Lecture: Infinite Reality

"Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life and New Worlds" by StanfordUniversity

Jeremy Bailenson shares his research on virtual reality, avatars, transformed social interaction, and related communication and psychological theories, as well as implications for citizens living in the digital age.

Tech: T(ether)

T(ether) by MIT Media Lab

I was just blown away with how cool this is. It remind me of the SixthSense technology demonstrated on TED a while back, but I believe that T(ether) takes it to a whole new level.

Snippet

“Virtual Reality is already a success as an industrial technology. It just hasn’t hit yet as a communications technology. But it’s become absolutely essential. One of the stories I tell is the story of the oil supply. If we go back twenty or thirty years, most people thought that the oil would be running out about now. And the reason it’s not is because computers allowed people to find and extract oil more efficiently…and from old fields. Ultimately, there’s an illusion — created because of computers — that the oil supply is expanding instead of running out. The underlying reality is that the oil supply is running out, so, in a way, this is a dangerous situation. At any rate, VR was used to visualize oil fields and to visualize machinery to extract oil more efficiently from old fields. Similar things happened in medicine. We understand more about large molecules, we understand more about how the body heals from surgery through VR simulations.”

—	Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality? – RU Sirius Interviews VR Developer Jaron Lanier

Tech: Mobile Augmented Reality Demo

Mobile Augmented Reality Demo

The same day that Google’s Project Glass patent was approved, WDG shared a video of their own dabblings in augmented reality. Above, the creative group explores the capabilities of two new mobile augmented reality platforms (compatible with both Android and iOS) developed using Unity3D. In this video, an experimenter uses both an iPad and an Android to guide a virtual car through a constantly shifting AR landscape.

Gadgets: Augmented Reality Sandbox

This new augmented reality sandbox designed by Oliver Kreylos out of U.C. Davis that projects a real-time colored topographic map complete with contour lines onto the surface of the sand while you manipulate it. The system even allows you to pour virtual water on your creation and interact with it in real time. It’s not hard to imagine switching the entire system to volcano mode, or using the projection in some sort of three dimensional toy battlefield. Gah!

According to Krelos’ YouTube page, the project was funded by the National Science Foundation with the hopes of installing these systems as exhibits at science museums like the Lawrence Hall of Science or the Tahoe Environmental Research Center. See another demo of this 21st century sandbox here.