Lifeboat Foundation

MindMaze technology explores the potential of brain machine interfacing with virtual reality, and it just got a huge financial boost.

Switzerland-based VR company, MindMaze received a major investment from Hinduja Group, who has valued the company at over $1 billion. This is a ten-fold increase since its previous valuation in 2012 where it was pegged at $10 million.

In a recent report published by the Economic Times, the investment is only “less than a third” of the company and makes MindMaze one of two “unicorns” in the AR and VR industry. MindMaze now joins Magic Leap in this category, which was values at over $4 billion.

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In a remote part of Utah, a small team of engineers, designers, and enthusiasts are creating fun and innovative experiences that rival anything you’d see at Disney World or Universal Studios.

The Void is a new age playground that seamlessly blends virtual reality experiences with physical environments, using effects like wind and water to make those virtual worlds feel even more convincing — anything from jungles to caves to fantastic environments you couldn’t dream of.

Continue reading “The Void: Alien level experience” »

In 2010, DARPA announced it was creating an autonomous, submarine-hunting war machine that would be manned with exactly zero people. Now, that vehicle is ready for action.

The Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel, or ACTUV, is now scheduled to be launched April 17 from the Vigor Shipyards in Oregon. The ACTUV will continue sea-trials for 18 months following its maiden voyage, where it will be tested for its long-range tracking and self-driving functions.

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Rice planting machine.

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GPS is an utterly pervasive and wonderful technology, but it’s increasingly not accurate enough for modern demands. Now a team of researchers can make it accurate right down to an inch.

Regular GPS registers your location and velocity by measuring the time it takes to receive signals from four or more satellites, that were sent into space by the military. Alone, it can tell you where you are to within 30 feet. More recently a technique called Differential GPS (DGPS) improved on that resolution by adding ground-based reference stations—increasing accuracy to within 3 feet.

Now, a team from the University of California, Riverside, has developed a technique that augments the regular GPS data with on-board inertial measurements from a sensor. Actually, that’s been tried before, but in the past it’s required large computers to combine the two data streams, rendering it ineffective for use in cars or mobile devices. Instead what the University of California team has done is create a set of new algorithms which, it claims, reduce the complexity of the calculation by several order of magnitude.

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Turn off the lights and maximize this image, you can thank me later.

=)

See more GIFs! Create and share your own GIFs, amazing moments and funny reactions with Gfycat.

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Powered by Illumina sequencing technology, GRAIL will develop a pan-cancer screening test by directly measuring circulating nucleic acids in blood.

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Speaking to packed house of journalists, scientists and members of The Planetary Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy, along with some very, very smart people, discussed how human beings might survive for long periods of time on Mars.

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Minduploading.org is a collection of pages and articles designed to explore the concepts underlying mind uploading. The articles are intended to be a readable introduction to the basic technical and philosophical topics covering mind uploading and substrate-independent minds. The focus is on careful definitions of the common terms and what the implications are if mind uploading becomes possible.

Mind uploading is an ongoing area of active research, bringing together ideas from neuroscience, computer science, engineering, and philosophy. This site refers to a number of participants and researchers who are helping to make mind uploading possible.

Realistically, mind uploading likely lies many decades in the future, but the short-term offers the possibility of advanced neural prostheses that may benefit us.

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