#interact19

Last night I watched the animated virtual reality short film Dear Angelica produced by Oculus Story Studio and felt incredibly moved and hopeful about the form for the first time.

My husband got an Oculus headset at Christmas and I’ve explored a range of games, films and experiences over the past few weeks and have, until now, felt unsatisfied.

While I enjoyed the dystopian workplace short Merger by Keiichi Matsuda I felt that it delivered on a vivid immersive experience but the story lacked emotional depth.

Dear Angelica– a hit at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival - is an incredibly moving emotional portrait of grief.  It’s director and former Pixar artist Sascha Unseld has done a fantastic job of taking you inside the perspective of a woman missing her mother, and exploring the story and emotion in a way only VR can.

I love the painterly visual style of the film and how the narrative is simple and familiar. Unlike in Merger, you’re not constantly asking the film ‘what is this?’ or ‘what’s going on now?’ Instead you’re just in it, going deeper into the beautiful visual experience and human emotion.

And while the interaction is minimal, the ‘screen’ story is immersive and captivating. Dear Angelica doesn’t require your physical cues to progress the story though the narrative features natural pauses that allow you to look around and experience it.

Bravo!

I wanted to share the search engine I nowadays use. It’s called DuckDuckGo, and it’s just one of the things you can do to protect your privacy. However, in the era of all the apps, phones, websites, and maps we use I know it’s impossible to hide everything I still believe we can do something.

DuckDuckGo is a search engine that protects its users’ privacy by not storing or saving the IP addresses, does not log user information, and uses cookies only when required.  Gabriel Weinberg, the creator of DuckDuckGo, states: "By default, DuckDuckGo does not collect or share personal information. That is our privacy policy in a nutshell."

DDG doesn’t do user profiling, and that gives all the same results for every user.  It emphasises returning the best results, rather than the most results, generating those results from over 400 individual sources.

It’s very user-friendly and looks a lot like Google; simple and fast. You can choose your location, web/pictures/videos/news, or time and safe search.

If you are interested, give it a try!

This week I explored the personalised documentary series about privacy and the web economy, Do not Track.

The series featured seven episodes on different data related topics from Like Mining, Cookies, Geo-Tracking, Big Data and Social Networks.

It is a fascinating and terrifying series that left me wanting more discussion and public debate on our data is used.

I’m still reeling from watching Brexit: An Uncivilised War on Channel 4 earlier this year, about the unethical manipulation of data to sway the British referendum on Brexit.

Do Not Track echoed a lot of my anxieties and beliefs about the problems we face as a society because of the massive financial value our data.

On a personal level, I learned that I am what the documentary referred to as a ‘major user of apps’. I unwittingly accept permissions for all of those apps, activate geo-tracking and frequently use public wifi.

My personal data is being transmitted in so many ways and I can’t really see what is being shared, and because I accept the terms and conditions I am consenting to sharing personal information on my phone. Yes, including private images in my photos app.

Like it is for most of us, having a phone isn’t optional for me. I have to use a mobile and therefore, have to be tracked, and I don’t have a lot of opportunities to turn it off. It’s not about personal choice.

On a societal level, we haven’t set any limits on the types of tracking that happen. Sure, the Cambridge Analytica and Facebook scandals of last year have brought attention to the debate but they haven’t changed the fact industries are continuing to mine and manipulate our data every day.