Which body is real?

When searching for my examples, I wasn’t all that shocked in what I found but was still somewhat concerned by technology can really do these days. When looking for the implant what I found was the microchip implant many of us have heard about, but what I didn’t know and what some of you might not know is that it’s already here. It’s similar to that of the ones we place in dogs, but contains much more information that just who our owner is and where we live. It is claimed to contain our DNA, fingerprints, footprints, financial status, our history, and who knows all what else. How I see this in relation to Hayles’ article is the idea of power in knowing a name or the true body. Granted, for many those of us not hiding from the law or as the clip explains, terrorists, with this chip, the government would have the power to know all of our whereabouts. They would know who we are and where we are even without asking us for permission. Obviously, this wouldn’t put us in a virtual world, but in the same sense that the host in a game has all power over everyone in that world, our government would seem to have all the power. Something I heard about that may also coincide with this idea of the microchip has to do with how we purchase things in the future. Who knows if it’s true, but they say that like the credit cards you just wave in front of the card reader, all we would have to do is walk through the line with our cart full of stuff and it would automatically scan our items and us and take that amount from our linked account. Seems like there could be a lot of problems with this. Going back to the clip, they talked about how it would be safer in that terrorists couldn’t just hide anymore, but really is that the case? With anything that is invented, there is always someone smart enough to hack it. Why would the microchip be any different? And then, if we solely relied on this medium for safety, it would seem that things would be even less safe. I do like the idea about how it may help with tracking down kids who are kidnapped, but once again, with new technologies, as I and others have talked about in previous blogs, there are always pitfalls. If we felt that our kids were that safe with chips in their arms, would parents become less careful in watching their kids? They might just go, “Oh they’re not going to be taken, and if they are we’ll find them.” But it could very possibly be too late.

This idea of the chip has already been implemented in phones that parents can use to track their kids’ whereabouts. Just something to comment on is the fact that elementary kids are now getting cell phones. I completely see the function of being able to call your parents, but are we really not around enough to know where are kids are? At least until your child can drive, why do they even need one? Well, it seems I have ventured off topic…

I knew there toy airplanes that had cameras on them that would send you feed of what was going on in the air, but I found this to take it to the next step (*I’m sure the government or something else already has this, but I thought it was interesting enough to share). In the video, a Canadian RC airplane enthusiast shows the convergence between a model RC airplane and virtual reality gear. The airplane is a conventional one, controlled by a wireless remote control. On the airplane is a pan-and-tilt camera, controlled also wirelessly, but the interesting part was that the video is viewable through virtual reality goggles, which have a gyroscope built in to sense the movement of the goggles. So when you move your head, the camera moves. When I thought about this, I immediately thought of how when my sister and I used to play racing video games, as she came up on a turn she would lean her entire body in hopes of making the car turn better. *I’m sure many people do this! So what I pictured was me walking through a field with these goggles on my head ducking, tilting, and swaying back and forth with the images I saw – until I finally ran into a tree or something. In this example, everything was real. The images were real, the plane was real, and you were real. The only thing was that you were actually the plane flying through the air, but this is the point Hayles made in that at some point the sense of our self merges with the puppet. In this case, the puppet being the plane. I’m sure that if in the course of flight, some object quickly came out of nowhere you in your body would duck to try to avoid it.

What I found most perplexing was the thought about what happens when you are flying and you turn the plane around and see yourself. Which body do you associate with? Because your eyes are still seeing through the eyes of the plane are you the plane? Or at that moment, do you regain a sense of your real body and jump back into your physical body? Probably with time, you would get used to this situation but the first time around, it would be interesting to see what happens. At this point, what is real and what is virtual?

Links:
Microchip
Virtual Reality Airplane