Imagine wearing a book. Imagine the characters in that book asserting their emotions onto you physically, from triumph to tragedy. When they’re sad, you feel sad. When they’re cold, you’re shivering, and so on… Vice reports that MIT’s Media Lab has created a prototype for a “sensory fiction” device that will mimic what the characters in a book are feeling.
According to Vice:
Is the protagonist depressed? One hundred LED lights on the book cover will adjust to create ambient lighting to reflect the mood. Scared? Air pressure bags in the wearable vest will make it constrict and feel tighter. Excited? Vibration patterns that influence your heart rate can make it beat faster. Embarrassed? A heating device on the vest changes the temperature of your skin.
Creepy? You bet! But also kind of interesting if done carefully and artfully. Take a look at the video which quickly details the device in use as the reader works through a James Tiptree, Jr. story.
I already have one of those. It’s called an imagination.
@1 Exactly my thinking.
catperson@1: Perfect.
This reminds me of when I was a kid and saw the (1978) Battlestar Galactica movie. The cinema had been fitted with some gadget which shook the seats when a spaceship went by.
And that of course was the birth of sensory fiction cinema, and nothing has been the same since. Has any other technology since Gutenberg had such a significant effect on our culture?
I think I’ll stick with my Kindle.
I like their choice of fiction. James Tiptree, Jr. AKA Alice Sheldon FTW!
I’ll pass on the sensory tech though. If I wanted non-written sensory clues I’d go see a movie.
If I want characters and their emotions turned into light and vibrations, I’ll watch a fucking movie.
This sounds like an absolute nightmare.
Certainly, when I read, I care about the people I’m reading about.
But I also read to escape, to care about someone else (even fictional) when my own problems are more than I can deal with.
My own mind and imagination are very, very good at taking a story on a page and understanding it on an emotional level, without being overwhelmed and having it harm my own emotional well-being.
I avoid watching movies in theaters, because it tends to override my own ablility to manage a story in an emotionally safe way.
And I don’t trust authors and publishers with the ability to manipulate my emotions in the way described and still be able to enjoy stories in a way that is compatible with my mental health.
This type of innovation seems to be asking the question “how can we make reading a book more like watching a movie in a theater?” without any consideration as to why someone would prefer to read a story in a book rather than to watch it in a movie theater.
And I don’t think that this will work, financially. If I enjoy my stories as movies in a theater, then I will spend my money for that experience. If I enjoy my stories as text on a page, why would I spend more to experience a text-on-page story with all sorts of odd physical effects beyong my control?
Different people enjoy stories presented in different ways. This idea seems to be about taking stories as enjoyed by one sort of person, and making them into something close to but not really the type of stories enjoyed by another sort of person, and ending up with stories in a form that no one enjoys.
People who enjoy text stories are overwhelmed by unwanted sensory experience, and people who enjoy stories as movies and television are left wanting for the ways in which these stories fall short.
Agreed with 8 and I have some similar problems with certain topics when it comes to movies or even books – sometimes my imagination is TOO good at making things vivid.
When I first saw the headline, I was thinking of something a little more direct – something that somehow stimulated ‘sadness’ or ‘horror’, whatever – but, as somebody pointed out on the Game of Thrones thread, part of the reason we read books like that is to be able to deal with those kinds of events in a more ‘safe’ way. I definitely don’t want to ‘experience’ exactly what it feels like to lose a child, or to be in fear for my life, etc. That doesn’t mean that I don’t want to be moved at all, but to me, part of the value of a book and its ability to move you is that you are using your own emotions, empathy, intellect, etc to generate that emotion (and of course it is partially dependent on the skill of the writer to be able to tap into it) – it kind of cheapens a bit to just have some lights or sensations ‘stimulate’ the emotions.
Which is not to say that movies and film – which do make more use of things like music and imagery and color – are ‘cheating’, but…it’s a different medium.
I guess maybe this could end up being a medium unto itself but to me – and maybe I’m being a bit snobby – it seems a lazy way to read (and encouraging a lazy way to write!) and would maybe even harm one of reading’s great gifts, which is to help develop your own emotional responses and thoughts.