Wednesday, July 04, 2007

eXistenZ

I watched a movie the other night that was more than a little disturbing but at the same time intriguing. It’s a movie that I found out was released in the same year as The Matrix, but it got a lot less press. Canadian director David Cronenberg’s creation is called eXistenZ. Remember the port on the back of Neo’s (and the rest of the crew’s) necks? They plugged into The Matrix and fought the bad guys like it was a video game. eXistenZ has a similar “port”. Read what wikipedia has to say about it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EXistenZ :


The story is based on the confusion between reality and virtual reality as the characters move in and out of a quasi-organic role-playing computer game called eXistenZ, the aim of which is unknown. The players are linked to the virtual world of the game by a console that resembles a living lump of animal tissue which is connected to the player's nervous system through a 'bio-port' drilled in the player's lower back; however, near the end of the film the gamers seem to be connected to the virtual world by electronic devices connected to their heads and wrists. The ending, immediately following that switch into what appears to be a real world in which gamers were merely playing virtual reality, with electronic devices on their hands and wrists, leaves open the question of how many layers of virtual reality are still left between characters and the real world.

The virtual world of the game features many aspects of traditional video games, particularly graphical adventure games of the 1980s and early 1990s. Some of these are explicit, such as the repetitive "loops" of actions that minor characters perform, or the need to provide certain trigger phrases to make progress possible. There are many other references that are more subtle, for example the sparsely populated nature of the game world and the physical proximity of certain locations for no sensible reason (e.g., a Chinese restaurant next to a fish processing factory in thick forest). Another trait repeatedly used is the tendency of characters within the game to perform certain actions to quickly establish their personality which, presented in a more real world, would be nonsensical, such as the soldier firing a weapon, apparently randomly, in the middle of a conversation. Clothing in the film is primarily blank colours without patterns, as with games of the time.

There is a tension throughout the film between what appear to be rival game companies (Antenna Research and Cortical Systematics) that want to gain the services of a famous game designer, or kill the game designer if they cannot gain cooperation, while a third party known as the Realist Underground tries to subvert both game companies.

The plot involves existentialist themes, similar to The Matrix. Both films were released in the same year, but The Matrix received far more attention.

Then, last month, in the local newspaper, they ran an article on something called Augmented Reality (AR). This is where you are in the game but you use an external device that projects holograms (my understanding).

Check out these sites for workgroups that have designed Augmented Reality (AR) “games”

http://www.gvu.gatech.edu/arfacade/links.html

and

http://www.hitlabnz.org/

Back to Matrix/eXistenZ type interface. It’s called a neural interface. I did a google on it and found that there is a society devoted to the development of it, called The Society for Neural Interfacing (SNI). Check out their website: http://www.ifi.uzh.ch/groups/ailab/sni/


I just had a flash. Have you seen Futurama, the Matt Groening show where the brains of famous people are kept alive, in jars, in museums? Can you see a future where our bodies may wear out but our brains could be kept alive, neurally interfacing with a virtual reality? Freaky eh?