On John Underwood's southwest Texas ranch PCs are lined up on the dusty sunbaked ground, aiming and firing .22 rifles at the whim of a home user, manipulating a computer mouse anywhere in the world. Users of live-shot.com can take part in target practice and soon hunt real animals from home.
Watching this demo (Windows Media .wmv) cannot help but stir up the thoughts on the implications of this technology and a possible new era of real-life video gaming. Control physical devices in the real world through a virtual interface for points and status. Artists like Stelarc have been working for a long time exploring human machine interfaces, demonstrating for example how a human can be controlled over the Internet when mounted in robotic apparatus.
But the simplicity of integrating basically anything into the emerging ICT network means ideas like live-shot can emerge. Funnily Underwood was inspired to create the website when watching another application of this technology -- webcams set up in the wild to allow website users to take photos of passing animals.
"We were looking at a beautiful white-tail buck and my friend said 'If you just had a gun for that.' A light bulb went off in my head," he told Reuters News Agency.
Issues like this get the best out of the blogging community where opinions range from horror to applause. But I guess the real point is that such things are possible, and humanity has a habit of constantly filling our buckets of possibility. Underwood has responded to critics by emphasizing the hunting access this provides to the disabled although he is open to anyone using his system. A bill is making its way through the Texas state assembly to ban hunting by remote control.
It's not likely to exclusively remain the moral or ethical domain of politicians and policy makers to gauge responsibility in the internetworked world. As civilization adjusts to the presence and possibilities of interacting, providing services and facilitating communities in emerging human/computer networks, we will be challenged to address every application. One can imagine a kind of virtual The Most Dangerous Game, where the answer to the latest who shot JR? or JFK? at least according to the conspiracy theorists ... is a Dell 5100 or iMac.
Labels: internet
