Week 5

The fist half of the lecture this week looked at the history of the Internet. We learnt that the Internet started with bulletin boards acting as web sites, and telephone handsets were used to link computers. Recently I saw a Cat Stevens music video (Majikat) and was surprised to see that in 1976 "Less than one thousand people were connected to a thing called 'The Internet'."

The second half of the lecture concentrated on Virtual Reality (VR). VR uses computer technology (and interfaces) to manipulate the five senses (i.e sight, sound, taste, touch & smell) into fooling the brain to make a person think that they are in a different environment than what they actually are. The future applications of VR are interesting and something that I could explore further in my essay topic.

This weeks tutorial task was to collect photos that represent the ideas of: friends, high-tech, news, summer, unconventional and university life. I took the photos using a Fuji 9.1MP digital FinePix camera model s9500. The photograph that I have selected are as follows:

Friends - This photo was taken of the Gloria Jean's coffee shop in Surfers Paradise. It symbolises a place were friends go to meet and chat over a cup of coffee.

High-tech - The most developing technology today occurs in communications. The mobile phone tower is used to represent communication technology.

News - This photo of a community news board demonstrates how news is spread at its most basic level in a neighbourhood.

Summer - The Australian culture centres around life at beach in Summer. This photo taken at Burleigh Heads represents the typical Australian Summer.

Unconventional - The normal convention for house numbers is to be attached the right way up on a letterbox, fence, or dwelling. This house at Mermaid Beach does not follow the normal convention, and has its house numbers hanging upside down.

University life - Undergraduate courses require an enormous amount of time using a personal computer. The Internet is used to research information as well as a tool for communications between the student and the university. This photograph of a computer on the learning@griffith website portrays this.