Future U.S. military tanks may look and perform nothing like they do today.
In fact, they may not even have windows and instead seal military personnel inside a closed cockpit to better protect them against threats.
But how could they see the battlefield around them without windows? To see outside, Soldiers could use a new technology made by Honeywell that lets them “see” with virtual reality and augmented reality.
Neat!
Drawing in air, touchless control of virtual objects, and a modular mobile phone with snap-in sections (for lending to friends, family members, or even strangers) are among the innovative user-interface concepts to be introduced at the 30th ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium (UIST 2017) on October 22–25 in Quebec City, Canada.
Here are three concepts to be presented, developed by researchers at Dartmouth College’s human computer interface lab.
The four drivers received specialist training, including a new virtual reality mode…
Lincolnshire police officers have been receiving extra lessons in high-speed car chases — by playing a video game.
PlayStation has partnered up with Lincolnshire Police in order to provide extra tuition to specialist drivers using Gran Turismo Sport.
The project — which aims to boost skill and safety — has seen officers clock an initial lap time at Silverstone race course in Towcester.
Looking back at vintage conceptions of the future can be interesting. Most depictions of the 2000s that were rendered in the 1800s or early 1900s come off as whimsical, because they’re so off-target. Illustrators in the past were often focused on transportation, military tactics, and domestic life, and they predicted everything from whale buses to Fallout -esque fashion. Some illustrated predictions, however, are eerily accurate.
In 1963, science fiction author Hugo Gernsback posed for Life Magazine wearing a fake mock-up of a tool featured in one of his stories. He called the contraption “TV glasses”. Considering them now, they look a lot like an oculus rift. Hugo told Life that users would one day watch television on screens so close to their eyes that they felt immersed in the action, effectively predicting the media’s recent preoccupation with virtual reality.
No one’s sure if Hugo also predicted immersive “action” of the pornographic kind, but that’s what technology’s up to now.
Article out by Ron Bailey at Reason Magazine that discusses #transhumanism and #libertarianism:
Kai Weiss, a researcher at the Austrian Economics Center and Hayek Institute in Vienna, Austria, swiftly denounced the piece. “Transhumanism should be rejected by libertarians as an abomination of human evolution,” he wrote.
Clearly there is some disagreement.
Weiss is correct that Istvan doesn’t expend much intellectual effort linking transhumanism with libertarian thinking. Istvan largely assumes that people seeking to flourish should have the freedom to enhance their bodies and minds and those of their children without much government interference. So what abominable transhumanist technologies does Weiss denounce?
Weiss includes defeating death, robotic hearts, virtual reality sex, telepathy via mind-reading headsets, brain implants, ectogenesis, artificial intelligence, exoskeleton suits, designer babies, and gene editing tech. “At no point [does Istvan] wonder if we should even strive for these technologies,” Weiss thunders.
That problem from the frontier of technology is why many tech leaders foresee the need for a new “edge computing” network—one that turns the logic of today’s cloud inside out. Today the $247 billion cloud computing industry funnels everything through massive centralized data centers operated by giants like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. That’s been a smart model for scaling up web search and social networks, as well as streaming media to billions of users. But it’s not so smart for latency-intolerant applications like autonomous cars or mobile mixed reality.
Cloud computing’s big, distant data centers can’t support VR and self-driving cars—but “edge computing” can.