Lifeboat Foundation

A Technicolor scientist surrounded by the latest virtual reality technology inspects a vial containing a few droplets of water—and one million copies of an old movie encoded into DNA.

The company has come a long way since the Hollywood golden age, when the world gazed in awe at the lush palette of “The Wizard of Oz” and “Gone with the Wind” provided by its three-strip cameras.

Now celebrating its centenary year, Technicolor’s laboratories are at the cutting edge of the science of filmmaking, leading a worldwide revolution in immersive entertainment.

“Travel agencies have struggled to bring people back into their stores over the last few years thanks to the Internet. In the UK and Belgium, however, one of Europe’s biggest tour operators Thomas Cook rolled out Samsung Gear VR headsets in a bid to entice customers back into its stores by offering to bring dream vacation destinations to life.”

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Oculus Rift roller coaster reaction.

This is NOT the way to encourage people to use this device, nor develop anything for it at all. Shame on them!

“By submitting User Content through the Services, you grant Oculus a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual (i.e. lasting forever), non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free and fully sublicensable (i.e. we can grant this right to others) right to use, copy, display, store, adapt, publicly perform and distribute such User Content in connection with the Services. You irrevocably consent to any and all acts or omissions by us or persons authorized by us that may infringe any moral right (or analogous right) in your User Content.”

The Oculus Rift is starting to ship, and we’re pretty happy with it. While it’s cool, like any interesting gadget, it’s worth looking through the Terms of Service, because there are some worrisome things included.

Continue reading “There Are Some Super Shady Things in Oculus Rift’s Terms of Service” »

A lot of transhumanism friends have asked me to write about Bernie Sanders, so here are my thoughts:

The transhumanism movement has been dramatically growing in size—and most of that growth is from millennials and youth joining. Transhumanists want to use science and technology to radically improve the human race, and the onslaught of new gear and gadgets to do that—like virtual reality, robots, and chip implants —are giving them plenty of ammunition to do that.

Continue reading “The Bernie Sanders Phenomenon and Transhumanism” »

“[T]oday, the final, consumer-ready version of the Rift arrives ready to show virtual reality’s promise to the world — as well as the hurdles that consumer VR still has to overcome.”

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There are some kernels of brilliance scattered amid the dead spaces of “Creative Control,” a microbudgeted techno-drama.

In a near-future Brooklyn, marketing consultant David (played by Benjamin Dickinson, the film’s director and co-writer) is assigned to create an ad campaign for Augmenta, a new form of augmented-reality glasses that will add a high-tech layer to the viewer’s reality. After deciding to give a pair to a hip artist — in this case, the musician/comedian Reggie Watts, here wittily sending up his own image — David starts noodling with a pair himself.

While he ignores his flighty yoga-instructor girlfriend, Juliette (Nora Zehetner), David starts to create a sexy avatar based on Sophie (Alexia Rasmussen), the fashion-designer girlfriend of his best friend, Wim (Dan Gill), a philandering photographer. David and Sophie start crushing on each other, but it’s nothing to the sparks David feels with her simulated version.

Continue reading “Movie review: Virtual reality blurs the line in ‘Creative Control’” »

BOSTON — When evaluating wearables, IT can’t leave out augmented and virtual reality devices, which are poised to have a major effect on the enterprise.

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” »