REVIEW OF WEEKENDS WORK - 19th - 21st OCTOBER

Over the weekend I organised my work and put some interesting ideas into my sketchbook. I researched Virtual Reality (mainly in relation to children due to my Virtual Classroom idea) and it's effect on society and education. It is clear that virtual reality has been used with education (see sketchbook) and I feel that it is a matter of time before this is applied to our schools.

The only real fallback of this Virtual Classroom idea is the lack of socialising and interactivity the pupils will have. This is why my idea would relate more to the idea of pupils socialising normally out of class time but when class begins the children would put on their headsets to begin the lesson, this is turn would enable sufficient and correct teaching of the exact curriculum.

This idea inspired me to research forms of online interactivity and socialising (e.g. 2nd Life, Facebook, Myspace, MSN). If we can log onto virtual worlds now and actually live another virtual life in the form of an avatar, then surely it is a matter of time before we can put on our virtual headsets and live in a virtual world. This idea is not so different from 'The Matrix' where we see characters such as Neo getting plugged into the matrix (see image right).

In relation to our speaker we had last thursday, Simon Morse, I thought of his idea of technology becoming over complex and making it too hard to use. This in turn making us 'dumb' due to over-complexity, this is a simliar concept to the movie 'Idiocracy' where the main agonist wakes up in the future to find that everyone has been 'dumbed down'. Although This film isn't the greatest (in my opinion) it is useful in relation to this project because there are some interesting perspectives of the future portrayed throughout this movie.

I have been practicing with After Effects over the weekend because I want to be fully capable of using this program before I begin creating my presentation and final project idea.

I stumbled across a useful 3D tutorial in Creative Arts, which I feel will be use to everyone as it is simple to follow and I completed succesful in relatively short time, click on the truck image below to visit this link to the tutorial: