How technology will change things

Virtual reality is seen as paving the way for the next generation of
interactive entertainment. But right now, it’s quite limited. You have
cables to worry about, you need extra gadgets to immerse other parts
of your body beyond your vision, and you need a large, empty environment in
which to enjoy your VR without injury.
Japanese video-game publisher and developer Koei Tecmo doesn’t want to wait
for virtual-reality technology to mature, so it came up with an alternative.
Rather than requiring users to wear a VR headset, it created a virtual reality

of your senses.

T the Edinburgh festival, a woman is talking to her iPhone’s personal helper talking to her iPhone’s personal helper, Siri. But this is not a private meet between one woman and technology. Much like Krapp’s Last Tape may be portrayed as a part for two performers an actor and a tape recorder so Siri is a show featuring a human and a digital performer. Canadian actor Laurence Dauphinais poses the program a series of questions that, as they probe into her own background, elicit ever more existentialist sounding replies.
Javaad Alipoor: ‘The answer to radicalism is to shut down debate for young people.

The VR Sense looks similar to a typical arcade racing
game, with a seat in front of a display. But it offers 3D
visuals as well as a fragrance function, touch function,
wind function, thermal cooling function, and mist
function. So you’ll be able to smell the action,
experience the wind rushing through your hair, and feel
temperature changes and if it’s raining in a game,
you re going to get wet.
According to entertainment site , VR Sense
is expected to launch at some point in summer 2017 and

games will be included at launch: a GI Jockey horseracing
game, an entry in the long-running Dynasty
Warriors series of games, and an as-yet-untitled VR
horror game that’s sure to be extra scary, providing the

Interested gamers will have to pay per play, and while
pricing has yet to be announced, I doubt this will be a
cheap machine to use.

When Beckett wrote Krapp in the late 1950s, he saw the possible for harnessing everyday technology in the theatre, on the Edinburgh fringe this summer, artists are doing the same thing. In the creepy Sance, which takes place in a black container outside Summerhall, binaural sound can be used in a way that undercuts all certainties and so overwhelms the senses that you find yourself doubting what you just have experienced. In Javaad Alipoor’s The Believers Are But Brothers, the whispering, insidious voices of extremism are delivered to the screen of your smartphone in a disconcerting part of theatre that uses multimedia to evoke a shadowy world of online Isis recruiters and alt right websites.

Some of the technology that’s changing the audience experience was around for many years. For Stand By, written by former police officer Adam McNamara, the audience wears single earpiece headphones just as real officers do. we are watching a group of police officers bicker and banter in a police van prepared to intervene if negotiations with an armed man holding a child hostage fail. The officers complain about cliched TV police dramas, but there are lots of cliches here, too. While the earpiece that lets us to hear the communications between the officers and their station immerses us in the drama, the technology does not feel completely integrated till the last tense times.

Hopefully VR Sense makes it
outside of Japan, so we can give it a try. I’d really like to
know what fear smells like, and the fragrance function
on this machine may answer that question.