One of the most important applications of full-immersion virtual reality will be virtual eating. Like sex, eating is a pleasurable activity that can be disentangled from its risks and downsides in a virtual environment. If people could virtually eat any and everything they want, any time, and the physical experience was identical to the real […]
This video is amazing. Basically what we have here is scientists reverse-engineering visual data out of brain activity as measured in an MRI. In the comments, there is quite a bit of angst about the government reading our minds via this kind of technology, which of course is a risk, but at least for now […]
Image by Christopher Chan via Flickr Well, not exactly nothing. I direct your attention to the Year in Virtual Goods,where we learn that in the year 2010, people worldwide found a way to spend more than $7 billion real dollars on virtual stuff. Maybe this shouldn’t be surprising, what with 80 million people playing Farmville, […]
In The Purple Rose of Cairo, Woody Allen poses as fantasy a question that we are likely to confront in real life in the near future. The question is, what happens when individuals from one level of reality meet up with individuals from another level of reality? In a Woody Allen movie, what happens is […]
In The Purple Rose of Cairo, Woody Allen poses as fantasy a question that we are likely to confront in real life in the near future. The question is, what happens when individuals from one level of reality meet up with individuals from another level of reality? In a Woody Allen movie, what happens is […]
One of the questions associated with developing true virtual reality technology is whether a human brain would ever accept a virtual body as its own. Can we experience things happening to a body substitute as though they were actually happening to us? Apparently, yes: Shaking hands with yourself is an amusing out-of-body experience. The illusion […]
As I mentioned on the most recent FastForward Radio, I’ve been at Walt Dinsey World this week working at a conference. I described the Disney complex as an artificial world made up of several smaller artificial worlds. Las Vegas is another good example of this. Last night after dinner, one of my co-workers (a fellow […]
This is neat: An international team of architects, archaeologists and experts spent 10 years working on a real-time 3D model of the city called Rome Reborn. Some 7,000 buildings were scanned and reproduced using a model of the city kept at a Rome museum. Users enter the city at the time of Constantine and see […]
Transformations Back up three pounds this week to 238, re-setting my total weight loss to 59 pounds. That’s okay — I’m used to these off weeks by now. An interesting e-mail from Stephen the other day: Reading passages from “The Singularity is Near” this afternoon I came across the passage where Kurzweil explained the impact […]
Transformations Back up three pounds this week to 238, re-setting my total weight loss to 59 pounds. That’s okay — I’m used to these off weeks by now. An interesting e-mail from Stephen the other day: Reading passages from “The Singularity is Near” this afternoon I came across the passage where Kurzweil explained the impact […]