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For the first ever time, scientists have created a virtual reality (VR) simulation of Sagittarius A*- the black hole at the center of our galaxy. The simulation allows helps viewers to better visualize the phenomenon and study the black holes as well.

With the aim of creating a VR simulation of Sagittarius A*, scientists at Radboud University, The Netherlands and Goethe University, Germany come together and used an astrophysical model of Sagittarius A*. Through this model, they were able to capture an image series that then put together to create a 360-degree virtual reality simulation of the black hole.

The simulation can be seen using VR consoles. The most fascinating thing about this simulation is, it created one of the most realistic views of the direct surroundings of the black hole. Moreover, it is expected to help scientists to study the behavior of the black hole.

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Group Facetime. I think this means we are closer to platforms that can support Virtual Reality… #Holodeck


Apple today released iOS 12.1, the first major update to the iOS 12 operating system designed for the iPhone and the iPad. iOS 12.1 comes more than a month after the September release of iOS 12 and a few weeks after iOS 12.0.1, a bug fix update.

The update is available on all eligible devices over-the-air in the Settings app. To access the update, go to Settings — General — Software Update. As with all iOS updates, iOS 12.1 is free to download.

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Memes are not just learned, they run deeper than that, they are part of our shared experience as human beings. This is how we communicate to each other through spoken, written, and body language; this is how we participate in customs, rituals and cultural traditions. Indeed, human civilization has always been a “cultured” virtual reality. We don’t often think of cultures as virtual realities, but there is no more apt descriptor for our widely diverse sociology and interpretations than the metaphor of the “virtual reality.” In truth, the virtual reality metaphor encompasses the entire human enterprise. We should realize that all our ideologies and religions, our belief systems and models of reality are our own personal operating systems — real to us but wry to someone else — each of us lives in a seemingly shared but simultaneously private virtual world.


By Alex Vikoulov.

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“We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Over-Soul” (1841)

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How to solve the problem of which map to use, without distortion.


Check out more details at our EuroVis 2018 paper at: https://vis.yalongyang.com/papers/vr-maps-globes.pdf

Four interactive way to present the WORLD: (a) a 3D exocentric globe, where the user’s viewpoint is outside the globe; (b) a flat map (rendered to a plane in VR); © an egocentric 3D globe, with the viewpoint inside the globe; and (d) a curved map, created by projecting the map onto a section of a sphere which curves around the user.

Interactive bi-directional transformation between a globe and a map!

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