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Augmented and Virtual Reality in the World of GPT Text and Image Creations: AI, Metaverse, and Art

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Augmented and Virtual Reality in the Metaverse

Part of the book series: Springer Series on Cultural Computing ((SSCC))

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Abstract

This chapter discusses popular aspirations and fears of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). For both, the ideal content required has all the complexity, persistence, and interactivity of nature: a metaverse and AI. There are dystopias and utopias colorfully portrayed in science fiction which speak to our fears and desires for the future. But, has the metaverse already arrived? There are now convincing AI metaverses of text, virtual collaborations and presence, 'digital twin' ontologies, deep fakes, and fake news. It seems that the technological ground on which our reality and industries rest is again shifting with the sudden advances in artificial intelligence—especially with text and still-image generation. Does this shift give us a new perspective on the desires, horrors, and useful definitions of Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and the potential metaverse? In this chapter, the authors seek to interrogate the terms: ‘AR’, ‘VR’, and ‘metaverse’ in light of the fast-moving AI phenomenon. A survey of popular science fiction draws out the hopes and anxieties of these media, and a journey through the progress of virtual and metaverse art in China over the last decade elucidates the creative challenges ahead.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    An article in the Hollywood Reporter notes that iMax’s global gross receipts for 2023 are almost equivalent to the record setting year of 2019, when they reached $ 1.1 billion (Vlessing 2023). In 2019, 3D film receipts were $6.5 billion globally, and this amount accounted for only a 15% share of the global box office (Newbould 2021).

  2. 2.

    In the film, the aliens’ nefarious purpose is to somehow harvest energy from the virtual living of the unwilling participants.

  3. 3.

    Here thinking of the terminology used by Michael Hardt, who in “Withering of Civil Society” uses ‘smooth’ to describe cyberspace: “The metaphorical space of the societies of control is perhaps best characterized by the shifting desert sands, where positions are continually swept away; or, better, the smooth surfaces of cyberspace, with its infinitely programmable flows of codes and information” (Hardt, p. 37).

  4. 4.

    Aliasing refers to rendered artifacts which occur when electronic sampling is unable to distinguish between one value and another (thus one and its ‘alias’). In computer graphics, this typically looks like ‘jaggies’, where gradients or curves rasterize as jagged lines (see “What is aliasing?” PhysLink.com).

  5. 5.

    It is hard to delineate what types of virtual media can constitute AR, because our pedestrian realities include frequent contact with media of all sorts: broadcast sound, pictures, telecommunications, sensors, etc. Of AR, we typically think like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart: “I know it when I see it” (Jacobellis 1964, p. 197). But, to go beyond that and list a discrete set of required technologies is difficult. Certainly, an intelligent hologram home-companion is AR, but is a typical TV screen AR because it augments an interior with virtual content? What about a gaming device, which is more intelligent and interactive? What about a sentient android? And must AR be visual, or can it be auditory, like Alexa and Siri? Must it speak and appear, or can it only watch and listen?

  6. 6.

    Bladerunner 2049, similar to Black Mirror “White Christmas”, also has a narrative of enslaved AI entities: synthetic humans (‘simulants’) are clearly sentient, but humans treat them as a slave race, to be used for services and as disposable labor for dangerous activities, such as off-world colonization (Bladerunner 0:40:00–0:42:00).

  7. 7.

    In this way, the hologram takes on the role performed by the android replicant love interest in the first Bladerunner film, released in 1982—in the second chapter, released in 2017, the human protagonist is replaced with a synthetic human, and the love interest, who was a synthetic human in the first film, is replaced with a hologram. It raises the question, how is an android (or synthetic human) essentially different from a sentient AR hologram?

  8. 8.

    But this question is not posed reciprocally. Both films seem to evade the question of the AR entity’s own experiential senses—they are able to deliver experiences of sight and sound, but what are they able to experience themselves? What would be the AR entity’s experience of sex? How can something that has never experienced touch, want touch?

  9. 9.

    In Bladerunner 2049, when the AR entity first travels outside to the roof, she experiences rain for the first time. The rain drops pass through her incarnate form, but they also render as holographic raindrops on her hand (we assume this is through sensitive and intelligent AR coding) (0:21:00).

  10. 10.

    This is the fate of the character played by Jon Hamm. In punishment for his crime, he is put “on the register” and cannot see anyone, or be seen by them (1:08:00–1:10:00).

  11. 11.

    The most popular map program, Google Maps, is comprised of many petabytes of geographic data: a quantity of information (each petabyte equivalent to one-million gigabytes) that is hard to imagine (Nahar 2017).

  12. 12.

    “How can I help you?” is the initial prompt given at https://chat.openai.com/ as of January 2024.

  13. 13.

    One can think of one comparably massive dataset that precedes our current age of technological revolution… History: the sum of all archives, museums, and libraries describing the events and objects that have come before now. This idea of history as a metaverse that can be accessed through VR and AR has been explored in both sci-fi and real-world projects. In the opening sequence of the first Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), the protagonist uses an AR device to project holograms showing the ancient city as it once was, complete with people and pets (0:05:00–0:6:00). The Chicago History Museum’s Chicago 00 Project and the Museum of London’s Streetmuseum have published apps that use AR to project the museums’ photo archives on to the places where the history occurred. The exhibition, Notre-Dame de Paris: the Augmented Exhibition, by the studio, Histovery created an AR-enabled exhibition in which one could see the entire history of the famous site (see References).

  14. 14.

    Decentraland is a 3D virtual world browser-based platform, see https://docs.decentraland.org/.

  15. 15.

    The term metaverse originated in the 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash as a portmanteau of “meta” and “universe.”

  16. 16.

    SH Contemporary: https://www.e-flux.com/directory/71999/sh-contemporary/.

  17. 17.

    School of Intermedia Art (SIMA), China Academy of Arts: http://intermediart.caa.edu.cn/.

  18. 18.

    See: http://www.chronusartcenter.org/en/.

  19. 19.

    River crab (Chinese: ; pinyin: héxiè) and harmonious/harmonize/harmonization (Chinese: 和谐; pinyin: héxié) are Internet slang terms created by Chinese netizens in reference to the Internet censorship, or other kinds of censorship in China. See: 你全家【原版】https://www.bilibili.com/video/av1605/?vd_source=32c5b9ade575b9b30daead445e846877.

  20. 20.

    See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dam_Youth_Escort.

  21. 21.

    Established in 2009, MadeIn Company is an artists' collective founded by Shanghai-based artist, Zhen (b.1977). See: https://www.whitecube.com/gallery-exhibitions/madein-company.

  22. 22.

    Video Bureau (officially launched and open to the public from 2012), see: https://videobureau.org/.

  23. 23.

    Yayoi (2013), exhibition “A Dream I Dreamed”, see: https://aaa.org.hk/tc/collections/search/library/kusama-yayoi-a-dream-i-dreamed.

  24. 24.

    Erlich (2013), SHIKUMEN, see: http://leoxuprojects.com/?page_id=1901.

  25. 25.

    teamLab (2017). Living Digital Forest and Future Park, Pace Beijing. See: https://art.team-lab.cn/en/e/beijing/.

  26. 26.

    teamLab Borderless Shanghai. See: https://art.team-lab.cn/en/e/borderless-shanghai/.

  27. 27.

    Meet You Museum 798 Beijing. See: https://www.meetyoumuseum.com/beijing-798-1.

  28. 28.

    EAST-Technology arts Season. See: http://east.work/.

  29. 29.

    School of Design & Innovation. See: https://en.caa.edu.cn/study/schoolsdepartments/schoolofdesigninnovation.

  30. 30.

    Exhibition “teamLab: Universe of Water Particles in the Tank,” see: http://tankshanghai.com/en/exhibition/info13.htm.

  31. 31.

    Exhibition “40 Years of Humanizing Technology,” see: https://ars.electronica.art/export/en/humanizingtechnology/.

  32. 32.

    Emerging Sci-tech Artist Awards, announcement, see: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/_lLZGBaV0s1MXVkaFI3gyw.

  33. 33.

    Exhibition “Do Not Black Out” (2021), see: https://www.mcam.cc/#exhibition.

  34. 34.

    “Metaverse” was written into the “14th Five-Year Plan.”

  35. 35.

    Exhibition “Meta City Biennale,” see: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/PHUJgZtxjNjGmN0MRPDjLg.

  36. 36.

    CAFA First National Virtual Curatorial Competition For Undergraduates, see: https://www.cafa.com.cn/cn/news/details/8331568.

  37. 37.

    Exhibition “Archverse,” see: https://www.caa-ins.org/archives/8184.

  38. 38.

    The exhibition unit of the “Eastern Fantasy：A Metaverse Sci-Fi Fest 2.0,” see: https://en.chengduworldcon.com/news3_35_95_32_66_76_50/82.html.

  39. 39.

    Online unit of the exhibition “Chongqing Holographic fragment,” see: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/0tjwFiulSmB34IFqQog6bA.

  40. 40.

    Exhibition “Not About Money: Landing Meta,” see: https://www.swcac.com/detail/?id=517e983c321584aacd2877f8b3ca1f13&type=expo.

  41. 41.

    AR project “Hu Zhi Ling,” see: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/P-qFp5_UDKY3DE2BRlL8dQ.

  42. 42.

    The book explores the impact of contemporary technology on global governance. Bratton introduces the concept of “The Stack,” a layered technological framework, to analyze its influence on politics, economics, and the environment. The book calls for a reevaluation of our understanding of technology's role in shaping society and urges a reconsideration of global governance in this interconnected technological age.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Future Museum Studio, Institute of Cultural and Creative Industry, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Geoffrey Alan Rhodes

  2. Metaverse Artist and Curator, Raiden INST, Shanghai, China

    Songhao Huang

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  1. Geoffrey Alan Rhodes
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Correspondence to Geoffrey Alan Rhodes .

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  1. Informatics and Computer Science, British University in Egypt, El Sherouk City, Egypt

    Vladimir Geroimenko

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Rhodes, G.A., Huang, S. (2024). Augmented and Virtual Reality in the World of GPT Text and Image Creations: AI, Metaverse, and Art. In: Geroimenko, V. (eds) Augmented and Virtual Reality in the Metaverse. Springer Series on Cultural Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-57746-8_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-57746-8_12

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