Digital Gaming and the Media Playground
DIGITAL MEDIA AND CONVERGENCE 3 Digital Gaming and the Media Playground At least since the days of Johannes Vermeer, 75 The Development the Dutch master of photorealism painting in the of Digital Gaming seventeenth century, humans have sought to create 81 real-looking visual experiences; that is, virtual reality The Internet (VR). Part of the technical challenge has been gen- Transforms Gaming erating three-dimensional (3-D) images—something 84 Vermeer couldn’t quite do with a two-dimensional The Media Playground painting. By the 1830s, inventors had developed ste- 92 Trends and Issues reoscopes, binocular devices with left-eye and right- in Digital Gaming eye views of the same image that, when combined 99 by human vision, created the depth of a third dimen- The Business of sion. From the mid-1800s through the 1930s, view- Digital Gaming ing collections of stereo cards—of places like Egypt’s 106 Sphinx, New York’s Flatiron Building, or Yosemite Digital Gaming, Free Speech, and Valley—was a popular home entertainment. From Democracy the 1940s onward, plastic View-Master devices were popular toys for viewing a wheel of 3-D images of tourist attractions, television scenes, and cartoons. Since that time, of course, there have been advances into 3-D film (first in the 1950s, with viewers wearing cardboard glasses with red and blue lenses, and now with more advanced digital 3-D, as seen in movies like Avatar) and amusement Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images park experiences (which often add motion effects). CHAPTER 3 • DIGITAL GAMING AND THE MEDIA PLAYGROUND 73 3 DIGITAL GAMING AND THE MEDIA PLAYGROUND Now we have 3-D television in addition to Still, the leading edge of virtual reality has digital 3-D films.
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