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A
participant enters the CompuObscura, which is fairly
dark, and she stands for a few moments to let her eyes
adjust. She notices a few other people in the room with
her, some standing still, some walking around. Projected
against one wall is a large video image, showing that
the participant and her fellow CompuObscura participants
are standing in a corner of a plaza in Italy, taking
up roughly the same amount of space in the plaza that
they are taking up in the CompuObscura. The key thing
that the participant will notice immediately is that
the image of herself in the plaza is puppet-like, it
is as if large photographs of parts of her body have
been pieced together to form a large, somewhat two-dimensional
puppet.
The effect of standing in the
middle of the CompuObscura and looking at the video
is similar to looking at a wall-sized
mirror reflection of the CompuObsura room, except
the reflection contains elements that are not present
in the “actual” room. Scattered around the
projected plaza environment are a few other puppet-like
figures, but they are not representative of the people
who are in the actual CompuObscura, at the same time
as our subject--these puppets are clearly paired with
participants "beamed in" from some distant
location, probably from another CompuObscura device. |
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