Lifeboat Foundation

This time I come to talk about a new concept in this Age of Artificial Intelligence and the already insipid world of Social Networks. Initially, quite a few years ago, I named it “Counterpart” (long before the TV series “Counterpart” and “Black Mirror”, or even the movie “Transcendence”).

It was the essence of the ETER9 Project that was taking shape in my head.

Over the years and also with the evolution of technologies — and of the human being himself —, the concept “Counterpart” has been getting better and, with each passing day, it makes more sense!

Imagine a purely digital receptacle with the basics inside, like that Intermediate Software (BIOS⁽¹⁾) that computers have between the Hardware and the Operating System. That receptacle waits for you. One way or another, it waits patiently for you, as if waiting for a Soul to come alive in the ether of digital existence.

Continue reading “Digital Doubles and Second Selves” »

More and more companies and scientists are working to equip contact lenses with applications that not long ago still seemed like science fiction, such as the ability to record videos or diagnose and even treat diseases. Mojo Vision, an American startup, is one company that has been improving its prototypes since 2015. It is currently developing an ambitious project involving augmented reality lenses that, in addition to correcting your vision, will let you consult all kinds of information, from the trails on a ski slope to your pace when you run, all through microLED displays the size of a grain of sand.

“In the short term, it sounds like a futuristic idea, but 20 years ago we couldn’t even imagine many of the technological advances that we have today,” says Ana Belén Cisneros del Río, deputy dean of the College of Opticians-Optometrists in the Spanish region of Castilla y León, of the Mojo Vision project. However, Daniel Elies, a specialist in cornea, cataract and refractive surgery and medical director of the Institute of Ocular Microsurgery (IMO) Miranza Group in Madrid, does not believe that this type of contact lens will become part of everyday life anytime soon, “especially due to cost issues.”

One of the companies interested in manufacturing augmented reality contacts is Magic Leap. Sony, for its part, applied a few years ago for a patent for lenses that can record videos, and Samsung did the same for lenses equipped with a camera and a display that projects images directly into the user’s eye. Some researchers are trying to create robotic lenses that can zoom in and out with the blink of an eye, and yet others are working on night vision contact lenses, which could be useful in military applications.

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) headsets are becoming increasingly advanced, enabling increasingly engaging and immersive digital experiences. To make VR and AR experiences even more realistic, engineers have been trying to create better systems that produce tactile and haptic feedback matching virtual content.

Researchers at University of Hong Kong, City University of Hong Kong, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC) and other institutes in China have recently created WeTac, a miniaturized, soft and ultrathin wireless electrotactile system that produces tactile sensations on a user’s skin. This system, introduced in Nature Machine Intelligence, works by delivering electrical current through a user’s hand.

“As the tactile sensitivity among different individuals and different parts of the hand within a person varies widely, a universal method to encode tactile information into faithful feedback in hands according to sensitivity features is urgently needed,” Kuanming Yao and his colleagues wrote in their paper. “In addition, existing haptic interfaces worn on the hand are usually bulky, rigid and tethered by cables, which is a hurdle for accurately and naturally providing haptic feedback.”

When in 2015, Eileen Brown looked at the ETER9 Project (crazy for many, visionary for few) and wrote an interesting article for ZDNET with the title “New social network ETER9 brings AI to your interactions”, it ensured a worldwide projection of something the world was not expecting.

Someone, in a lost world (outside the United States), was risking, with everything he had in his possession (very little or less than nothing), a vision worthy of the American dream. At that time, Facebook was already beginning to annoy the cleaner minds that were looking for a difference and a more innovative world.

Today, after that test bench, we see that Facebook (Meta or whatever) is nothing but an illusion, or, I dare say, a big disappointment. No, no, no! I am not now bad-mouthing Facebook just because I have a project in hand that is seen as a potential competitor.

I was even a big fan of the “original” Facebook; but then I realized, it took me a few years, that Mark Zuckerberg is nothing more than a simple kid, now a man, who against everything and everyone, gave in to whims. Of him, initially, and now, perforce, of what his big investors, deluded by himself, of what his “metaverse” would be.

Continue reading “Meta what?” »

Over the last three decades, the digital world that we access through smartphones and computers has grown so rich and detailed that much of our physical world has a corresponding life in this digital reality. Today, the physical and digital realities are on a steady course to merging, as robots, Augmented Reality (AR) and wearable digital devices enter our physical world, and physical items get their digital twin computer representations in the digital world.

These digital twins can be uniquely identified and protected from manipulation thanks to crypto technologies like blockchains. The trust that these technologies provide is extremely powerful, helping to fight counterfeiting, increase supply chain transparency, and enable the circular economy. However, a weak point is that there is no versatile and generally applicable identifier of physical items that is as trustworthy as a blockchain. This breaks the connection between the physical and digital twins and therefore limits the potential of technical solutions.

In a new paper published in Light: Science & Applications, an interdisciplinary team of scientists led by Professors Jan Lagerwall (physics) and Holger Voos (robotics) from the University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, and Prof. Mathew Schwartz (architecture, construction of the built environment) from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, U.S., propose an innovative solution to this problem where physical items are given unique and unclonable fingerprints realized using cholesteric spherical reflectors, or CSRs for short.

Mojo Vision CEO Drew Perkins is the first human being to put them on.

“After completing preclinical testing and mitigating potential safety risks, I wore Mojo Lens,” Perkins wrote in a blog post. “Much to my delight, I found I could interact with a compass to find my bearings, view images, and use an on-screen teleprompter. Seeing the future literally put me at a loss for words.”

Mojo Vision is now ready to conduct the clinical trials needed to secure FDA approval for the tech — and ultimately, give you super vision.

Sleek, light, high-performance, and not easy on the pocket like any other Apple device.

Earlier this week, Meta rolled out its Quest Pro Virtual Reality (VR) headset, priced at $1,499. Many questioned the need for a high-end VR headset when the company’s Quest 2 headset appears to be doing rather well. However, as Mark Zuckerberg mentioned in his conversation with The Verge.

The official launch of Apple’s mixed reality headset was expected to happen in 2022. In the recent past, we have had Apple products being announced much earlier than their actual availability, so a 2022 launch could still be possible. To prepare you for such an event, here’s what you need to know about the Apple headset.

Continue reading “Apple’s mixed-reality headset: Here’s what you need to know” »

A while ago I spotted someone working on real time AI image generation in VR and I had to bring it to your attention because frankly, I cannot express how majestic it is to watch AI-modulated AR shifting the world before us into glorious, emergent dreamscapes.

Applying AI to augmented or virtual reality isn’t a novel concept, but there have been certain limitations in applying it—computing power being one of the major barriers to its practical usage. Stable Diffusion image generation software, however, is a boiled-down algorithm for use on consumer-level hardware and has been released on a Creative ML OpenRAIL-M licence. That means not only can developers use the tech to create and launch programs without renting huge amounts of server silicon, but they’re also free to profit from their creations.

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that his company is working with Ray-ban on creating new augmented reality glasses.

This product is coming sometime in the future, and it’s in addition to the existing partnership that Meta and Ray-ban have on Ray-ban Stories glasses. Zuckerberg said that AR glasses will get more sophisticated over time. Rocco Basilico of Luxotica showed off a demo of the new tech. And Ray-ban Stories will get a Spotify update.