The Ghost in the Machine

A small team at NYU Tandon's Media and Games Network (MAGNET) is working on the first-ever production of "Hamlet" in the virtual world.


There's an urban legend among cinema cognoscenti that one of the first films ever made— all 50 seconds of a steam train moving towards the camera as it pulls into a station in the Lumière brothers' 1895 classic, L'arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat— caused such shock and disorientation that members of the audience screamed and ran toward the back of the room. Some even ran from the building. Incredibly, at least to our modern sensibilities, the audience was so unfamiliar with the medium, they instinctively ran away from what felt like an actual oncoming train.

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