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VR for phobias; makes sense. Scared of spiders? Samsung believes VR may be the treatment for you.

Could you face your fears if you knew you weren’t actually facing your fears? That’s the premise behind a virtual reality experiment Samsung is running for a new app called Itsy, which is designed to help people face their fear of spiders. Created with the help of researchers at Stockholm University, Itsy tries to wean people into giving up their fear of arachnids.

The program is being run by Samsung’s Nordic branch, and the reason is extremely specific.

It turns out 25 percent of Nordic people have a fear of spiders. This presented a good way to test VR and help people at the same time. First subjects are asked to walk as close to a tarantula as they can get. Most of them don’t get far. That’s when Itsy comes in.

Continue reading “Samsung thinks you can overcome your fear of spiders using virtual reality” | >

IRVINE, Calif., July 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — From measuring glaucoma to augmenting reality, advances in technology have enabled smart contact lenses to steadily gain traction in the past year. Although still in the early stages of development, the introduction of such novelties will inevitably be life-changing.

Photo — http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160711/388295

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By laser-cooling atom clusters and studying their movements, a Missouri University of Science and Technology researcher hopes to better understand how atoms and their components are impacted and directed by environmental factors.

With a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Daniel Fischer, assistant professor of physics at Missouri S&T, tests the limits of quantum mechanics through his project titled “Control and Analysis of Atomic Few-Body Dynamics.”

In a hand-built vacuum chamber, Fischer manipulates lithium atoms by trapping them in a magnetic field and then shooting them with different lasers. This gives Fischer a large variety of initial states to test. Tests range from single, polarized atoms to larger groups that are laser-cooled to a consistent energy level. By doing so, Fischer works to help unravel the “few-body problem” that continues to confound the world of physics.

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PARC is a Xerox company that has received funds from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) through its Inbound, Controlled, Air-Releasable, Unrecoverable Systems (ICARUS) program.

The ICARUS program aims at creating a prototype air vehicle that has the potential to deliver small payloads in an autonomous manner to targeted locations and then disappears after the task it completed. PARC in cooperation with AeroVironment Inc. plans to produce particular materials and the air delivery system that can be made to disappear through a project within ICARUS that is referred to as On-Target Delivery and Disintegration Upon Stress-release Trigger (ONLY-DUST).

The project focuses on producing complex structures that are majorly firm during flight and storage, and at the same time permits reliable on-demand transience. It is possible to potentially scale up the DoD applications of the demonstration system because of its association with AeroVironment Inc., a leading company in unmanned, small aerial vehicles.

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