppression as well as liberation. It shows how cyberpunk's revolutionary claims conceal its ultimate conservatism on matters of class, gender, and race. The cyberfeminists writing here view cyberculture as a social experiment with an as-yet-unfulfilled potential to create new identities, relationships, and cultures. The book brings together women's cyberfiction--fiction that explores the relationship between people and virtual technologies--and feminist theoretical and critical investigations of gender and technoculture. From a variety of viewpoints, the writers consider the effects of rapid and profound technological change on culture, in particular both the revolutionary and reactionary effects of cyberculture on women's lives. They also explore the feminist implications of the cyborg, a human-machine hybrid. The writers challenge the conceptual and institutional rifts between high and low culture, which are embedded in the texts and artifacts of cyberculture.

Imagine being able to "walk" into your computer and interact with any program you create. It sounds like science fiction, but it's science fact. Surgeons now rehearse operations on computer-generated "virtual" patients, and architects "walk through" virtual buildings while the actual structures are still in blueprints. In Virtual Reality, Howard Rheingold takes us to the front lines of this revolutionary new technology that creates computer-generated worlds complete with the sensations of touch and motion, and explores its impact on everything from entertainment to particle physics.