Word: virtually
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Integrated Media Systems Center at the University of Southern California. The center resides in a squat, red brick building, well baked by the Los Angeles sun, whose modest exterior camouflages the far-out work that's happening within. The group is focused on a multimedia effort to bring virtual people together for lifelike encounters. The project is fusing several state-of-the-art technologies - 3-D facial modeling and animation, video compression, spatially placed sound - to create a full-fledged virtual world...
Many of the innovations that get us excited seem to be a drag on the human evolutionary scale. Once upon a time kids just went out and played ball with one another. Eventually computer games allowed us to sit in our rooms and play virtual baseball. Progress! With the Internet, kids can now compete against other players online, in real time! Interactivity! What's next? Some day someone will figure out a way to truly experience the "feel" of throwing and catching a virtual ball remotely, through complicated algorithms developed by Indian software engineers (who, by the way, play cricket...
...spite of those concerns, Makatiani is convinced that the new economy is spreading to Africa and he wants to be the person to tap that potential. He believes that someday African entrepreneurs will use Africa Online to create virtual offices from which they can e-mail, store private documents in safe files and do their banking. "When you start looking at 800 million people and start looking at one continent rather than separate countries, you start getting extremely excited," says an animated Makatiani, jumping up from his office sofa. "You say to yourself, ?You know, I can do what Bill...
...Squadron II. Replicating the climactic canyon-run sequence in Star Wars, designers created a Death Star that looked embarrassingly more realistic than the 1977 movie model. "I thought, 'My God, I hope Lucasfilm doesn't get mad at us,'" says director Brett Tosti. To save George Lucas' blushes, the virtual version has been fixed to look as plastic as the original...
...knew a man - short, bald, of undetectable charm - who was a virtual bigamist. He had a wife and family in the suburbs and something of the same arrangement, though without benefit of clergy, in town. He lived a complex double life - a secret agent in his own existence, half of him a stranger to the other half. Which was perhaps his way of keeping himself amused. He often had to eat two dinners: once, in early evening after work, with his in-town woman, and a few hours later - after "working late at the office" - with his wife. No wonder...