Disney will soon be opening a new Avatar-themed experience in Disneyworld Florida, and a group of the brand’s biggest fans got to see a preview last week.
One of the highlights of the ride are the ridiculously realistic Na’vi robots that talk to the visitors. The movie’s CGI already looked stunning, but these animatronics are just ridiculously realistic.
I just caught up with Season 3 of Black Mirror, the dystopian science-fiction British television series on Netflix. I found the six episodes riveting, but often sort of nightmarish. Think high-tech, R-rated Twilight Zone.
Spoiler alert: the following mentions some things that are not immediately revealed in the episodes, similar to the trailers below (but does not give away endings).
An artificial intelligence system developed by researchers at DeepMind and the University of Oxford got so good by watching 5000 hours of BBC programmes.
A punky warrior races across a barren wasteland, pursued by a hulking cyborg. There’s not much more to go on in the visually stunning Lost Boy, but since it’s a proof-of-concept film, mood and style are the main attraction. It’s by PostPanic Pictures, whose visually-rich short Sundaysreceived feature interest last year.
Short proof-of-concept Sundays video is getting a feature film thanks to Warner Bros. Wonderful, we’ve had a real dearth of virtual reality, “this isn’t real”, Matrix-like features. If that’s what this short film is actually about???
It sounds like a plot from a comic book or a sci-fi film, a theory that got a boost when one of the greatest discoveries in physics in the modern era, the discovery of the “God particle,” or the Higgs boson, the missing piece in the Standard Model of particle physics. In the preface to his book Starmus, Stephen Hawking warns that the Higgs Boson field could collapse, resulting in a chain reaction that would take in the whole universe with it.
Theoretical physicist Joseph Lykken says it would probably take billions of years before we reach that point. Lykken hails from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. If it did happen though, you wouldn’t know it. One instant you are here, the next, you and everything else is swallowed up by an enormous vacuum bubble, traveling at light speed in every direction. Humanity would never see it coming.
Peter Higgs and colleagues first theorized the existence of the Higgs boson in 1964. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland finally discovered it in 2012. With this missing piece found, three of the four fundamental forces of nature become complete. The particle’s measured value is 126 billion electron volts. That’s 126 times a proton’s mass. This is just enough to maintain a state teetering near the edge of stability.
Florida-headquartered Magic Leap has set up a company in Helsinki to gain access to Finland’s vast, Nokia- and gaming-driven reservoir of VR and AR talent.
In July, Magic Leap registered a company in Helsinki with CFO Scott Henry as the chairman of the board. The company did not return my request for a comment.
The Finnish VR and AR companies I spoke with would not confirm or deny working with the company dubbed one of the most secretive startups in the world. But considering the country’s strong know-how in technologies (especially in optics, hardware, and software) that are all highly relevant in the quest for VR/AR domination, it’s no surprise that multinational giants and hot startups are courting the country’s talent pool.
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