The Collaborative International Dictionary
Virtuality \Vir`tu*al"i*ty\, n. [Cf. F. virtualit['e].]
The quality or state of being virtual.
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Potentiality; efficacy; potential existence. [Obs.]
In one grain of corn, there lieth dormant a virtuality of many other.
--Sir T. Browne.
Wiktionary
n. A state of being virtual.
Wikipedia
Virtuality is a line of virtual reality gaming machines produced by Virtuality Group, and found in video arcades in the early 1990s. The machines deliver real time (less than 50 ms latency) gaming via a stereoscopic visor, joysticks, and networked units for multi-player gaming.
Following Dr. Jonathan D Waldern’s pioneering VR PhD research from 1985-1990, supported by IBM Research Labs in Hursley, UK, Virtuality Group began life in 1985 as a garage startup called W Industries. Waldern’s company developed many of the principal components including VR headsets, graphics subsystems, 3D trackers, exoskeleton data gloves and other enclosure designs. Fully developed by 1990, the VR integrated systems were launched at a computer graphics show at crystal palace and marketed to industry. The first two networked VR systems were sold to British Telecom Research Laboratories to experiment with networked telepresence applications. Many other systems were sold to corporations including Ford, IBM, Mitsubishi and Olin. Professional virtual reality systems included the launch of the Ford Galaxy in virtual reality and a virtual trading floor for the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (LIFFE). However, the users' thrill of talking and mutually interacting with each other as virtual characters refocused the company's direction.
There are two types of units (referred to by the company as "pods"): One where the player stands up (SU), and the other where they sit down (SD). Both unit types utilize virtual reality headsets (the "Visette") which each contain two LCD screens at resolutions of 276x372 each. Four speakers and a microphone were also built into the unit. The SU units have a Polhemus 'Fast Track' magnetic source built into the waist high ring with a receiver in a free-moving joystick (the "Space Joystick"), while the SD design has the player sitting down with joysticks, a steering wheel, or aircraft yoke for control, depending on the game. The SD system was developed and launched in 1993 at Wembley Stadium in London.
Using the magnetic tracking system the stereoscopic display was able to react to head movements to change the display based on what the player would be "looking at" within the gaming environment. The position of the joystick (also magnetically tracked) controls movement of the player's "virtual hand", and a button on the joystick moves the player forwards in the game arena.
Virtuality is the quality of having the attributes of something without sharing its (real or imagined) physical form.
Virtuality also may refer to:
- Virtuality (gaming), a family of virtual reality arcade machines
- Virtuality (philosophy)
- Virtuality (software design), a concept of software design proposed by Ted Nelson
- Virtuality (song), a song by Rush
- Virtuality (TV pilot), a proposed TV show by Ronald D. Moore for which a pilot was produced, but no series ultimately commissioned
- Reality–virtuality continuum, a concept in computer science
- Augmented virtuality, a term that refers to the merging of real world objects into virtual worlds
- Real Virtuality (game engine), a proprietary computer game engine developed by Bohemia Interactive Studio
Virtuality is a television pilot co-written by Ronald D. Moore and Michael Taylor and directed by Peter Berg that aired on the Fox network. Although a full series was never commissioned, the two-hour pilot episode aired on Fox as a television movie on June 26, 2009. The pilot featured the crew of Phaeton, a spaceship designed to search for a hospitable planet in a nearby star system after an ecological catastrophe in near-future Earth. While approaching the point of no return, crew experiences problems with their virtual reality entertainment system, which quickly escalate and threaten their mission.
Virtuality is a song from the progressive rock band Rush and was released as the fourth single from their 1996 album Test for Echo. The song peaked at #16 on the U.S. Its lyrics deal of how the Internet technology affect the way relationships are carried on.
Virtuality is a term used by Ted Nelson for what he considers the central issues of software design. "Virtuality" refers to the seeming of anything, as opposed to its reality. (This has been the dictionary meaning of "virtuality" since at least the 18th century). Everything has a reality and a virtuality. Nelson divides virtuality into two parts: conceptual structure and feel. In every field these have different roles. The conceptual structure of all cars are the same, but the conceptual structure of every movie is different. The reality of a car is important, but the reality of a movie is unimportant—how a shot was made is of interest only to movie buffs.
(Note that the goal of the paragraph above is to get across the gist of the concept. If you think about *actual* movies, quite a few of them have identical essential structures, with only trivial surface differences—there is an entire sub-industry of making the same movie, over an over, ad infinitum. The reality of the movie *is* important; if the movie was made sloppily, with janitors visible in the background cleaning up the set, and with pie-plates on fishing-rods to represent the alien invaders, this clearly screws up the feel of the movie, and probably the conceptual structure as well. Cars are also not as described here: what matters is whether it *looks* fast and whether it *feels* sporty, to the average unintelligent consumer, not whether it is actually fast in reality. Saying that the 'conceptual structure' of a fully restored rhodium-plated 1922 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost is identical to the conceptual structure of a barely maintained primer-grey 1992 Nissan S-Cargo1 is nuts. Which gets better gas mileage, or has a tighter turning-radius, is hardly the point. This brings us back to Nelson's point, however: the reality of the Ghost and the reality of the S-Cargo do matter significantly, when you are trying to use them to get from point A to point B. If the engine conks out, you are just as stuck, no matter which one you are driving. The reality of the movie does not matter significantly: as long as suspension of disbelief is possible, and the story is magnificent, much can be forgiven.)
The feel of software, like the feel of a car, is a matter of late-stage fine-tuning (if it is worked on at all). But Nelson regards the design of software conceptual structure—the constructs we imagine as we sit at the screen—as the center of the computer field. However, the conceptual structure of almost all software has been determined by what Nelson calls the PARC User Interface, or PUI, on which Windows, Macintosh and Linux are all based. The feel is only icing on top of that.
In relation to new media, Woolgar (2002) has proposed 'five rules of virtuality'" that are drawn from in-depth research in the UK on uses of the so-called 'New Media' (Flew, 2008):
- Both the uptake and uses of new media are critically dependent on the non-ICT-related contexts in which people are situated (gender, age, employment, income, education, nationality).
- Fears and risks associated with new media are unevenly socially distributed, particularly in relation to security and surveillance.
- CMC-mediated or 'virtual' interactions supplement rather than substitute for 'real' activities.
- The introduction of more scope for 'virtual' interaction acts as a stimulus for more face-to-face or 'real' interaction.
- The capacity of 'virtual' communication to promote globalization throughout communication that is spatially disembedded encourages, perhaps paradoxically, new forms of 'localism' and the embedding, rather than the transcendence, of identities grounded in a sense of place, belief, experience, or practice.
Virtuality is a concept in philosophy, particularly that of French thinker Gilles Deleuze .
Deleuze used the term virtual to refer to an aspect of reality that is ideal, but nonetheless real. An example of this is the meaning, or sense, of a proposition that is not a material aspect of that proposition (whether written or spoken) but is nonetheless an attribute of that proposition. Both Henri Bergson, who strongly influenced Deleuze, and Deleuze himself build their conception of the virtual in reference to a quotation in which writer Marcel Proust defines a virtuality, memory as "real but not actual, ideal but not abstract". A dictionary definition written by Charles Sanders Peirce supports this understanding of the virtual as something that is "as if" it were real, and the everyday use of the term to indicate what is "virtually" so, but not so in fact.
Usage examples of "virtuality".
Whereas our attention was first drawn to the intensity of the elements of virtuality that constituted the multitude, now it must focus on the hypothesis that those virtualities accumulate and reach a threshold of realization adequate to their power.
We certainly do recognize the need to insist on the creative powers of virtuality, but this Bergsonian discourse is insufficient for us insofar as we also need to insist on the reality of the being created, its ontological weight, and the institutions that structure the world, creating necessity out of contingency.
The res gestae, the singular virtualities that operate the connection between the possible and the real, are in the first passage outside measure and in the second beyond measure.
Linemen told each other frontier stories, pioneer tales, of ghosts in the net, strange codes or secret trapdoors leading to fantastically detailed alien virtualities, odd conversations with disembodied people with no lookup addresses.
This avatar, his point of view and representative within the virtuality, was an exact replica of his own self, built from the tomographic scan.
No doubt I'd find a gray or ebony version of my girlfriend inside, swathed in the robes of a virtuality chador, laboring to fulfill some academic requirement in her latest major maybe Bantu Linguistics or Chinese Military History -- I couldn't follow the way her interests kept swerving, like a hundred million other permanent students on this continent alone.
He was a novice, but like most Kithfolk he had passed considerable time in virtualities, which included forests, lifeways of the past, and the like.
What the hell a Texas Ranger vehicle was doing this far out of Texas jurisdiction was a serious puzzle to Jane, but the thing was a bitch to drive and Leo was in a tiny captain's chair looking through some virtuality blocks and wearing a headset.
Not in the physical net of microwave transmissions and diamond wire lines, but in the software that linked virtualities to the Internet and to each other, in the place where phones and TVs and computers promiscuously crossbred.
After Innenin, I'd more or less forgotten what it was like to be genuinely afraid, but virtualities were a notable exception.
A little like the cut-rate virtualities you used to get in arcades back when I was a kid, the ones where the construct wouldn’t let your character look up more than a few degrees above the horizontal, even when that was where the next stage of the game was taking you.
A little like the cut-rate virtualities you used to get in arcades back when I was a kid, the ones where the construct wouldn't let your character look up more than a few degrees above the horizontal, even when that was where the next stage of the game was taking you.