Tag: fahrenheit 451

Video Breakdown of Fahrenheit 451

fahrenheit_451Hello all, and welcome to another glorious Friday! I feel fortunate today, due largely to the fact that yet another person who is dedicated to media literacy, science fiction, books and issues has chosen to get in contact with me and asked to be featured on this site. It’s always good to hear from people and know that what you are doing is garnering attention. But when they ask permission to share their message in your forum, well that’s just the bee’s knees!

F451Apparently. it was my tribute to Ray Bradbury which got this particular gentleman’s attention, and for good reason too. Through a site known as Academic Earth, where one can create and post educational videos on a variety of subject, Mr. Jack Collins created a video breakdown of Fahrenheit 451 that was both educational and insightful. In his brief but poignant segment, he takes a look at the major plot points, themes and motifs of Bradbury’s enduring classic.

To quote from his description of the video:

Ray Bradbury wrote his dystopian classic Fahrenheit 451 at the height of McCarthyism and Cold War paranoia. In the novel, Guy Montag is employed as a fireman who burns books. The whole of American society has descended into a zombie-like stupor of instant gratification, and books are seen as challenging and disruptive relics, which must be destroyed at any cost.

Today, with the increasing proliferation of surveillance equipment in American cities, the spread of digital books and the decline of attention spans the world over, Fahrenheit 451 remains a startlingly relevant work of fiction today. Watch this video and be instantly gratified (irony alert) with your knowledge of Bradbury’s most famous novel.

Trust me when I say it’s a fine educational short, one which I would definitely use if and when I got the chance to teach this novel. And after watching it, I couldn’t help but reflect upon a certain irony. More and more today, educators find themselves taking advantage of new media and video breakdowns in order to help students make sense of complex subject matter and lengthy texts. A few decades ago, they would simply be expected to read it, internalize it, and report on what they read.

One could easily argue that all this sort of trend really is a part of our society’s growing preoccupation with sound bites and easy accessibility. But then again, in our quest to maintain attention spans and promote thoughtfulness, we’d be fools to not take advantage of the very technology that is making it quicker and easier for people to do the opposite in the first place.

Enjoy the video! As you can tell, it got me thinking, and that’s not always the easiest thing for someone else to do 😉 Check out the video by following the link below, and be sure to comment!

academicearth.org/electives/tldr-fahrenheit-451/

The Future is Here: The VR Cave!

Cave2It’s called the CAVE2, a next-generation virtual reality platform that is currently the most advanced visualization environment on Earth. Whereas other VR platforms are either in 2D or limited in terms of interactive capability, the CAVE2 is about the closest thing there is to a real-life holodeck. This is accomplished through a series of panoramic, floor-to-ceiling LCD displays and an optical tracking interface that is capable of rendering remarkably realistic 3D environments.

Developed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, CAVE2 is a direct follow up to the VR platform the university created back in 1992. Like the original, the name stands for “Cave Automatic Virtual Environment”; but whereas its predecessor was set in a cube-shaped room, the new environment is set within a cylindrical, 320 degree immersive space. In addition, the screens, sounds, and resolution have all been vastly upgraded.

ModelFor example, the 7.5 by 2.5 meter space (24 feet x 8 feet) is covered floor-to-ceiling with 72 3D LCD screens, each of which outputs images at 37-megapixels (that’s 7,360 x 4,912 pixels, twice that of 2D). This allows for a pixel density that is on par with the human eye’s own angular resolution at 20/20 vision. Headgear is needed to get the full 3D effect, and the entire apparatus is controlled by a hand-held wand.

Yes, in addition to the holodeck, some other science fiction parallels are coming to mind right now. For example, there’s the gloved-controlled holographic interface from Minority Report, the high-tech nursery in Ray Bradbury’s short story The Veldt, and the parlor walls he envisioned in Fahrenheit 451. And apparently, this is no accident, since director Jason Leigh, the head of the project, is a major sci-fi geek!

mars_lifeBut of course, all this technology was designed with some real-life, practical applications in mind. These range from the exploration of outer space to the exploration of inner space, particularly the human body. As Ali Alaraj, a noted neuroscientist who used the CAVE2 put it:

“You can walk between the blood vessels. You can look at the arteries from below. You can look at the arteries from the side. …That was science fiction for me. It’s fantastic to come to work. Every day is like getting to live a science fiction dream. To do science in this kind of environment is absolutely amazing.”

All of this bodes well for NASA’s plans for space exploration that would involve space probes, holographics, and avatars. It would also be incredibly awesome as far as individual hospitals were concerned. Henceforth, they could perform diagnostic surgery using nanoprobes which could detail a patients body, inch for inch, from the inside out.

And of course, the EVL has provided a cool video of the CAVE2 platform in action. Check them out:

Source: IO9, evl.uic.edu