front cover of Are We There Yet?
Are We There Yet?
The Myths and Realities of Autonomous Vehicles
Edited by Michael A. Pagano
University of Illinois Press, 2020
Autonomous vehicle (AV) technology represents a possible paradigm shift in our way of life. But complex challenges and obstacles impose a reality at odds with the utopian visions propounded by AV enthusiasts in the private and public sectors.
 
The new volume in the Urban Agenda series examines the technological questions still surrounding autonomous vehicles and the uncertain societal and legislative impact of widespread AV adoption. Assessing both short- and long-term concerns, the authors probe how autonomous vehicles might change transportation but also land use, energy consumption, mass transit, commuter habits, traffic safety, job markets, the freight industry, and supply chains. At the same time, the essays discuss opportunities for industry, researchers, and policymakers to make the autonomous future safer, more efficient, and more mobile.
 
Contributors: Austin Brown, Stan Caldwell, Chris Hendrickson, Kazuya Kawamura, Taylor Long, and P. S. Srira.
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front cover of Are We There Yet?
Are We There Yet?
Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism
Alison Byerly
University of Michigan Press, 2012

Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism connects the Victorian fascination with "virtual travel" with the rise of realism in nineteenth-century fiction and twenty-first-century experiments in virtual reality. Even as the expansion of river and railway networks in the nineteenth century made travel easier than ever before, staying at home and fantasizing about travel turned into a favorite pastime. New ways of representing place—360-degree panoramas, foldout river maps, exhaustive railway guides—offered themselves as substitutes for actual travel. Thinking of these representations as a form of "virtual travel" reveals a surprising continuity between the Victorian fascination with imaginative dislocation and twenty-first -century efforts to use digital technology to expand the physical boundaries of the self.

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