The stimulations were critical for their learning. Separate experiments with DishBrain without any electrical feedback performed far worse.
Game On
The study is a proof of concept that neurons in a dish can be a sophisticated learning machine, and even exhibit signs of sentience and intelligence, said Kagan. That’s not to say they’re conscious—rather, they have the ability to adapt to a goal when “embodied” into a virtual environment.
The designer has equipped the headset with explosive charges.
Palmer Luckey, the guy who co-founded the virtual reality (VR) headset-making company Oculus, has now made another VR headset that can kill you if you die in an online game. Luckey’s company was acquired by Facebook, now Meta, and his product is now a critical component of the metaverse that Mark Zuckerberg plans to build the company around.
At the outset, it might seem that Zuckerberg did the right thing by acquiring Oculus. Otherwise, we would not really know what sort of products they would bring to the market.
Palmer Luckey.
However, in a blog post, Luckey has given us some clues as to what inspired him to make the VR headsets in the first place and what continues to inspire him even today, and it all boils down to an anime game called Sword Art Online (SOA).
Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have engineered a virtual reality (VR) remote collaboration system which lets users on Segways share not only what they see but also the feeling of acceleration as they move. Riders equipped with cameras and accelerometers can feedback their sensations to a remote user on a modified wheelchair wearing a VR headset. User surveys showed significant reduction in VR sickness, promising a better experience for remote collaboration activities.
Virtual reality (VR) technology is making rapid headway, letting users experience and share an immersive, 3D environment. In the field of remote work, one of the major advances it offers is a chance for workers in different locations to share what they see and hear in real-time.
An example is users on personal mobility devices in large warehouse facilities, factories, and construction sites. Riders can cover large areas with ease while highlighting issues in real-time to a remote co-worker. However, one major drawback can ruin the whole experience: VR sickness is a type of motion sickness which comes from users seeing “motion” through their headsets without actually moving. Symptoms include headaches, nausea, and sometimes vomiting. The problem is particularly acute for the example above, when the person sharing the experience is moving about.
Since I won’t be posting on Facebook that much in the future. I will leave you with this post, and also hope to see you there, as with Twitter.
Neal Stephenson invented the metaverse. At least from an imagination standpoint. Though other science fiction writers had similar ideas—and the pioneers of VR were already building artificial worlds—Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash not only fleshed out the vision of escaping to a place where digital displaced the physical, it also gave it a name. That book cemented him as a major writer, and since then he’s had huge success.
Plus: Depicting the nerd mindset; the best lettuce; and the future is flooding.
Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) headsets are becoming increasingly advanced, enabling increasingly engaging and immersive digital experiences. To make VR and AR experiences even more realistic, engineers have been trying to create better systems that produce tactile and haptic feedback matching virtual content.
Researchers at University of Hong Kong, City University of Hong Kong, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC) and other institutes in China have recently created WeTac, a miniaturized, soft and ultrathin wireless electrotactile system that produces tactile sensations on a user’s skin. This system, introduced in Nature Machine Intelligence, works by delivering electrical current through a user’s hand.
“As the tactile sensitivity among different individuals and different parts of the hand within a person varies widely, a universal method to encode tactile information into faithful feedback in hands according to sensitivity features is urgently needed,” Kuanming Yao and his colleagues wrote in their paper. “In addition, existing haptic interfaces worn on the hand are usually bulky, rigid and tethered by cables, which is a hurdle for accurately and naturally providing haptic feedback.”
Gallery QI — Becoming: An Interactive Music Journey in VR — Opening Night.
November 3rd, 2022 — Atkinson Hall auditorium.
UC San Diego — La Jolla, CA
By Shahrokh Yadegari, John Burnett, Eito Murakami and Louis Pisha.
“Becoming” is the result of a collaborative work that was initiated at the Opera Hack organized by San Diego Opera. It is an operatic VR experience based on a Persian poem by Mowlana Rumi depicting the evolution of human spirit. The audience experiences visual, auditory and tactile impressions which are partly curated and partly generated interactively in response to the player’s actions.
“Becoming” incorporates fluid and reactive graphical material which embodies the process of transformation depicted in the Rumi poem. Worlds seamlessly morph between organic and synthetic environments such as oceans, mountains and cities and are populated by continuously evolving life forms. The music is a union of classical Persian music fused with electronic music where the human voice becomes the beacon of spirit across the different stages of the evolution. The various worlds are constructed by the real-time manipulation of particle systems, flocking algorithms and terrain generation methods—all of which can be touched and influenced by the viewer. Audience members can be connected through the network and haptic feedback technology provides human interaction cues as well as an experiential stimulus.
While the piece is a major artistic endeavor, it also showcases a number of key technologies and streaming techniques for the development of musical content in XR. The spatialization system Space3D, developed at Sonic Arts and implemented to run on advanced GPUs, is capable of creating highly realistic spatial impressions, and recreating the acoustics of the environment based on the virtual models in real-time using advanced multi-processing ray-tracing techniques.
“Becoming” premiered at SIGGRAPH 2022, Immersive Pavilion in Vancouver, Canada in August 2022. Opera America and San Diego Opera showcased an early preview of this work as part of the first Opera Hack presentations in 2020.
It mentions that Mark believes that people will migrate to the Metaverse and leave reality behind.
Here’s my conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, including a few opening words from me on Ukraine, Putin, and war. We talk about censorship, freedom, mental health, Social Dilemma, Instagram whistleblower, mortality, meaning & the future of the Metaverse & AI. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zOHSysMmH0 pic.twitter.com/BLARIpXgL0— Lex Fridman (@lexfridman) February 26, 2022
SEE ALSO: Meta Shuts Down Its Students-only College Social Network ‘Campus’
Reports suggest that Meta intends to spend the next five to ten years creating an immersive virtual environment that includes fragrance, touch, and sound to allow users to lose themselves in virtual reality. The wealthy creator unveiled an AI system that can be used to construct totally personalized worlds to your own design in a recent update on future plans, and he’s working on higher-fidelity avatars and spatial audio to make communication simpler.
Art is a fascinating yet extremely complex discipline. Indeed, the creation of artistic images is often not only a time-consuming problem but also requires a significant amount of expertise. If this problem holds for 2D artworks, imagine extending it to dimensions beyond the image plane, such as time (in animated content) or 3D space (with sculptures or virtual environments). This introduces new constraints and challenges, which are addressed by this paper.
Previous results involving 2D stylization focus on video contents split frame by frame. The result is that the generated individual frames achieve high-quality stylization but often lead to flickering artifacts in the generated video. This is due to the lack of temporal coherence of the produced frames. Furthermore, they do not investigate the 3D environment, which would increase the complexity of the task. Other works focusing on 3D stylization suffer from geometrically inaccurate reconstructions of point cloud or triangle meshes and the lack of style details. The reason lies in the different geometrical properties of starting mesh and produced mesh, as the style is applied after a linear transformation.
The proposed method termed Artistic Radiance Fields (ARF), can transfer the artistic features from a single 2D image to a real-world 3D scene, leading to artistic novel view renderings that are faithful to the input style image (Fig. 1).
When in 2015, Eileen Brown looked at the ETER9 Project (crazy for many, visionary for few) and wrote an interesting article for ZDNET with the title “New social network ETER9 brings AI to your interactions”, it ensured a worldwide projection of something the world was not expecting.
Someone, in a lost world (outside the United States), was risking, with everything he had in his possession (very little or less than nothing), a vision worthy of the American dream. At that time, Facebook was already beginning to annoy the cleaner minds that were looking for a difference and a more innovative world.
Today, after that test bench, we see that Facebook (Meta or whatever) is nothing but an illusion, or, I dare say, a big disappointment. No, no, no! I am not now bad-mouthing Facebook just because I have a project in hand that is seen as a potential competitor.
I was even a big fan of the “original” Facebook; but then I realized, it took me a few years, that Mark Zuckerberg is nothing more than a simple kid, now a man, who against everything and everyone, gave in to whims. Of him, initially, and now, perforce, of what his big investors, deluded by himself, of what his “metaverse” would be.
