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by Andy Miah, PhD

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Making Sports Virtual

How long will it be before we ditch the sports arena and compete as athletes - or view as spectators - within an entirely virtual reality? This is the subject of a new book I am writing for The MIT Press, tentatively titled 'CyberSport: Digital Games, Ethics and Cultures'. It will be written with a colleague of mine in Australia, Dr Dennis Hemphill.

The subject of this book will feature in a Sky One (television) production to be broadcast on December 2 in the United Kingdom. The programme is about sport and technology generally, and it rounds off with a segment about the prospect of making sports virtual.

This project develops some thoughts that have been hanging around for the last five years. An early example of how they work out can be found in this piece:

Miah, A. (2002) Immersion and Abstraction in Virtual Sport, Research in Philosophy and Technology, 21, 225-233

Thursday, November 10, 2005

10x Human-Machine superperformance

I am a long-distance member for one of Yale's inter-disciplinary bioethics group, which soon receives a talk from Professor Deb Roy. Taking a closer look at Roy's work draws me even nearer to the work at MIT. I visited there in April this year and was struck by the breadth of creative invention taking place there.

This project 10x Human-Machine Symbiosis is discussed in an outline paper available from its website, wher Roy explains ths relationship between art, science and design.

In my various travels, I have found the richest of environments where a range of disciplines and views inform an approach to a problem, where it is difficult to characterise researchers as having expertise in specific domains. The more intriguing researchers seem to be those who apply a set of understandings to a range of applications.

More recently, I have been drawn towards architecture in work related to technology - such as William Mitchell's 'city of bits' - to research surrounding media spectacles - the Situationist Internationale are integral to a course I wrote on Spectacle. Today, I was reading an article about Unifying Urbanism, which described a use of communication technology within the city to de-fragment its evolving character. I struggle to separate out disciplinary perspectives when writing about culture. Far too much is connected.