Tag: virtual reality
A link to the Kirkus review of Babylon Dreams
Disney’s new VR Jacket
From the Washington Post: 4/26/2018
Hugs and punches and snakes, oh my . . .
I’ll take a hug but hold the snakes.
Wolves in the Walls : VR and Neil Gaiman
How Virtual Reality Will Change Who We Are
FROM BIG THINK
Parag and Ayesha Khanna on April 5, 2011, 7:22 PM
Today marked the publication of the new book Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution by Jeremy Bailenson and Jim Blasocovich.
Infinite Reality gets inside all of the technologies and animation that we now take from granted, from Wii video games to movies like the Matrix and Avatar, and explains how this virtual reality is changing our reality.
In this video on the book’s website, the authors discuss how the human mind perceives interaction with digital avatars as real, opening a whole new world of possibilities for shaping the mind outside of normal social contexts:
Jeremy is the director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL), and Jim, one of the original pioneers of virtual reality, teaches at the University of California in Santa Barbara. Very much related to the scope of this book, Jeremy’s recent research has shown the surprising ways in which just a few minutes spent in the virtual environments he has constructed change how we view ourselves and each other once we step back into the real world.
Unafraid to forecast decades into the future, Bailenson and Blascovich are at the forefront of showing how the lines between physical and virtual are blurring in our emerging hybrid reality. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in how the next generation of the Web – 3D immersive reality – will shape and transform us as we engage with it.
Scared of heights? Take this pill
From: THE TELEGRAPH
A pill could help people cure themselves of a fear of heights, a study suggests.
By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent
28 Mar 2011
Scientists have discovered that giving people a tablet of the stress hormone cortisol can help reduce their phobia.
The hormone, which is part of the body’s “fight or flight” reaction to danger, appears to open the brain up to being reprogrammed and to permanently remove anxieties.
Tests on 40 patients with acrophobia – a fear of high places and edges – found those given cortisol in combination with behavioural therapy dramatically reduced their aversion.
The researchers said their findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could lead to the development of effective treatments for a host of anxiety disorders.
Half the participants were given the drug and the others a placebo an hour before being subjected to a virtual-reality outdoor elevator ride.
Their fear was measured three to five days and one month after the last exposure session through an established acrophobia questionnaire and by sensors that picked up their sweat known as skin conductance examinations.
Compared with those given the dummy pill participants who took cortisol suffered significantly less anxiety and a smaller increase in skin conductance during follow-up.
The effect also lasted a lot longer and still apparent a month later.
Article Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/8411753/Scared-of-heights-Take-this-pill.html
Researcher claims virtual reality games can predict the future
From DIGITAL JOURNAL:
Mar 27, 2010 by Stephenie Deering
Sociologist William Sims Bainbridge uses the game World of Warcraft to gain insights into human behaviour. It is not a new idea, but it is a growing field of study.
People have used cards, sticks, coins, bones, and heavenly bodies for hundreds of years trying to divine the future. Many of these past-times, such as the Chinese I Ching, the Tarot and astrology live on. People are almost obsessed with knowing the outcome of the future, both in the short term and in the long term, and this includes scientists. Sociologist William Bainbridge uses a non-traditional method of divining the future. He studies human behaviour in on-line virtual reality games, such as World of Warcraft, to look at societal belief systems and to forecast the future of human beliefs. Bainbridge notes alternative reality games like World of Warcraft can answer real-life questions through play because the game deals with current real-life issues.
In an interview with New Scientist reporter, Samantha Murphy, Bainbridge likened World of Warcraft to Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, saying
“… Tolkien believed that all good people could come together on the same side. This is one of the biggest questions that humanity faces: can we have a world consensus by which we’re all partners in finding a solution? Or, like the Hoarde vs Alliance situation in WoW, are we doomed to be in separate factions competing ultimately to the death? It touches on very serious issues but in a playful way.”
Dr. Jane McGonigal has taken questions like these and created an alternate reality game that aims to change the real world. Evoke is a short-term game in which creators hope to impart skill sets on players — real skills that can be applied in the real world. Evoke takes gamers through ten weeks of set goals to achieve, and at the end of the game, players will have viable business ideas and will be matched up with mentors — all with the idea of changing the real world. The game got underway earlier this month.
Most video games ask little else of players than to dedicate 10 hours or so of their time to save a virtual princess or prevent the world’s destruction.
But what if a game challenged players in real life and required them to develop and utilize skills beyond button-mashing or Wii-mote waving? (Very cute) Game designer Jane McGonigal and the team behind upcoming alternate reality game (or ARG) “EVOKE” wants to find out.
We got in touch with McGonigal to find out just what “EVOKE” actually is, and why people should be paying attention.
To hear exactly what “EVOKE” entails is to immediately be struck by the scope of the venture. It’s at once a pie-in-the-sky project based around empowering people to make positive changes to the world around them, but based around social gaming conventions to lure in people familiar with online games. “EVOKE” is like “World of Warcraft,” but instead of vanquishing orcs you’re fighting hunger; instead of raiding dark dungeons, groups band together to solve the energy crisis. If it sounds like a game with an agenda, that’s because it is.
http://www.asylum.com/2010/02/26/jane-mcgonigal-mmorpg-urgent-evoke-uses-gamers-to-change-the-world/
Augmented Reality: Magic Vision Lab AR Weather System
From Wired BEYOND THE BEYOND
http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2011/03/augmented-reality-magic-vision-lab-ar-weather-system/
Science Thrives in Virtual Worlds
From COSMIC LOG on MSNBC: by Alan Boyle, MSNBC science editor
Second Life residents Desdemona Enfield and Curious George work on a virtual-reality visualization that classifies stars, galaxies and quasars according to their colors, brightness, distance and morphology.
Does the virtual-reality world known as Second Life have anything to offer for real-world scientists? Absolutely — and a trailblazing researcher says the payoffs are sure to increase when the Internet goes 3-D.
“We are really meant to interact in 3-D, with other people and with information,” Caltech physicist George Djorgovski, director of the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics, told me today during an interview in Second Life. “Because this works so well with the human perception system, as soon as there is an easy and ‘good enough’ 3-D approach, people will switch en masse.”
Djorgovski joined Second Life three years ago, and today his avatar (“Curious George”) seems totally comfortable in the world. (I, on the other hand, still walk over chairs, even though I’ve been an occasional Second Lifer for four years.) The Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics presents a series of professional seminars, workshops and popular talks in Second Life, including a couple that I’ve presented. In addition, Djorgovski regularly meets with scientific collaborators in Second Life to work on his real-world research, which focuses on galaxy formation and evolution, quasars, sky surveys and data visualization.
You’ll find plenty of virtual experiments in SploLand, the Second Life science center operated by San Francisco’s Exploratorium. “We’re using it as an extension of our exhibit space, to do things for our online visitors that we can’t do in the real world,” Rob Rothfarb, the Exploratorium’s project director for online engagement, told me today.
article link: http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/03/25/6344843-science-thrives-in-virtual-worlds?gt1=43001
Michio Kaku on Virtual Reality
The Earth Simulator
What is the UK-Japan Climate Collaboration ?
http://www.earthsimulator.org.uk/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1
The aim of the UJCC project is to exploit the power of the Earth Simulator to produce world-leading climate simulations. The enhanced resolution models will allow unprecedented fidelity of simulation, and allow many emergent phenomena to be resolved. The science of the project will then be to understand how the increased resolution changes the large scale mean climate, consider whether the emergent processes are therefore essential to produce reliable climate models, and consider if these processes can be parameterized in lower resolution models, or if their importance is enough to drive model resolution to increase.
Virtual things to come?
A bit cheesy but worth a look (and listen–Future boy talks like Sean Connery)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJTnChBdmrU
Future city and all kinds of other Future stuff video (alas no more colonials or columns) plus ghost of Christmas shopping Future
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jU9KzsU0zo&feature=related
Robot with a Rat Brain
From Bot Girl’s Second Life Diary: Erotic Chat as an Exemplar of Sense Extension in Virtual Worlds
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Erotic text chat is an exemplar of sense extension within virtual worlds. It can evoke sights, sounds, smells, tastes, sensations and actions that are otherwise difficult or impossible to create visually within the digital world. Intentional activation of the imagination can induce powerfully realistic experiences because the brain does not qualitatively distinguish between physically produced and intensely imagined sensory experience. For instance, studies have shown that the brain is activated by imagined smells and tastes in the very same way it responds to actual sense impressions.
Link to article: http://botgirl.blogspot.com/2009/04/erotic-chat-as-exemplar-of-sense.html
PRESENCCIA
The Beginning of Sims?
Research project on artificial intelligence interacting with virtual humans
http://www.presenccia.org/
Welcome to the PRESENCCIA project website
This Integrated Project will undertake a Research Programme that has as its major goal the delivery of presence in wide area distributed mixed reality environments.
The environment will include a physical installation that people can visit both physic
ally and virtually. The installation will be the embodiment of an artificial intelligent entity that understands and learns from its interaction with people. People who inhabit the installation will at any one time be physically there, virtually there but remote, or entirely virtual beings with their own goals and capabilities for interacting with one another and with embodiments of real people.
Specific subclasses of the installation will be used for the construction of a number of application scenarios, such as a persistent virtual community that embodies the project itself.
The core methodology will be to achieve this through the identification, understanding and exploitation of cerebral mechanisms for presence in conjunction with advances in the underlying technology for mixed reality display and interaction, with special attention to the interaction between people, and also between people and virtual people. Such cerebral mechanisms will be the basis for a core aspect of the IP which is the exploitation of brain-computer interfaces.
Processes within the environments adapt and correlate with the behaviour and state of people, and in addition people are able to effect changes within the environment through thought as well as through motor actions.
Foreword to Virtual Humans October 20, 2003 by Ray Kurzweil
This paragraph is from a 2003 Kurzweil article//
Article Link: http://www.kurzweilai.net/foreword-to-virtual-humans
“When we want to experience real reality, the nanobots just stay in position (in the capillaries) and do nothing. If we want to enter virtual reality, they suppress all of the inputs coming from the real senses, and replace them with the signals that would be appropriate for the virtual environment. You (i.e., your brain) could decide to cause your muscles and limbs to move as you normally would, but the nanobots again intercept these interneuronal signals, suppress your real limbs from moving, and instead cause your virtual limbs to move and provide the appropriate movement and reorientation in the virtual environment.”
On February 21, 2011, The TIME MAGAZINE cover is titled “2045–The Year Man Becomes Immortal.”
It spotlights the work of Ray Kurzweil, a Futurist whose accurate predictions earned him the spotlight. In 2000, Kurzweil predicted that mind-uploading-scanning your brain and living after your physical death in Virtual Reality–would be a reality.
I read Kurzweil’s article on mind-uploading in Psychology Today when it first appeared in 2000. In it, he defined mind-uploading and described the research taking place. As I understood the article, mind-uploading involves scanning the memories in a living person’s brain and creating a file, then loading the file into a computer program designed to simulate the physical world.
Here is a link to the article and more about Kurzweil: http://singularityhub.com/2011/02/11/time-magazine-shines-a-spotlight-on-kurzweil-the-singularity/
2045– the year Kurzweil predicts mind-uploading technology that will enable us to live forever.
“You shimmer with doubt?” GUNTER HOLDEN asks. “Let me tell you my stories while you settle—some of them are lies of course.”
Gunter, my protagonist, is based on people I’ve known in my life. We’ve all encountered them–people who seem to live by different rules. This book is written from Gunter’s point of view. Gunter admits his charm wears thin at times. He’s intelligent, resourceful and entertaining, but, betrayal is inevitable.
Babylon Dreams takes place in the 22nd century and “post-biological destinations” are big business with companies like Joy Forever and Infinite Bliss fighting for their share of the market dominated by one giant–Virtual Enterprises Inc.
Until his suicide at age 56, Gunter Holden was CEO of VEI, the company he founded in order to create the perfect world. Gunter is now a virtual resident of Bali Hai–the program that was the ultimate in post-bio destinations. It isn’t anymore.
Mind-uploading mimics physical life ala The Matrix, except the real you isn’t stuck in a gooey pod.
The rich opt for luxury and fantasy fulfillment in”post-bio destinations” . For the middle-class they’re often financed, given as wedding and graduation presents, part of retirement plans. The poor hope to win them in state lotteries–or accept another gate with no admittance. So assuming I can afford it, I can exist in paradise– no longer wanting since all is given. There’s no death–I exist for as long as I choose unless I choose to self-delete. What would I want? After that? What then? Babylon Dreams is a place where people discover the answer to “What then?”
As he struggles to free himself from the guilt and betrayals of his past “bio” life, Gunter is caught between two religious communities–one Christian Fundamentalist and the other a ‘New Age” religion as they fight for control of the remaining computer memory.
Nano Nano
(VEI guarantees the whole you in PARADISE–our nanobots are cutting edge!)
Harvard Medical School’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute team have constructed a self-assembling nanodevice from single-stranded DNA using a design principal known as tensegrity to lash double-helix struts together with single-stranded DNA. The strands interconnect the struts and pull the entire piece into a taught shape resembling a twisting prism. The structures can further be programmed to change shape on call, as well as move of their own accord. While some nanotechnological advances are under FDA study for fears of tampering or tainting the human body, Harvard’s DNA devices are biodegradable and biocompatible. In their lives as possible drug ferries, mimicking viruses to deliver lethal drugs to targeted cells, they pose much less threat of eventual problems than solid state deliver devices such as carbon nanotubes. Once their mission is complete, the DNA machines can be safely destroyed in-vitro, leaving no troublesome refuse. Another possible use for the DNA constructs is the fine-tuning of cellular matrices to coax stem cells into becoming one type of cell or another. Stem cells differentiate their jobs in part by the the rigidity of their surrounding tissue. Stiff extracellular matrices can convince a stem cell to produce bone, while a more liquid mixture could generate neurons. Being able to fine-tune the shapes of the DNA devices could help to control the extracellular matrices, giving stem cells a preferred environment for a desirable piece of tissue growth.
http://www.dailytech.com/Harvard+Debuts+Selfassembling+Biological+Nanodevices/article18818.htm
Mind Uploading and Mind Children
There are two major questions surrounding the concept of mind uploading. There is the question of feasibility: Can we build a model of a brain complete enough to allow a conscious mind to emerge? The other question is concerned with identity. Some people argue that, if a copy of a conscious mind is identical by all measures (ignoring the fact that one is biological and the other is neuromorphic software/hardware) it should be thought of as a continuation of the mind that was mapped and uploaded. Others argue that a copy cannot be considered the same as the original, so the newly awakened consciousness must be another person.
Various attempts have been made to imagine the benefits of mind uploading. Assuming continuation of the mind, these benefits include indefinite lifespans and upgrading the mind. When your current brain no longer works well enough or not at all, you transfer your conscious mind to another (perhaps better) artificial brain. None of these benefits are tempting to those who see uploads as different people. In The Spike, Damien Broderick declared “copies are not you” and asked, “Would you be prepared to die (sacrifice your current embodiment) in order that an exact copy of yourself be reconstructed elsewhere, or on a different substrate?” He goes on to argue that this is not a procedure he would be willing to undertake. Let’s assume Broderick is right and a copy is indeed “not you.” Does it then follow that mind uploading offers no benefits?http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/virtual-reality/mind-uploading-and-mind-children
Gunter prepares to welcome the leader of the “Herd People,” a holo porn king who plans to come as a god–a cigar-smoking llama.
marjorie kaye's Babylon Dreams 