3pointD.com

If you’re in New York or Washington over the next several weeks, you’ll have the chance to have your consciousness raised in 3D by an “interactive virtual reality installation” called Beyond Manzanar, created by Tamiko Thiel, who worked on Steven Spielberg’s Starbright World, and Iranian-American writer and multimedia artist Zara Houshmand. The show, whose title refers to a World War Two-era American internment camp for Japanese, plays on themes of xenophobia in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing and the World Trade Center attacks of 2001. [Via Chris Carella.]

This kind of thing came up at the Metaverse Roadmap summit, and was roundly criticized by Ethan Zuckerman. While I have nothing against consciousness-raising exercises, I agree with Ethan that they’re not, in themselves, enough to effect change. That said, I do see distant potential in emerging metaverse and 3D Web technologies to improve the information flows coming out of conflict sites — not immediately, mind you, but some years in the future — and I think it would be silly not to push these technologies in that direction. A virtual Manzanar isn’t really part of that, but perhaps things like this will help direct attention to more useful applications of the technology.