Cyberspace is an interconnected digital environment. It is a type of virtual world popularized with the rise of the Internet. The term entered popular culture from science fiction and the arts but is now used by technology strategists, security professionals, governments, military and industry leaders and entrepreneurs to describe the domain of the global technology environment, commonly defined as standing for the global network of interdependent information technology infrastructures, telecommunications networks and computer processing systems. Others consider cyberspace to be just a notional environment in which communication over computer networks occurs. The word became popular in the 1990s when the use of the Internet, networking, and digital communication were all growing dramatically; the term cyberspace was able to represent the many new ideas and phenomena that were emerging. As a social experience, individuals can interact, exchange ideas, share information, provide social support, conduct business, direct actions, create artistic media, play games, engage in political discussion, and so on, using this global network. Cyberspace users are sometimes referred to as cybernauts.
Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that employs 3D near-eye displays and pose tracking to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment, education and business. VR is one of the key technologies in the reality-virtuality continuum. As such, it is different from other digital visualization solutions, such as augmented virtuality and augmented reality.
Susan Jane Blackmore is a British writer, lecturer, sceptic, broadcaster, and a visiting professor at the University of Plymouth. Her fields of research include memetics, parapsychology, consciousness, and she is best known for her book The Meme Machine. She has written or contributed to over 40 books and 60 scholarly articles and is a contributor to The Guardian newspaper.
Social constructionism is a term used in sociology, social ontology, and communication theory. The term can serve somewhat different functions in each field; however, the foundation of this theoretical framework suggests various facets of social reality—such as concepts, beliefs, norms, and values—are formed through continuous interactions and negotiations among society's members, rather than empirical observation of physical reality. The theory of social constructionism posits that much of what individuals perceive as 'reality' is actually the outcome of a dynamic process of construction influenced by social conventions and structures.
In philosophy of perception and epistemology, naïve realism is the idea that the senses provide us with direct awareness of objects as they really are. When referred to as direct realism, naïve realism is often contrasted with indirect realism.
A virtual world is a computer-simulated environment which may be populated by many users who can create a personal avatar, and simultaneously and independently explore the virtual world, participate in its activities and communicate with others. These avatars can be textual, graphical representations, or live video avatars with auditory and touch sensations. Virtual worlds are closely related to mirror worlds.
Michael Cranford is a video game designer and programmer. As a designer and programmer his works include The Bard's Tale, The Bard's Tale II, and Dark Seed. Cranford left the video game industry in 1992 to pursue an academic career as an ethicist.
Jonathan P. Bowen FBCS FRSA is a British computer scientist and an Emeritus Professor at London South Bank University, where he headed the Centre for Applied Formal Methods. Prof. Bowen is also the Chairman of Museophile Limited and has been a Professor of Computer Science at Birmingham City University, Visiting Professor at the Pratt Institute, University of Westminster and King's College London, and a visiting academic at University College London.
A virtual museum is a digital entity that draws on the characteristics of a museum, in order to complement, enhance, or augment the museum experience through personalization, interactivity, and richness of content. Virtual museums can perform as the digital footprint of a physical museum, or can act independently, while maintaining the authoritative status as bestowed by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) in its definition of a museum. In tandem with the ICOM mission of a physical museum, the virtual museum is also committed to public access; to both the knowledge systems embedded in the collections and the systematic, and coherent organization of their display, as well as to their long-term preservation. As with a traditional museum, a virtual museum can be designed around specific objects, or can consist of online exhibitions created from primary or secondary resources. Moreover, a virtual museum can refer to the mobile or World Wide Web offerings of traditional museums ; or can be born digital content such as, 3D environments, net art, virtual reality and digital art. Often, discussed in conjunction with other cultural institutions, a museum by definition, is essentially separate from its sister institutions such as a library or an archive. Virtual museums are usually, but not exclusively delivered electronically when they are denoted as online museums, hypermuseum, digital museum, cybermuseums or web museums.
Richard Filler Taruskin was an American musicologist and music critic who was among the leading and most prominent music historians of his generation. The breadth of his scrutiny into source material as well as musical analysis that combines sociological, cultural, and political perspectives has incited much discussion, debate and controversy. He regularly wrote music criticism for newspapers including The New York Times. He researched a wide variety of areas, but a central topic was Russian music from the 18th century to the present day. Other subjects he engaged with include the theory of performance, 15th-century music, 20th-century classical music, nationalism in music, the theory of modernism, and analysis. He is best known for his monumental survey of Western classical music, the six-volume Oxford History of Western Music. His awards include the first Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society in 1978 and the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy in 2017.
Richard John Alexander Talbert is a British-American contemporary ancient historian and classicist on the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor of History and is currently Research Professor in charge of the Ancient World Mapping Center. Talbert is a leading scholar of ancient geography and ideas of space in the ancient Mediterranean world.
Virtual reality in telerehabilitation is a method used first in the training of musculoskeletal patients using asynchronous patient data uploading, and an internet video link. Subsequently, therapists using virtual reality-based telerehabilitation prescribe exercise routines via the web which are then accessed and executed by patients through a web browser. Therapists then monitor the patient's progress via the web and modify the therapy asynchronously without real-time interaction or training.
Connected Education - also known as Connect Ed - was a pioneering online education organization founded and administered by Paul Levinson and Tina Vozick. Operating from 1985 to 1997, Connect Ed offered the M.A. degrees in Media Studies and Creative Writing. Connect Ed also worked with Polytechnic University in Brooklyn and Pacific Oaks College in Pasadena, California.
Fabian Michael Wadel, known professionally as Fabian Tassano, is an economist and author, known for his radical views on the medical profession, and for his critique of ideological aspects of modern culture.
Antoinette LaFarge is a new media artist and writer known for her work with mixed-reality performance and projects exploring the conjunction of visual art and fiction.
Designing Virtual Worlds is a book about the practice of virtual world development by Richard Bartle. It has been noted as an authoritative source regarding the history of world-based online games. College courses have been taught using it.
Sally Haslanger is an American philosopher and the Ford Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Formal semantics is the study of grammatical meaning in natural languages using formal tools from logic, mathematics and theoretical computer science. It is an interdisciplinary field, sometimes regarded as a subfield of both linguistics and philosophy of language. It provides accounts of what linguistic expressions mean and how their meanings are composed from the meanings of their parts. The enterprise of formal semantics can be thought of as that of reverse-engineering the semantic components of natural languages' grammars.
Timothy Binkley, is an American philosopher, artist, and teacher, known for his writings about conceptual art and aesthetics, as well as several essays that helped to define computer art. He is also known for his interactive art installations from the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Stuart Nicholson is a British jazz historian, biographer, music critic, journalist, and academic. A recognized expert on the history of jazz, he has penned several books on jazz history and several biographies on jazz luminaries, including Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Duke Ellington. The author of numerous articles on jazz in newspapers, magazines and academic publications, he has taught as a visiting professor on the faculty of the Leeds College of Music and as a guest lecturer at multiple institutions internationally.
