Author Archives: James Dawson

Week 5: Final Video – Virtual Reality

So we all know that virtual reality has long been a technology associated with the future. Examples of it have been popping up movies, television shows, and more for years. We’ve even had attempts at making virtual reality, reality, with tech like the Virtual Boy, or now with the Oculus Rift. In this video I’ll show you a few examples of how virtual reality has been depicted in film, and how it may relate to our reality. The TV series and movies included in this video are as follows: Space Adventure Cobra, Megazone 23, The Matrix, Summer Wars, and Avatar.

Virtual Reality from James Dawson on Vimeo.

Week 4: Social Impacts

Jessi and Will did a great job this week handling the ‘Social Impact” project. Using the Google Maps program was unexpected, but I like how it turned out. It’s especially neat seeing how so many of our points congregate in the western United States, specifically in California and around the Silicon Valley. One thing I also noticed, is that internet has had a huge effect on how we consume media. We’ve covered two small aspects of it, anime and music, but there are several mediums that have been completely transformed by the World Wide Web. Video games could be another medium that future classes might want to look into.

Back to the Future – Goku: Midnight Eye

I mentioned the movie Goku: Midnight Eye before in my list of cyberpunk influenced anime, but I think it would also be great for our upcoming project. The movie centers around around a detective who loses his eye and wakes up with a prosthetic replacement that’s connected to every computer terminal in the world. The comic it’s based on came out in 1987, so it’s an interesting early look at wearable (if you’d consider a prosthetic eye wearable) technology.

Here’s the clip that I’d like to dub over. Luckily, its no stranger to bad dubbing.

Goku Midnight Eye I (20:49 to 22:50)GOKU MIDNIGHT EYE ISSUE 1 PG 27

Week 5: Future

In Week 5, we’ll be focusing on the future of the internet. A few key topics that we could discuss are:

3D Printing

Cloud Computing

Smart Appliances

Google Glass and wearable technology

I’m sure there are more, but those four topics should help us start off. As for the project side of things, there are several things we could do. If we had more time, it might have been neat to visit the ThinkLab on campus to witness 3D printing first hand, and maybe try it out for ourselves. I’m not sure how the logistics of that would work out. Infographics have also been mentioned. That would be one way to handle the project.

I’m open to suggestions.

How It Works

wp_ss_20140608_0001[1]Last week’s “How It Works” project was pretty interesting. I learned some interesting tidbits concerning different types of software. For instance, I didn’t even know Apache was a thing, nor that the majority of servers use it. I also liked that we used HTML. I’ve used HTML before, but my experience has mainly been with editing already existing documents, or using it to organize new articles or reviews into paragraphs. I’ve never built a web page from scratch using HTML. It was a neat experience. Learning about CSS was also helpful. I might have some use for these new skills in the future.