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Imagine your chest tightening as you struggle for for breath. There’s no cure for it, and it will most likely be a hindrance to your day-to-day life.

This feeling is familiar to the 300 million people worldwide who suffer from asthma. In the US alone, one in 14 people has asthma, and ten of them die from asthma every day.

For children, relying on symptoms to determine whether an asthma attack is about to happen is particularly difficult. Not only is it harder for them to articulate their discomfort, it’s less likely that they will be able to attribute it to asthmatic symptoms.

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The Allen Brain Observatory is open for business, revealing what’s running through the mind of a mouse as it sees patterns of light and dark, pictures of butterflies and tigers – or even the opening scene of Orson Welles’ 1958 classic film, “Touch of Evil.”

The online repository of 30 trillion bytes’ worth of brain-cell readings represents the latest scientific offering from the Allen Institute for Brain Science, funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. It follows through on a $300 million pledge that Allen made more than four years ago.

The Allen Institute’s president and chief scientific officer, Christof Koch, has compared the project to a Hubble Space Telescope for the brain.

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We’re really excited to be working with the Toronto International Film Festival on a three-day event called POP showcasing some of the most inventive VR creations… and it’s coming up very soon — Friday, July 15th through Sunday, July 17th at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto. Tickets are on sale now, and we’d love to see you there.

Let’s talk about what you’ll see when you’re there. The theme of this POP event is empathy and real-world storytelling — how VR can really impact your view of (and connections to) the world. We have more than a dozen pieces that you can try.

Then on Saturday, Adi Robertson and I will be moderating panels where the creators — including the co-founders of Felix and Paul… Felix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël — talk about how they use VR to elicit emotion.

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Enjoy this VFX Sci-Fi Short Film… 2046. A new energy source, created to solve the world’s energy crisis, is believed to have deadly side effects. When The Signal’s inventor chooses to help a girl warn the public, he gains an unlikely ally to save the world from his own creation. Starring Michael Ealy and Grace Phipps, Written and Directed by Marcus Stokes!

On the web — http://www.thesignalmovie.com

This live action short film was shot in downtown Los Angeles over a weekend. The post production and visual effects took considerably longer and were done by the writer/director Marcus Stokes and a few additional VFX artists.

Starring: michael ealy, grace phipps, doc duhame, casey adams, zack duhame, brian buccellato, ciera payton, and gonzalo escudero.

Writer/director/vfx supervisor: marcus stokes executive producer: tim story producer: chris harding cinematographer: larry blanford editor: melissa lawson sound editor: stephen hunter flick music producer: bear mccreary composer: michael beach, jonathan ortega stunt coordinator: casey adams

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Since then, I’ve been entrenched in the video game industry and fascinated with the rapid evolution of the technology surrounding it.

I’m addicted to producing professional web content which aims to simultaneously educate and entertain. My column at Forbes is the culmination of these experiences, and I’ll bring my unique voice, background and skillset to deliver memorable content.

I’ve also contributed gaming and technology features to outlets like PCWorld and HotHardware.

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I just last week saw the movie Neon Demon. The movie explores pathology of prettiness, and to what degree people demand to consume prettiness. This is a particularly futurist topic, as society might change a lot with regards to commidifying as well as synthesizing completely new forms of beauty. This arouses deep seated fears. We fear those who manipulate desire (love, lust, loneliness, among others) for their own benefit. But many in the field claim “it is just another job”. Is relationship now part of the “gig economy” or should our politicians interfere? Will a basic income increase these forms of prostitution or decrease them?

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So-called “zero-point energy” is a term familiar to some cinema lovers or series fans; in the fictional world of animated films such as “The Incredibles” or the TV series “Stargate Atlantis”, it denotes a powerful and virtually inexhaustible energy source.

Whether it could ever be used as such is arguable. Scientists at Jülich have now found out that it plays an important role in the stability of nanomagnets. These are of great technical interest for the magnetic storage of data, but so far have never been sufficiently stable. Researchers are now pointing the way to making it possible to produce nanomagnets with low zero-point energy and thus a higher degree of stability (Nano Letters, “Zero-Point Spin-Fluctuations of Single Adatoms”).

Artistic depiction of the magnetic fluctuations (blue arrows)  of a single atom (red ball)  lying on a surface (gray balls)

Artistic depiction of the magnetic fluctuations (blue arrows) of a single atom (red ball) lying on a surface (gray balls).

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Human civilization has always been a virtual reality. At the onset of culture, which was propagated through the proto-media of cave painting, the talking drum, music, fetish art making, oral tradition and the like, Homo sapiens began a march into cultural virtual realities, a march that would span the entirety of the human enterprise. We don’t often think of cultures as virtual realities, but there is no more apt descriptor for our widely diverse sociological organizations and interpretations than the metaphor of the “virtual reality.” Indeed, the virtual reality metaphor encompasses the complete human project.

Figure 2

Virtual Reality researchers, Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson, write in their book Infinite Reality; “[Cave art] is likely the first animation technology”, where it provided an early means of what they refer to as “virtual travel”. You are in the cave, but the media in that cave, the dynamic-drawn, fire-illuminated art, represents the plains and animals outside—a completely different environment, one facing entirely the opposite direction, beyond the mouth of the cave. When surrounded by cave art, alive with movement from flickering torches, you are at once inside the cave itself whilst the media experience surrounding you encourages you to indulge in fantasy, and to mentally simulate an entirely different environment. Blascovich and Bailenson suggest that in terms of the evolution of media technology, this was the very first immersive VR. Both the room and helmet-sized VRs used in the present day are but a sophistication of this original form of media VR tech.

Read entire essay here