When Will Virtual Reality Become Reality? When I attended the VRLA Summer Expo in August, I couldn’t stop thinking about Elon Musk’s speculation that there’s a “one in billions” chance that we aren’t living in a simulation. Musk draws a … Continue reading The future of VR hardware
What will tomorrow’s computers look like? Nothing like today’s Decades from now, how will we communicate with our smart devices? Probably the same way we communicate with the real people in our lives today. USC computer scientist Andrew Gordon predicts human-computer relations in the next few decades could actually bear a striking resemblance to how 1960s-era sci-fi filmmakers imagined them. Remember Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey? “The whole spaceship is the computer in this model,” says Gordon. “You don’t type into it; you talk to it as if it were a person.” (Ideally, it won’t be prone to … Continue reading Will computer mimic humans?
Lytro raises $50 million to shift from still cameras to virtual reality Lytro plans to bring its unique camera technology to video and virtual reality, giving the tech new opportunities to catch on. According to Recode, Lytro is raising money and cutting jobs in order to facilitate the transition. It’s raised $50 million in funding in a round led by GSV Capital that bumps the company’s valuation 5x. At the same time, Lytro is cutting 25 to 50 jobs from its current roster of 130. “We are going to have to make some cuts in some areas so we can … Continue reading The virtual reality camera
Everyone should learn to drive in a simulator Georgia native Luke Pye was 18 years old, driving with his high school girlfriend on the highway when a van cut him off. He reacted by turning his wheel toward the guardrail, avoiding the surrounding cars and oncoming traffic. The situation could have played out in many different ways that afternoon. The couple could’ve been among the more than 41,000 people to lose their lives to car crashes in the US that year in 2007. Instead, they walked away with only a couple of bruises. Today, they’re married and have a four-month-old … Continue reading Driving simulators at school
A Googler’s Quest to Teach Machines How to Understand Emotions Quoc Le sees the world as a series of numbers. A digital photo is nothing but numbers, he says, and if you separate the spoken word into individual phonemes, you can translate these into numbers too. You can then feed such numbers into machines, and that means machines can ultimately understand the contents of photos and the meanings of words. Facebook can recognize your face, and Google can act on particular words you say. But Le wants to go further. He wants to create technologies that can take entire sentences, … Continue reading Can machines experience virtual emotions
How to live for a month in virtual reality Next year, artist Mark Farid wants to give up a month of his life to virtual reality. If a crowdfunding campaign succeeds, he’ll spend 28 days in a gallery, wearing a VR headset and a pair of noise-canceling headphones. For the duration of the show, all he’ll experience will be video and audio captured by a complete stranger, going about their daily life. When they eat, he’ll eat. When they sleep, he’ll sleep. As much as modern technology permits, he will let his individual identity evaporate. This isn’t escapism. He’s not … Continue reading The illusion of staying in a virtual sphere
Virtual Reality Fails Its Way to Success Of all the praise heaped upon Oculus, the virtual-reality company that Facebook acquired for $2 billion earlier this year, perhaps the most significant has been this: non-nauseating. I can testify to that after my visit last month to the groovy downtown Manhattan offices of Relevent, a marketing agency that has created a virtual-reality demo for HBO to help promote its hit series “Game of Thrones.” Without much small talk, Ian Cleary, Relevent’s vice president of “innovation and ideation,” escorted me into a steampunk cage the size of a phone booth, made of iron … Continue reading Virtual Reality Through the Years
MIT Visualizes What Robots Are Thinking Robots make thousands of tiny decisions a second, but they don’t emote or verbally communicate. So when a Roomba turns 90 degrees in the middle of the room, we’re only left wondering why and if something is broken. Now, two researchers at the MIT’s Aerospace Controls Lab–postdoc Ali-akbar Agha-mohammadi and graduate student Shayegan Omidshafiei–are creating a system to peer inside the minds of autonomous robots. “Measurable virtual reality,” as the researchers call it, can visualize what robots see and what they’re trying to do. ….[READ] Continue reading Measurable virtual reality
Big Brother is feeling you: The global impact of AI-driven mental healthcare Big Brother is feeling you—literally. A few months back, I wrote about Ellie, the world’s first AI-psychologist. Developed by DARPA and researchers at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies, Ellie is a diagnostic tool capable of reading 60 non-verbal cues a second—everything from eye-gaze to face tilt to voice tone—in the hopes of identifying the early warning signs of depressions and (part of the long term goal) stemming the rising tide of soldier suicide. And early reports indicate that Ellie is both good at her job and that soldiers … Continue reading Ellie, the AI-psychologist
‘Tilt Brush’ Surprises and Delights with Best GUI at Proto Awards – Lets You Create VR Paintings with Depth A previously unknown virtual reality software title, Tilt Brush, went home with the Proto Award for Best GUI (graphical user interface) thanks to its innovative virtual reality interface. The software uses a gaze-based interface that allows users to paint in 3D and even use the Oculus Rift DK2′s positional tracking for brush input. Tilt Brush was completely unknown prior to the Proto Awards, which had their first show last weekend in Hollywood, CA. When testing Tilt Brush as a judge for … Continue reading How to paint in 3D
LAVREB Laboratory of Virtual Reality and Economic Behavior 