MIT made a table-like robot that can build with blocks. No humans needed.
Category: virtual reality – Page 101
“Next Wednesday, the design agency Positron will release a virtual reality “experience” in which viewers can get a first-person look from the cockpit at a race between the DeLorean and a Tesla Model S P90-D. The date is no coincidence: fans know October 21, 2015, is the day Marty McFly arrives in the future in Back to the Future II. This year also marks the 30th anniversary of the first film, released in 1985.”
Are we living in a virtual reality? Is the universe emerging from an information processing system? And if so, could we ever tell? Is it possible to ‘hack’ the system and change reality? Take a look at the evidence and decide for yourself! Contributions to THE SIMULATION HYPOTHESIS are made by leading researchers from physics, cosmology, mathematics and information sciences. Appearances by MaxTegmark, Neil degrasse Tyson, Paul Davies, James Gates and many more. Science has never been so much fun!
“What an incredible film! Fascinating, mind-bending stuff.” — Timothy Rhys, Publisher: MovieMaker Magazine.
“Supremely interesting, compelling, fantastic!” — David Hoffman, Producer: Cannes Film Festival Critics Prize Winner.
Ray Kurzweil’s singularity of human superintelligence is a polar opposite of the singularity described by Vinge, Hawking, and Bostrom:
“The singularity will be a merger of our bodies and minds with our technology. The world will still be human, but transcend our biological roots. There will be no distinction between human and machine, nor between physical and virtual reality.”
Dear readers,
This month celebrates the 10 year anniversary of the classic book The Singularity Is Near, written by Ray Kurzweil, published in September 2005.
In the decade since its publication, we’ve witnessed an explosion of breakthroughs in genetic engineering, medical regeneration of the human body, autonomous robotics, computing power, and renewable energy. Advanced sensor arrays and internet meshes are uniting all people and things within the interconnected environments we live in, and with each other. Today’s massively scaled, crowd-sourced knowledge, innovation, and shared human experience are driving this momentum. The future is now.
My new and first article for The Daily Dot. It’s about transhumanism and the Immortality Bus tour:
Even though I was born after the 1960s, I’ve always been fascinated with that era. Some people credit Ken Kesey’s cross country bus trip aboard colorfully painted “Further” as helping to create a generation of hippies. Of course, my Immortality Bus (shaped to look like a coffin) wants to stir up the national consciousness as well, aiming to usher in its own cultural shift. Whereas the ‘60s were about peace, love, drugs, and sex, I believe the next decade will be about virtual reality, implants, transhumanism, and overcoming death with science. For futurists like myself, that’s quite an intoxicating mix.
The fact is that a lot of radical tech, science, and medicine are already here in America. Consider that today the paralyzed can walk via exoskeleton suits, the blind can see via bionic eyes, and the limbless can grab a bottle of water and drink with artificial limbs that connect to their nervous system. Additionally, lifespans are increasing for people all around the planet. Science is rapidly making the world a better place, and it’s starting to eliminate suffering and hardship for billions of people.
Virtual reality headsets can trick our eyes and ears into believing we’re someplace else. Fooling the rest of the body is a little trickier though. Companies have tried spinning chairs and omnidirectional treadmills, but nothing comes close to the “Cable Robot Simulator” developed at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. The player wears a wireless VR headset inside a carbon fibre cage, which is then suspended in mid-air and thrown around the room using eight steel cables. The exposed pod is able to tilt, bank and move with an acceleration of up to 1.5g in response to the VR experience. Researchers have shown off some basic flight and racing simulations, but we’re already imagining how it could be used in our favorite video games. A dogfight in Star Wars: Battlefront Tearing around corners in F-Zero GX The possibilities are endless. It’s still very much a prototype, and hardly suitable for home use, but we’re desperate to have a go ourselves.
A sequel to Steven Spielberg’s epic movie, MINORITY REPORT is set in Washington, D.C., 10 years after the demise of Precrime, a law enforcement agency tasked with identifying and eliminating criminals … before their crimes were committed. Now, in 2065, crime-solving is different, and justice leans more on sophisticated and trusted technology than on the instincts of the precogs. Sept. 21 series premiere Mondays 9/8:00c
LIMITLESS, based on the feature film, is a fast-paced drama about Brian Finch, who discovers the brain-boosting power of the mysterious drug NZT and is coerced by the FBI into using his extraordinary cognitive abilities to solve complex cases for them. Sept. 22 series premiere Tuesdays 10/9c
Topics: Cognitive Science/Neuroscience | Entertainment/New Media | Human Enhancement | VR/Augmented Reality/Computer Graphics.
With more than $100 million in total investment, Jaunt is among the cluster of startups trying to take VR mainstream.
One of the most remarkable things about Monument Valley, the mobile puzzler from Ustwo, was how it managed to lure in people who don’t play games. Its intuitive controls and beautiful, MC Escher-inspired worlds made it the rare blockbuster that almost anyone could play. And now the studio is looking to do the same thing in virtual reality. On October 30th, Ustwo will release Land’s End on Samsung’s Gear VR, an exploration game that maintains many of the same principles of Monument Valley — stunning art, accessible controls — and transports them to a 3D space.
“The thing we wanted to do, is to bring our way of thinking to VR,” explains Peter Pashley, technical director at Ustwo Games. “We find that a lot of people who are making VR experiences are kind of making quite traditional games. I wanted to make sure that our branding was represented in the early days of VR.”
