Some Key Terms & Principle Concepts

Veröffentlicht am Bearbeitet am

Some Terms

  • “Cyberspace”: A term first used in speculative fiction by William Gibson in reference to shared spatial visualisation of a world-wide computer network - “a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.” (1984, p69). In he following decades, the term use has been also metaphorical and it became synonymous with the World Wide Web, describing the imaginary, shared space of communication and representation online.

  • “Internet of Things”: “interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, animals or people … with unique identifiers (UIDs) and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction” (Wikipedia Contributors 2019)

  • “Locative Art”: Art that is digital and also concerned directly with the physical space of the world. In the early days (before phones) people used protable GPS devices and the work tended to be very perfomative and interactive. When AR became possible, the focus shifted to that. The 2002 book “Spook Country” by William Gibson suggested an art practice like this before it really existed.

  • “Mirror Worlds”: A term coined by David Gelernter in his 1991 book “Mirror worlds, or, The day software puts the universe in a shoebox : how it will happen and what it will mean.” (Gelernter 1991) Mirror worlds are virtual representations of data space. They may utilise world-space but they may also represent data in other ways that better allow for navigation and interpretation.

  • “Web of Things”: In the same way the Web is a layer of shared protocols (an “application layer”) for the Internet (the “network layer”), “Web of Things” describes the proposed standards for an application layer that simplifies the creation of applications for the “Internet of Things”. Competing approaches include a framework from Mozilla (Mozilla IoT 2019) and a draft specification from the W3C (Web of Things (WoT) Architecture 2017)

  • “World space”: A term from spatial computing (c.1997) meaning the shared 3D space of a scene, as opposed to the relative 3D space of a single object in a scene. Frequently found in technical documentation of 3D programming frameworks, eg: “Returns a vector representing the position of the object in world space.”

  • “XR (X Reality): “the union between ubiquitous sensor/actuator networks and shared online virtual worlds” (Landay & Paradiso 2009)