Adults are starting to behave like toddlers as social media and video games lead to a craving for instant gratification, a leading neuroscientist fears.
Baroness Susan Greenfield, who is a senior research fellow at Oxford University, said the obsession with games like Pokémon Go is causing the “infantilisation” of adulthood.
The trend of shunning the outdoors and live social contact in favour of social media is also contributing to grown-ups exhibiting traits associated with toddlers, including neediness and a short attention span, she added.
Wonder when someone will attempt to 3D Print Atlantis; or recreate the ancient Colossus of Rhodes.
Rio 2016 is a much-awaited event of people from all over the world that has already been happening in Brazil. On the other hand, the Summer Olympics that was held in Atlanta in 1996 has celebrated their 20th anniversary by creating a replica of Zeus using 3D printing technology. The statue of Zeus that was taken from Olympia is commonly used to represent the Olympics. As a matter of fact, it is also considered as a part of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world.
The statue of Zeus can be seen in the heart of the Olympics that was founded in Olympia in 776 BC. The Olympic Games is known to be the most significant event that happened in Greece that brought Greeks together with their religious and cultural bond. They have organized the games in respect to Zeus who is the king of the gods and ruled Mount Olympus. The events happen every four years for more than thousands of years that takes five days. During this event, you will notice how they give it importance because of the peace that people experience despite the wars that they have to fight.
We got about a minute of footage last week, and now the full trailer for the movie adaptation of Ted Chiang’s “Story Of Your Life” is here. And it is tense.
Whereas before, the footage ended with Amy Adams’ Dr. Banks getting her first look inside one of the weird alien monoliths that have appeared, the trailer goes much further. We see her actually communicating with the aliens, while the rest of the world goes appropriately batshit. There’s a lot less action in this sci-fi movie than there is drama, and it all looks great.
Video games. The last i heard AI had been up to playing and Mastering Atari 2600 games, and that was a few years ago. Figured it was only a matter of time til they started playing around with current gen stuff.
The first trailer from Arrival, Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of the Ted Chiang short story Story Of Your Lifeis finally here. It looks like an Oscar contender wrapped in a high-concept blockbuster package, which is a way to say it looks great.
Paramount Pictures is releasing the film, which stars Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, and Forest Whitaker, on November 11. A full trailer comes out next week but, for now, check this out.
Watching glasses-free 3D on a TV is no longer an outlandish concept, but that hasn’t been true for movie theaters. How are you supposed to create the same parallax effect for everyone, whether they’re up front or way in the back? Researchers at MIT CSAIL and Israel’s Weizmann Institute for Science finally have a practical answer. Their Cinema 3D tech creates multiple parallax barriers in a single display, using lenses and mirrors to deliver a range of angles across the whole theater. And unlike previous attempts at large-scale glasses-free 3D, you don’t have to take a hit to resolution.
You won’t get to forego the unwieldy eyewear for a while. The prototype is only slightly larger than a pad of paper, and uses 50 lens/mirror combos to achieve its 3D effect. You’d need a far bigger and more intricate system to make it work at the local movie house, which might make it prohibitively expensive. However, it’s imaginable that a future, optimized version might find its way into theaters and spare you from one of the biggest hassles in modern moviegoing.
The SETI concepts now called ‘Dysonian’ are to my mind some of the most exhilarating ideas in the field. Dysonian SETI gets its name from the ‘Dyson spheres’ and ‘Dyson swarms’ analyzed by Freeman Dyson in a 1960 paper. This is a technology that an advanced civilization might use to harvest the energy of its star. You can see how this plays off Nikolai Kardashev’s classification of civilizations; Kardashev suggested that energy use is a way to describe civilizations at the broadest level. A Type II society is one that can use all the energy of its star.
In the film 2010, director Peter Hyams’ 1984 adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s novel 2010: Odyssey Two (Del Rey, 1982), we see an instance of this kind of technology at work, though it has nothing to do with a Dyson sphere. In the film, a dark patch appearing on Jupiter signals the onset of what Martyn Fogg has called ‘stellification,’ the conversion of a gas giant into a small star. Rapidly replicating von Neumann machines — the famous monoliths — increase Jupiter’s density enroute to triggering nuclear fusion.
A new star is born, with consequences entertainingly explored in the novel’s epilogue. Without monoliths to work with, Fogg described another way of triggering a gas giant’s fusion reaction in a 1989 paper. A small black hole could be put into orbit around the planet, its orbit gradually sinking toward the planetary center. Accretion will eventually cause the new star to shine like a red dwarf, its brightness steadily increasing over a 50 million year period. Parts of the Jovian satellite system could be rendered continuously habitable over a period of about 100 million years, even as the star-builders exploit its energies via orbiting power stations.
Nintendo fans may be anxiously awaiting next March’s supposed NX launch (and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild), but the Japanese gaming giant has a little something up its sleeve in the meantime: a re-release for the iconic NES. Dubbed the Nintendo Entertainment System: NES Classic Edition, the console comes in the form of a miniaturized, HDMI-equipped take on the original and comes with 30 games built right in. Said Nintendo of America President and COO Reggie Fils-Aime:
We wanted to give fans of all ages the opportunity to revisit Nintendo’s original system and rediscover why they fell in love with Nintendo in the first place. The Nintendo Entertainment System: NES Classic Edition is ideal for anyone who remembers playing the NES, or who wants to pass on those nostalgic memories to the next generation of gamers.
Players will even be able to pick up a second controller for just $10 USD when the revamped NES drops this fall. And best of all? The mini console will only run you $60 USD.
2016 has been called the year that virtual reality becomes a reality, as some of the most anticipated devices will be made available on the consumer market. From Magic Leap (valued at over $1 billion) to Oculus (acquired by Facebook last year for $2 billion), there’s plenty of interest in the market, and ample room for it.
Though virtual reality is often depicted as an experience for the recliner or gaming chair, a number of VR enthusiasts want us to rethink how we engage with the technology. Instead of sitting around, they’d like to get us moving and looking beyond the go-to medium of gaming. Developers of these new devices consider fields like military training and healthcare as valuable places for mobile virtual reality to be applied.
Leading this approach is a Kickstarter VR company called Virtuix, whose treadmill-like device Omni encourages users to get upright and active. The reason to develop such a device felt like a natural evolution to Virtuix’s former Product Manager, Colton Jacobs.
“If I am walking in the virtual world my avatar is actually walking…”, he says, “…then the body’s natural reaction is, I want to stand up, I want to be walking with this avatar as if I’m actually there.”
Virtuix’s Omni
Users first slip on a pair of Omni’s $60 slippery-bottomed shoes before stripping into a lower body harness, which allows them to shuffle and slide their feet over the surface of the device. The device looks like a treadmill, but the track doesn’t actually move; rather, the shuffling and sliding motions register on the track and translate into the VR program being used. Shuffle forward, and your character moves forward. Shuffle backward, and your character back pedals. The resulting movement is somewhat awkward looking from the outside, but a reportedly smooth and consistent experience for the user.
Engadget had a chance to try out the device earlier this year and gave a positive review: “Even the easy mode that I tried, wherein you fire where you look rather than where the gun is pointing – had my heart pounding.” Testing games like Doom and Call of Duty, Engadget reporter Andrew Tarantola recounts his experience:
“The generic ‘base defense’ shooter game that I tried blew me away. Having to actually move, turn, look around and aim was incredibly immersive and added a completely new level of gameplay. There’s no more sprint button. If you want to run faster, then you really have to run faster. I was sweating by the end of my session — and grinning harder than I have in years.”
Meanwhile, Jacobs describes Omni as an immersive experience like few others. Where your standard, handheld controls allow you to manipulate your character’s movement by toggling a joystick, Omni facilitates movement by mimicking the user’s movement.
“You can walk, run, jump, turn around 360 degrees and act out your virtual avatar’s motions. We’re doing motion tracking ourselves to the lower body so we’re going to be able to tell what direction you’re walking in and how fast you’re moving, jumping, side stepping, things like that and translate that into analog movement in the virtual world.”
Though he acknowledges gaming as the default medium for immersive VR devices, Jacobs envisions Omni’s technology applied beyond gaming.
“The gaming market is a great first adopter market for us,” he says. “That being said, we’ve had multiple orders for military installations, West Point Navy installations, where they’re doing training simulation for some emergency and disaster training… instead of sending soldiers out to the field, they can actually just do training for various types of scenarios in the virtual world together.”
By getting soldiers to actually act out the movement, they’re able to simulate the physicality of real-world scenarios more realistically than can be done with a hand-held controller.
Virtuix likely won’t stop with entertainment and military training. According to Jacobs, the company has looked into healthcare — particularly physical therapy and recovery – as a field that would greatly benefit from a device like Omni.
“We’ve had multiple universities around the world actually, go ahead and order the Omni and they’re looking to test it for various different rehabilitation, also research. Stroke survivors is one of our big ones. A traditional treadmill can get someone up and walking in a straight line but a lot of the dangers that they have when they’re walking around in their home or just walking in general is when they have to turn corners. When they have to go around an object, that’s when they have a higher fall risk. Our system could potentially help to reactivate those muscles after a major neurological attack like a stroke or Alzheimer’s.”
Though virtual reality is already used in healthcare, some ask why there isn’t hasn’t been more innovation in this area by the virtual reality industry. Perhaps Omni could be a useful bridge in moving the technology forward.
Of course, an important component in such applications is ensuring that the system is safe. After all, the thought of wearing a head mounted display (HMD) while sliding around a track sounds like an accident waiting to happen.
“Safety is definitely a top priority,” Jacobs says. “You can’t actually see your surroundings while you’re in the Omni. You need to be strapped in, make sure you’re safe, but you’re also standing on a frictionless surface. You have to watch a video of this to really understand, it’s very hard to say in words.”
But so far, Omni has stood up to the gaming obstacles, which speaks to potential opportunities for use in healthcare-type settings.
“With our harness and our safety support structure, we’ve never had anyone fall on the Omni, especially in a high-intensity gaming situation; it’s even more intense when there’s zombies flying at you.”
