Lifeboat Foundation

In Optica, The Optical Society’s (OSA) journal for high impact research, Qiu and colleagues describe a new approach for digitizing color. It can be applied to cameras and displays — including ones used for computers, televisions and mobile devices — and used to fine-tune the color of LED lighting.

“Our new approach can improve today’s commercially available displays or enhance the sense of reality for new technologies such as near-eye-displays for virtual reality and augmented reality glasses,” said Jiyong Wang, a member of the PAINT research team. “It can also be used to produce LED lighting for hospitals, tunnels, submarines and airplanes that precisely mimics natural sunlight. This can help regulate circadian rhythm in people who are lacking sun exposure, for example.”

The discovery demonstrates a practical method to overcome current challenges in the manufacture of indium gallium nitride (InGaN) LEDs with considerably higher indium concentration, through the formation of quantum dots that emit long-wavelength light. The researchers have uncovered a new way t.

A type of group-III element nitride-based light-emitting diode (LED), indium gallium nitride (InGaN) LEDs were first fabricated over two decades ago in the 90s, and have since evolved to become ever smaller while growing increasingly powerful, efficient, and durable. Today, InGaN LEDs can be found across a myriad of industrial and consumer use cases, including signals & optical communication and data storage – and are critical in high-demand consumer applications such as solid state lighting, television sets, laptops, mobile devices, augmented (AR) and virtual reality (VR) solutions.

Ever-growing demand for such electronic devices has driven over two decades of research into achieving higher optical output, reliability, longevity and versatility from semiconductors – leading to the need for LEDs that can emit different colors of light. Traditionally, InGaN material has been used in modern LEDs to generate purple and blue light, with aluminum gallium indium phosphide (AlGaInP) – a different type of semiconductor – used to generate red, orange, and yellow light. This is due to InGaN’s poor performance in the red and amber spectrum caused by a reduction in efficiency as a result of higher levels of indium required.

Continue reading “New Way To Generate Light Through Pre-Existing Defects in Semiconductor Materials” »

Hundreds of millions of years of evolution have produced a variety of life-forms, each intelligent in its own fashion. Each species has evolved to develop innate skills, learning capacities, and a physical form that ensures survival in its environment.

But despite being inspired by nature and evolution, the field of artificial intelligence has largely focused on creating the elements of intelligence separately and fusing them together after the development process. While this approach has yielded great results, it has also limited the flexibility of AI agents in some of the basic skills found in even the simplest life-forms.

Continue reading “New deep reinforcement learning technique helps AI to evolve” »

Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday announced the parent company’s name is being changed to “Meta” to represent a future beyond just its troubled social network.

The new handle comes as the social media giant tries to fend off one its worst crises yet and pivot to its ambitions for the “metaverse” virtual reality version of the internet that the tech giant sees as the future.

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp will keep their names under the rebranding.

Well, it’s official. After 17 years of being called Facebook, the social networking parent company behind Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus has a new name.

Facebook’s corporate entity is now **Meta**.

Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg announced the change at the company’s AR/VR-focused Connect event, sharing that the new title captured more of the company’s core ambition: to build the metaverse.

Continue reading “Facebook changes its corporate branding to Meta” »

Facebook has been putting research into systems that will see, hear, and remember everyday activities and interactions on AR/VR devices.

A team from the University of Zurich has trained an artificial intelligence system to fly a drone in a virtual environment full of obstacles before setting it loose in the real world, where it was able to weave around obstacles at 40 kph (25 mph), three times as fast as the previous best piloting software. Lead researcher Davide Scaramuzza, Director of the Robotics and Perception Group, says the work, carried out in partnership with Intel, could revolutionize robotics by enabling machines to learn virtually.

A paper describing the project, Learning high-speed flight in the wild, was published this month in the journal Science Robotics.

Continue reading “This Hotshot AI Drone Can Speed Through Complex Environments Thanks To New Kind Of Virtual Training” »

Facebook has just announced it’s going to hire 10,000 people in Europe to develop the “metaverse”.

This is a concept which is being talked up by some as the future of the internet. But what exactly is it?

**What is the metaverse?
**
To the outsider, it may look like a souped-up version of Virtual Reality (VR) — but some people think the metaverse could be the future of the internet.

Continue reading “Apparently, it’s the next big thing. What is the metaverse?” »

Witness first-hand how your mountain of waste plastic expands over the years and what impact your food has on the rainforests. Virtual reality gives you a front-row seat to the impact of unsustainable behavior. Communication scientists Marijn Meijers and Hande Sungur have developed highly effective virtual worlds that give people an up-close and personal experience of how sustainable and unsustainable conduct make a substantial difference…

You walk around a supermarket and whenever you take a product from the shelves, a pop-up appears with information about the environmental impact of your choice, for example, clearcutting of tropical rainforest to cultivate the palm oil in your chocolate spread. You travel through time to see how much plastic waste your everyday products create in the future, and travel back to see how your mountain of waste shrinks when you make more sustainable decisions.

VR is shown to have a positive effect on sustainability.

Continue reading “Virtual reality: A front-row seat to the impact of (un)sustainable behavior” »