Virtual reality photography has been around a while, but is becoming more widely known as new ways emerge of experiencing media. In particular, people expect rich ways of exploring remote locations, and the emergence of touch-sensitive displays makes VR pictures very compelling. In addition to photographic value, they offer an intriguing metaphor for seeing things in the real world — for understanding our whole reality.

VR photographs are viewed interactively. They are images that show all fields of view available from a given location. Three hundred sixty degrees around, and one hundred eighty degrees vertically, the viewer is essentially inside a sphere with the ability to look in any direction and often to zoom in for greater detail.

What can this tell us about the nature of reality? Continue reading →

The Avengers is one of the best superhero movies ever made. Like some other recent superhero movies, what made it so good wasn’t just the spectacular adventure, but the personal stories intertwined with that adventure. Real characters that develop as the story unfolds, adding a literary depth to the well-crafted adventure. In this case, a key theme was how a bunch of diverse and independent characters came together to battle something bigger than all of them, and how they ultimately succeeded. There’s was a success born not only from physical power, but from a paradox ultimately more powerful than even the tesseract. The seed for this paradox was planted near the beginning, during Loki’s speech. Continue reading →

In the movie Terminator 2, young John Connor tells the Terminator not to kill people. In response, the machine asks why. Although the answer seems obvious, the boy has a difficult time giving an explanation. Instead, he simply reiterates the command without a reason. The Terminator’s obedience to this becomes a hallmark feature of the movie, as well as the next. But it is not until later in T2 that the issue is really confronted. Continue reading →

In a previous post, Seeing More in the Watchmen, I touched on some of the spiritual references in the book, and tied them together under theme of “who watches the watchmen”. That’s kind of the “theme question” for the story, in that it come up over and over. The question itself goes back to Plato, and it was originally argued that society’s watchmen must police themselves. The fallacy of that argument is illustrated nicely by the Watchmen novel.

After looking at the question, and proposing that an answer is found in the story itself, the next step was to look at what this implies about the nature of the One who watches the Watchmen. This is where things get interesting.

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I read the graphic novel “Watchmen”, and was struck from the first page by the amount of spiritual content. Not just obvious things, like The Comedian’s eulogy, the verses at the end of some chapters, or even Jon walking on water, but some of the more subtle things.

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