Lifeboat Foundation

What if with the new wave of technologies, such as nanotechnology which would enable us to reprogram matter at a molecular level, we can overcome scarcity once and for all? Design would then become the most important part from start to end product which can be freely shared or have a premium in the marketplace. At any rate, this will dismantle the current social, economic, and political system, because it will become irrelevant; every institution, every value system, every aspect of our lives have been governed by scarcity: the problem of distributing a finite amount of “stuff.” There will be no need for any of today’s social institutions. In other words, when nanotech and ultra-realistic VR are commonplace, the system built on scarcity will crumble and that would herald the forthcoming “economic singularity.” #EconomicSiingularity

The current faltering economic model is suboptimal, hinders economic growth, and is not sustainable going forward.

Continue reading “The Economic Singularity: From Capitalism’s Unplanned Obsolescence to the New Transcendent Economy” »

When COVID-19 reared its ugly head, wreaking havoc on education for students all over the world, CSU’s human virtual reality program stepped up to meet the moment.

“We knew that teaching an entire human gross anatomy class remotely with only pictures would not be ideal for students,” said Tod Clapp, an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences and head of its human anatomy program.

Moving BMS 301, Human Gross Anatomy, to online-only instruction this summer meant that students would not only miss out on the chance to work with and learn from real human cadavers, they would also miss getting to experience the new 100-person virtual reality lab Clapp’s team built last fall.

Continue reading “Virtual Reality to the Rescue: Innovative pilot program transcends remote learning” »

Interactive 3D images that appear to float in the air, above a table that a group of people can stand around without needing any special headsets or glasses: that’s what South Australian company Voxon Photonics has built with its US$10,000 VX1 table.

Fiction has promised us holograms for decades, with one of the most famous examples appearing in 1977’s Star Wars: A New Hope. On board the Millennium Falcon, R2D2 and Chewbacca play some sort of digital board game, interacting with figures built out of light hovering in the air above a table.

Such things have been a long time coming to the real world. VR and AR can both somewhat replicate the experience, but they require headsets. In the best case, these are a bit antisocial, stopping you from looking others in the eye. In the worst case, they completely remove the wearer from the real world to immerse them in virtual space.

Get ready to dive into the Virtual Cave Worlds next Tuesday 11/17. Watch as 16 teams navigate the virtual environments with natural terrain and dynamic rock falls — all from the comfort of your home! www.subtchallenge.com.

It will allow for near-instantaneous virtual interactions, allowing people to send a hug to a loved one or shake hands with a colleague online. Its increased capacity and speed will revolutionise virtual reality and allow for wholesale ‘teleportation of senses’, researchers claim.

Potential applications include doctors monitoring patients remotely, embracing and holding hands with a loved one who may be thousands of miles away, and having virtual meetings with no lag…

Continue reading “UK’s first 6G innovation centre launches at University of Surrey” »

The COVID-19 crisis has led to a significant increase in the use of cyberspace, enabling people to work together at distant places and interact with remote environments and individuals by embodying virtual avatars or real avatars such as robots. However, the limits of avatar embodiment are not clear. Furthermore, it is not clear how these embodiments affect the behaviors of humans.

Therefore, a research team comprising Takayoshi Hagiwara (graduate student) and Professor Michiteru Kitazaki from Toyohashi University of Technology; Dr. Ganesh Gowrishankar (senior researcher) from UM-CNRS LIRMM; Professor Maki Sugimoto from Keio University; and Professor Masahiko Inami from The University of Tokyo aimed to develop a novel collaboration method with a shared avatar, which can be controlled concurrently by two individuals in VR, and to investigate human motor behaviors as the avatar is controlled in VR.

Full body movements of two participants were monitored via a motion-capture system, and movements of the shared avatar were determined as the average of the movements of the two participants. Twenty participants (10 dyads) were asked to perform reaching movements with their right hand towards target cubes that were presented at various locations. Participants exhibited superior reaction times with the shared avatar than individual reaction times, and the avatar’s hand movements were straighter and less jerky than those of the participants. The participants exhibited a sense of agency and body ownership towards the shared avatar although they only formed a part of the shared avatar.

Neuroscientists at University College London (UCL) have used laser beams to “switch on” neurons in mice, providing new insight into the hidden workings of memory and showing how memories underpin the brain’s inner GPS system.

The study, published in the journal Cell, explains how researchers harnessed an ‘all-optical’ approach using twin lasers to simultaneously read and write the activity of ‘place cells’ (a type of neuron) in mice, as they navigated a virtual reality environment.

Remarkably, by stimulating the place cells, scientists were able to reactivate (or retrieve) the memory of a location where the mice obtained a reward, which in turn “mentally teleported” the mice, causing them to act as if they were in the rewarded place.

Samsung and Stanford have developed a 10,000PPI OLED screen that could lead to completely seamless VR displays.

Over the past few decades, technological advances have enabled the development of increasingly sophisticated, immersive and realistic video games. One of the most noteworthy among these advances is virtual reality (VR), which allows users to experience games or other simulated environments as if they were actually navigating them, via the use of electronic wearable devices.

Most existing VR systems primarily focus on the sense of vision, using headsets that allow users to see what is happening in a game or in another simulated environment right before their eyes, rather than on a screen placed in front of them. While this can lead to highly engaging visual experiences, these experiences are not always matched by other types of sensory inputs.

Researchers at Nagoya University’s School of Informatics in Japan have recently created a new VR game that integrates immersive audiovisual experiences with tactile perception. This game, presented in a paper published in the Journal of Robotics, Networking and Artificial Life, uses a player’s biometric data to create a spherical object in the VR space that beats in alignment with his/her heart. The player can thus perceive the beating of his/her heart via this object visually, auditorily and tactually.