In fact, given the incessant reblogging of food pictures taken by others or oneself, shaky cell phone camera in hand at a local fine dining hotspot, food is not so much genuinely loved as it is madly stalked, photographed, instagram filtered, traded, and collected on virtual and real walls.
Ternovskiy sucked down a glass of fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice and pattered on about happiness and the intersection between virtual reality and real reality.
They caution, though, that there are important differences between virtual plagues and real ones.
In the last few years our private lives have been inundated with junk mail and our mailboxes real and virtual are filled to the tipping point with brand magazines and offers.
Its Japanese-language counterpart, which currently accepts orders but not online payments, will be relaunched next month as a full-service e-commerce center complete with virtual shopping trolleys and real-time credit-card processing.
In a shrinking world where air travel and the Web have made real and virtual nomads of us, major environmental and health problems have also become globe-trotters.
Mixing virtual worlds and virtual money creates some very real risks, to be sure.
Then, with the advent of the newest trends in e-commerce such as flash sales websites, personal subscriptions, and collaborative consumption, virtual shopping became just as overwhelming and complicated as real life shopping.
FORBES: Gentology: The Celebrity Curated E-Commerce Just For Guys
"Next-generation games blur the lines between real and virtual worlds more than ever before, " he said.
They tested 600 subjects when surrounded by red, blue or neutral colors in both real and virtual environments.
WSJ: Jonah Lehrer on Buildings, Health and Creativity | Head Case
With more disclosure comes more paper work, both real and virtual, and more information for investors and analysts to sift through.
Facebook is unprecedented not only in its scale but also in its ability to blur boundaries between the real and virtual worlds.
Here the fault is the education, not the internet, which needs to be given a much bigger role in classrooms (real and virtual).
Recent smaller projects that are still finding their legs include Facebook Gifts, which lets you buy real and virtual goods for friends, and charging to send strangers messages.
CNN: Facebook mobile users surpass desktop users for first time
As a researcher for the virtual world contractor Electric Sheep, he's working with a major toy company to build a product that would exist in both real and virtual environments.
The key for marketers is to learn how this collision of real and virtual time and space can be of the greatest benefit to their brands and the consumers who buy them.
FORBES: Virtual Experiences Help Brands Win Friends, Influence People
Recent smaller projects that are still finding their legs include Facebook Gifts, which lets you buy real and virtual goods for friends, and charging a small fee to send messages to strangers.
CNN: Facebook mobile users surpass desktop users for first time
As well as making it possible to scribble virtually anywhere, linking the real and virtual worlds through mobile devices could also change users' perception of their surroundings, says Jason Devitt of Vindigo, a company based in New York that provides location-based services on both handheld computers and mobile phones.
"We are very interested in music where you have real instruments on stage and virtual sound sources, which can be coming directly from the computer or transformed from the real-time recording of instruments onstage, " he says.
Google is about fluidity and search and making virtual things seem more real than reality, itself.
One of them is how much impact virtual economies and currencies will have on real world ones.
Movie rentals marks an extension of the credits system beyond virtual goods to real services, and (who knows) could potentially lead to physical goods.
Designed to work with SMART Devices that are typically connected to the internet, SMART Glasses are interactive and merge virtual information with the real world.
ENGADGET: Vuzix designs Smart Glasses to look like sunshades, tout connected transparent display
It's a matter of time before the real and the virtual fold into each other on the wireless Web, says Wonhee Sull, vice president of platform development at SK Telecom.
Its 150 news, music and entertainment channels draw to the site customers who spend real money for real goods at NetRadio's virtual music and software stores.
ECONOMIST: How well is net radio fulfilling its early promise?
The result: 6D gaze vectors on objects are calculated automatically and virtual content can be presented in real-time dependent on the gaze interaction of the user with the environment.
ENGADGET: SMI Eye-Tracking 3D Glasses use rim-based cameras to adjust perspective
And just as in real life, purchasing an expensive virtual good can send signals of status, wealth and power within virtual worlds and social networks.
And if you get bored of virtual building and would like to be able to get your hands on the real thing, then you can also order the necessary bricks for your creation and Lego will package it up for you.
应用推荐