Flight is about to get a lot more personal, says aviation entrepreneur Rodin Lyasoff. In this visionary talk, he imagines a new golden age of air travel in which small, autonomous air taxis allow us to bypass traffic jams and fundamentally transform how we get around our cities and towns. “In the past century, flight connected our planet,” Lyasoff says. “In the next, it will reconnect our local communities.”
This talk was presented at an official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.
Create your own VR space with STYLY’s intuitive interface. There is absolutely NO need to code
Recently, I spoke at VRTO2018 in Toronto, Canada—which gave me a chance to see some of the bleeding edge tech in VR, AR, and Mixed Reality. Of all the VR tech I encountered there, it was Psychic VR Lab’s creation Styly that captured my imagination most of all.
Terrence McKenna once described virtual reality as a “technology that will help us show each other our dreams.” He discussed this angle at length, finding that VR’s potential to share our subjective experiences with each other on an embodiment-based medium, to have vast consequences for our species. “In the cyberdelic future, artists will rule because the world will be made of art.” McKenna further speculated that he saw VR as a potential next step in the evolution of language itself. When and how and with what technology this will be achieved has been an open question. Yet, with the arrival of Tokyo-based company Psychic VR Lab and their new tool Styly, we seem within closer striking distance to McKenna’s dream of “inhabiting” the imagination more than ever before.
Psychic VR Lab made a splash in 2015 by providing a website that hosted and processed images using Google’s phantasmagoric Deep Dream. Their new project Styly is a hyper-user-friendly platform for creating shareable VR worlds. The browser-based interface consists of just a few buttons. Model content can be browsed and imported from a variety of pre-existing libraries like Sketchfab, 3D Warehouse, Unity’s asset store, and Google Poly. This means you do not need to make your own models from scratch — they can be imported in. Images can be uploaded from Instagram, videos from YouTube (including 360 videos), and music from Soundcloud are all a single click away. Mp3s and image files can be imported from you desktop, and it also supports Unity, SketchUp, Blender, Tilt Brush, Blocks, Maya, and Mixamo.
For me, the Styly interface had about a 12-minute learning curve — And I have not played with a modeling or animation program for about 15 years. The first thing I created was a Gigeresque nightmare world, and it took less than half an hour to build.
“The actual path of a raindrop as it goes down the valley is unpredictable, but the general direction is inevitable,” says digital visionary Kevin Kelly — and technology is much the same, driven by patterns that are surprising but inevitable. Over the next 20 years, he says, our penchant for making things smarter and smarter will have a profound impact on nearly everything we do. Kelly explores three trends in AI we need to understand in order to embrace it and steer its development. “The most popular AI product 20 years from now that everyone uses has not been invented yet,” Kelly says. “That means that you’re not late.”
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design — plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more.
Senolytics developed by UNITY Biotechnology are currently in Phase-1 clinical trials.
Today we are pleased to announce that UNITY Biotechnology is going into human clinical trials with the first true rejuvenation therapy that directly targets one of the processes of aging: senescent cells.
New study uses Earth as a stand-in for an exoplanet, and shows that even with very little light — as little as one pixel — it is still possible to measure key characteristics of distant worlds.
A Russian billionaire has held a lavish ceremony at a castle in Austria to declare himself the leader of a new, independent “space nation” called Asgardia.
A Russian billionaire who dreams of one day living in space holds a lavish ceremony at a castle in Austria to declare himself the leader of a new, independent space nation called Asgardia.
Getting older and dying is so inconvenient. Eating a healthy diet and exercising is a good start in warding off death, but if you’re looking to truly up your immortality game, the answer is simple: teen blood. For a whopping $8,000, the old and the wealthy can receive a blood transfusion from a teenager. Yes, you read that right.
At Ambrosia’s clinics in San Francisco and Tampa, Florida, the wrinkled are receiving what founder Dr. Jesse Karmazin simply refers to as a “young blood treatment.” Patients are administered a transfusion of around 0.66 gallons of blood acquired from donors between the ages of 16 and 25.
