I think I picked up the picture left from a mid western facebook correspondent in the US. A neat idea, but, not having the post to hand and being something of a dummy when it comes to facebook, I have no idea how she and her class get to know how far the message has traveled. Do they have a fun period first thing every morning when they plot where it has got to with red pins in a socking great wall map of the world?
A search for 'michelle teacher scotland bx93' in google this morning reveals that as well as to me the message also got to Woorree in Western Australia, gmaps -28.769710, 114.658184, this last number being the biggest gmaps reference number that I recall copying.
Experiment 2
This one picked up from a EC initiative called CEED and is called Project Morpheus, a new toy from the Sony games people, London branch seemingly. Perhaps computer games is one of the few things we Brits are still good at.
The idea is that you wear a headset, a bit like a fully visored motorcycle helmet, and the visor provides an immersive (I think that is the technical term) visual experience. I assume it does sound as well. So we have moved from silent, black and white films, through sound, through colour, through IMAX and now to full on, with the cinema people completely taking over your sight and sound portals. And interactive too.
One result of which is that they can be a lot more scary. People are really shaken if they are a hedgehog being eaten by a badger, in a way that they are not if they see the same thing on a conventional screen. The games people are having to tone down the experience a bit in consequence.
I think another part of the contraption is sensors attached to various parts of your body so that the computer knows where your body is and can adjust what you see accordingly.
I now wonder how they manage the fact that you are in your sitting room, perhaps on your sofa, while your headset tells you you are in outer space. What do they do to your head when your avatar crashes its head into a wall? I think the Microsoft people are working on a version on the Sony toy in which they integrate the virtual world into the real world, with virtual people sitting, perhaps, on your real sofa - and no doubt you can get to choose the person and their state of dress. I also think a crash conference in Tooting is called for, there being people there who are well up on this sort of thing.
I then wonder whether this sort of thing is not dangerous. Is tinkering with people's consciousness, muddling up fact with fiction in this intimate way, going to cause some kind of brain damage? I have the same worry with all the visual illusions cognitive types play with.
PS: google does not seem to know anything about CEED with http://ceedinstitute.org/ not being the right thing at all. Whereas it does know all about CEEDs which is at http://ceeds-project.eu/. Too dumb to make proper allowance for the 's' - and does not know as much about my searching habits this morning as it sometimes seems to.
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