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Virtual 1930s Harlem
Raiford writes "Students can now take fully guided field trips in a VR environment. An article in the newsroom section of the IEEE website describes a trip to an historic Virtual Harlem setting in the 1920s and 30s. The article gives a description of the VR technology and programming and states that the simulation is supported for both Silicon Graphics and Linux platforms"
it's good to see that linux is supported, usually such advancements are held to specific proprietry servers like sgi, former silicon graphics, offerings.
...but then I realized we've still got a long way to go for a fully immersive VR experience. Hell, ATI still can't release a good set of drivers for GTA3. Just imagine that... Walking down the street and you noice something not quite right about the flickering textures - a glitch in the Matrix perhaps? Nope - just buggy ATI drivers of the future.
I hope you'll be able to drive to the edge of the world and see wireframe birds and mountains.
My Led Zeppelin CD's raped all my Journey CD's! What should I do?
Get some Michael Jackson CDs instead. As long as you don't have any boy band CDs, you won't have any more problems like that.
...but I have the solution:
We need a NEW terrorist attack.
I wonder if they've chosen to simulate an American town in the 1930th because of this movie or whether it's just a coincidence.
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
...the mods are inhaling.
When I first saw the headline I thought it said Virtual Harem...
*runs away and looks for another headline*
What's the point? Why not simply go there?
FINALLY I get to meet my Angel of Harlem.
And I thought it said Virtual Harem ... so disappointed now.
Score:-1, Funny
I play KingPin, Mother****er!
Well, other than the game being crap, the city was awesome.
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
Oh wait, you said Virtual Harlem, not Virtual Haarlem?
1: Write free software.
2: ?
3: Watch 1930's harlem in VR.
4: Profit!
OK, now that we're this far, where do I sign up for Avalon? ;-)
PageTurner Reader: open-source e-reader for Android with cloudsync. http://pageturner-reader.org
The Virtual Harlem project is a great idea, huge educational value, blah, blah...
But what everyone really wants is to be able to blow stuff up. They need to use the system to create a modern day city. They should make it so that you can interact with its inhabitants, give you a selection of weapons, and set you loose to do as you will. Imagine a living, breathing city to cause complete havoc in! If only.
Oh wait... Maybe it's not just a daydream, maybe someone's already done that.
There is no excuse for indulging in this kind of immoral filth
Please do not try to cop out by saying "it's just a game, all my friends play it". If there was a game which "simulated" lynching blacks or kidnapping and raping children, would you play it? Would you keep company with people who did? How is GTA3 any different?
I'd really like to see a serious, rational reply to this objection, because up until now, I have not heard one.
-HashBang, posting anonymously to avoid "offtopic" modding...
Back in 1930's Harlem it wasn't an Evil Dangerous Drug but was inseparable from the music scene.
Does this VR simulation ignore marijuana entirely? Is this yet another apparatus used to whitewash history? Can someone please drive down to Gainesville, Florida and find Jim Haskins in a downtown bar, slap some VR goggles on him, and get his opinion?
--ZMNow if only the virtual crack dealers, thugs and pimps would try and "Jack" the students, it would make for a much more realistic experience...
Is this a joke? Who wants to see Harlem? Has the world gone mad.
(Before you mod me into troll/flamebait heaven, consider that I am taking on issues of race and cultural history and talking about such things is hard to do without offending...)
I find it amazing and appalling (but not surprising) that the response to this essay is for now dominated by racist trolls. Of course, one cannot say the writer's of these responses are racist, but their words certainly are.Harlem in the 1930s was a flourshing center of art, culture, literature, and music. The boom period known as the Harlem Renaissance is unparalleled in American history with perhaps the exception of the late 1960s, also known as the Countercultural Revolution. The Harlem Renaissance inspired poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes, musicians the likes of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, novelists such as Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison, and painters like Jacob Lawrence.
Art Deco, the style of art and architecture that exalts urbanism and the modernist avant-garde, flourished during this time, undoubtedly due to the broad sex appeal of jazz, an African-American musical form.
The amazing part about the Harlem Renaissance is that this is period of cultural growth during one of the most abysmal periods in economic history, a period so awful it is named "The Great Depression." You may not know a damn thing about niggers, but you should know that like the Founding Fathers of the United States, they know how to survive when things are tough. But more importantly, they know how to survive with style.
Niggers also have quite a bit in common with geeks. They are despised for their gifts and feared for their power. "Beautiful people" commit violence upon blacks and geeks and laugh about it. Now, imagine being a black geek (reading at -1) and coming to this thread.
It's now 2002, and the systematic (if unorganized) oppression and rejection of African Americans as "niggers" and "shit" is as strong as ever. In the early part of the twentieth century, groups of European-Americans killed blacks with impunity. Blacks were lynched and the KKK was scapegoated for America's racial hatred. I'm not saying the KKK were not guilty, but they were singled out, while everyday forms of racism survive unscathed.
Slashdot is one of my favorite webites. But I've never for a second doubted that some of my fellow /.'ers are racists. Now I have the proof. But I also know many /.'ers really don't have a lot to say about race, and the silence is deafening. So I thought in addition to those moderators who are on the job that I'd send out a few tendrils and try to turn up the signal to noise ratio, FWIW.
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Why not 1870? That would have been interesting.
And I was all excited too...
Or kids choirs!
Of course, if you ahve Curious George stuff, the monkey might also be in a little trouble.
Tournament Management Online &
Harlem 2002 just a joke!! don't mod down.
Snoozer.
We need this stuff in highschools
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
It's interesting to see a /. article to which I can personally relate. A friend of mine would invite me over to campus because UMC has this HUGE screen down a bottom computer lab to watch Star Trek. Since he was part of the computer crew, he had access to all the cool equipment and programs. I've played with the simulator. What gave it a different feel educationally is that you had the perspective of town to wonder around. As you got closer to characters or events, you would begin to hear them calling, talking, singing, etc. At the time, they didn't have a lot of people in it, but I still remember walking around and seeing all the people. Unless they've really splashed it up, it wasn't anything like seeing 3D characters walking and moving. The people were all 2d sprites. But, it gave a new definition to the term hi-res. I think they were rendering it off of a video card with 1 gig of memory. It left an impression on me and I think it would for anyone to get some since to feel what it was like back then. Oh, that and the 3D, VR, simulated helicopter with three-foot tall motion pad. That thing was fun as hell to play on. It had a five-point harness because that thing could take you for a ride. If you hit the ground and you knew it.. :)
Bel, the mostly sane.. "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." -- Me
You're full of it, and a coward to boot. Post with your id, why don't you?
I'm writing my dissertation, in the process of earning a Ph.D. in English, so I have plenty of education. I don't use drugs. I teach at the University of Virginia. I am biracial and am at times racially oppressed.
What's so hard to believe about the possibility that some of us experience oppression in ways you cannot understand?
I'm not saying oppressed people don't do bad things. They do. But most oppressed people don't do such things. Most oppressed people--black, white, geek, female, asian (what you call chink), handicapped--are exactly that: oppressed.
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Now that's pretty cool; my spell-checker made a Freudian slip. Substitue "fantasy" for "fascism" above and then start wondering if computers really do have a sense of humor. =)
Must be like watching an hour's worth of Howard University Television public service announcements.
...you can all fucking suck my knob, and like it.
If they made the thing available as a VRML world, it would be more accessable. VRML isn't used much any more, but it finally works quite well. VRML 97 sucked on 1997-vintage PCs, but with a modern graphics board and a broadband connection, it's far better than it used to be.
I think to myself at times and wonder if I am racist myself. What is telling is that I have no afro-americans in my circle of friends; this could be because I don't like them, or it could be because I have lived in neighborhoods without too many afro-americans. In addition, I don't go for black chicks. I find most other races attractive, with the notable exception of Asian women. I find some white women attractive, some southern europian women attractive, some latina women attractive, some native americans attractive, a few indian women attractive, and some arabic women attractive.
I also was taught as a kid that Black people are less intelligent and stronger than other races. I also have been given the impression that black people are more savage: They are more predisposed to commit crimes, spray graffiti, and engage in other antisocial behavior.
Now, how well this reflects reality is open to debate. When the driving when colored debate was going on (a debate where people were critizing police for pulling more afro-americans over then people of other races), I was thinking that, if police were going to profile the races of people they choose to pull over, we should also have public data where we see what percentage of crimes are committed by what races compared to the population of that race in a given neighborhood.
When went to a university in a section of towns where students were in constant fear of being mugged, the perception was that it was afro-americans committing all of the muggings cauing the neighborhood to go to hell; however everyone was too "politically correct" to say this out loud (the joy of being anonymous on Slashdot).
Honestly, I do not know how much reality this perception that black people commit a majority of the crimes has with reality. If we look at arrest statistics, that may not be accurate because policeman have this racist perception, causing them to arrest more black people. What needs to be done is to study people who report violent assualts being done against them, and see what the rce of the assualter is compared to the population of the race in question in the neighborhood. I know that when a black person assualts a white person, the race sticks out in my mind; when a white (or latino) person assulats a white person, the race is less likely to be remembered.
National Review , as expected says that the reason more black people are in prison than in college is because more black people committ criminal acts. Maybe people become like this when their culture and society was destroyed, such as when the blacks were forcibly taken out of Africa in to the US to become slaves.
This is a very complicated and emotionally charged issue; and one that people can not openly discuss because of our society's overzealous political correctness.
I think the advantage is that in VR when someone stabs you and steals your wallet you don't have to go to the hospital and you don't really lose your wallet!
That movie sucked and nothing should ever be based on it intentionally. Enough said.
Something about 70 virgins and paradise.
....virtual Beirut circa 1985.
Yeah that would be great. The venture(vulture?) capitalists must be circling this idea.
If they can have historical figures like Marcus Garvey, I'd like to see Malcolm X in his drug-pushing days, selling dope and whoring women.
Strangely omitted...
How everyone who has posting anything negative in regards to black people and our relation to Harlem is posting as an anonymous coward? Shows you how they've already acknowledged their opinion as just an attempt to show themselves as trollbait while expressing their naive views. One thing I can say about a racist is that I've never seen. heard, or read anything from intelligent ones, because an intelligent racist is an oxymoron...
The only thing keeping most of these so called "countries" in Africa going are their natural resources and the developed world's interest in them. I say again, the developed world does not profit from anarchy or de-civilization. This disrupts, not facilitates, the developed world's access to these all important natural resources. It's much easier to "exploit" a semi-developed, stable country with a modicrum of roads than it is to "exploit" a nightmare of a fucking "country" like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where you have lots of roads that go nowhere that no one uses.
These anti-globalists use logic that goes something like "capitalists are evil therefore, capitalists must be responsible for the deplorable conditions in Africa". Then explain the previous 2000 years without civilization in Africa...before the white man showed.
Oh yeah, I forgot, all those great ancient African civilizations no one has yet been able to find proof of hidden deep in the jungle.
(And here I was looking for a tarball, heh.)
Can you explain how they're using this for a distance learning project? Do they have identical labs set up, or what?
Just curious.
And is anybody doing something like this with an Open Source license?
Oh yeah, I forgot, all those great ancient African civilizations no one has yet been able to find proof of hidden deep in the jungle.
Do your research, "civilization" found them, and then shot them. They where taking up valuable forest land you know. . . .
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