After some time to overview our previous lessons, I’ve decided to try making some blog posts about my thoughts and feelings about each class and the materials associated with it.
To begin, we had a lecture about the usage of immersive technologies, such as VR and AR. This lecture primarily focused more on the usage of these softwares outside of the realm of interactive gaming experiences, with a diagram presenting all the areas these technologies had branched out into as a result of the pandemic, due to experiences such as VR being able to subvert restrictions commonly in place due to the pandemic.
I do think that perhaps when presented to the public, some of these technologies seem to discredit certain human factors regarding their experiences, in favor of practicality over perfection. One example of this I spotted primarily stemmed from the demonstration of the MyFinder application for those with visual impairments. While the application’s function to find, track, and document items in the surrounding is clearly effective, the app seemed to run the possibility of overstimulating the user with information, with the text to speech software running through multiple tracked items and properties in very quick succession. Of course, this is just my personal view, and as someone who is not personally visually impaired heavily, I cannot say whether my worries regarding the application are well founded.
Outside of the lecture itself, we were instructed to watch a video title ‘The Killing of Mark Duggan’ which followed the investigation of a shooting in London using virtual reality and augmented reality tech. I found the overall video fascinating, with the reconstruction of events of the incident being carefully recreated in VR to the highest degree of accuracy to ensure that the correct information was learned and given in courts. While watching this, another investigation involving the usage of virtual reality came to my mind, that of the crash of US Airways Flight 1549, more commonly known as ‘The Miracle of the Hudson’. While VR was not used as in-depth in this investigation as those used in the Mark Duggan case, flight simulations were an important piece of evidence during the case, being used to determine whether the pilots involved ultimately made the correct decision under the circumstances they found themselves in. Overall, I hope that immersive technology will become more common in the use of investigations, hopefully resulting in more accurate resolutions to each and every incident.