Lifeboat Foundation

Have you ever wanted to mess with a video by making its cast say things they never would on camera? You might get that chance. Researchers have built a face detection system that lets you impose your facial expressions on people in videos. The software uses an off-the-shelf webcam to create a 3D model of your face in real time, and distorts it to fit the facial details in the target footage. The result, as you’ll see below, is eerily authentic-looking: you can have a dead-serious Vladimir Putin make funny faces, or Donald Trump blab when he’d otherwise stay silent.

This isn’t about to reach software you can buy, but the implications for video creation are big if it becomes more than a university project. You could use the tool to mess with your friends by having celebrities say audacious things, or have famous figures recite dialogue in movies without needing to painstakingly animate faces frame by frame. In other words: get ready for an era when even the most plausible videos aren’t safe from a little computer trickery.

Continue reading “Smart 3D modeling lets you mess with faces in videos” »

When we think of the future of technology, we often imagine gadgets that will make us go faster. But some of the truly exciting developments will be around gadgets that help us with the tricky aspects of our emotional lives. If you like our films take a look at our shop (we ship worldwide): http://www.theschooloflife.com/shop/all/

Brought to you by http://www.theschooloflife.com

Continue reading “Emotional Technology” »

The fact that some people remember the past as a series of episodes full of details (episodic memory), while others store in their brains the meaning of events (semantic memory), has a lot to do with the configuration of the connections in the brain, according to a recent study published in the journal Cortex. Neuroscience is deciphering the sophisticated mechanisms of human memory to explain how we file and remember information.

– Memory’s unreliable.

Continue reading “The Latest Findings on Memory” »

The unholy, skinless, bloody creatures shambled toward me on all sides. My pistol was pitifully inadequate. For the first time ever, I pulled a VR rig off my head in the middle of a demo.

Not even extreme nausea had caused me to do so before Thursday, when I demoed the HTC Vive game The Brookhaven Experiment at Valve Software’s booth at the 2016 Game Developers Conference. I’d always choked down the bile and forced myself to finish the demo rather than bail, even though this is almost always a bad decision. Call it stupid gamer pride.

Continue reading “Virtual reality horror game The Brookhaven Experiment will scare the s**t out of you” »

The first games for Oculus Rift are pretty sweet, though some can cause motion sickness.

Enjoy millions of the latest Android apps, games, music, movies, TV, books, magazines & more. Anytime, anywhere, across your devices.

Is this another strategy to fight terrorism by seeing from techies and others the various ways terrorists can take every day items to create weapons?

Do you want to be a MacGyver and turn everyday household items into Decepticons? Then DARPA’s new Improv program wants you.

This sounds like a Transformers movie. Or a MacGyver episode. Heck, this could even be a precursor to Skynet and future Terminators. OK, that last one may not apply, but a new DARPA program wants people who can weaponize a toaster.

Continue reading “DARPA Calls For Creative Individuals to Weaponize Common Items” »

The film, produced and directed by Tristan Quinn, will be shown on BBC Two at 20:00 on Wednesday 16 March 2016.

A master player of the game Go has won his first match against a Google computer program, after losing three in a row in a best-of-five competition.

Lee Se-dol, one of the world’s top players, said his win against AlphaGo was “invaluable”.

The Chinese board game is considered to be a much more complex challenge for a computer than chess, and AlphaGo’s wins were seen as a landmark moment for artificial intelligence.