Fascinating, in-depth article which I am re-posting here. It goes into much greater depth about the spiritual side of Steve Jobs than what was covered in the Walter Isaacson biography that recently came out.
http://blogs.plos.org/neurotribes/2011/10/28/what-kind-of-buddhist-was-steve-jobs-really/
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
This is an incredibly high-resolution image of the Earth, as captured by one of NASA's satellites on January 4, 2012.
The satellite was recently re-named to "Suomi NPP", in honor of the late meteorologist Verner E. Suomi, a scientist hailed as the father of satellite meteorology.
Our Amazing Planet
The satellite was recently re-named to "Suomi NPP", in honor of the late meteorologist Verner E. Suomi, a scientist hailed as the father of satellite meteorology.
Our Amazing Planet
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Virtual Reality Contact Lenses
The future is here, or is it? These prototype contact lenses will allow the wearer to view a "heads up" display directly in front of their eyes, rather than at a near-field distance currently seen in automobile windshields, cockpits, etc.
The technology is currently being developed under DARPA funding, and a consumer version will be ready in two or three years.
Virtual Reality Contact Lenses
The technology is currently being developed under DARPA funding, and a consumer version will be ready in two or three years.
Virtual Reality Contact Lenses
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: the Ars Technica Review
An interesting article by John Siracusa in regards to software interfaces that are trying to emulate objects in the real world. And where they fail, if they go too far — when people attempt to interact with graphical "objects" that are not meant for interaction.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.ars/5
Monday, November 15, 2010
Whatever Happened to … Virtual Reality?
[The following article was originally published in the MIT Technology Review blog Mims's Bits.]
For further reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Reality
[Image: Google Trend shows the steady decline in searches for "Virtual Reality"]
Whatever Happened to … Virtual Reality? Remember the movie Lawnmower Man? Here’s why we’re not even close.
Christopher Mims 10/22/2010
The early 90′s were awesome. Bill Watterson was still drawing Calvin and Hobbes, the tattered remnants of the Cold War were falling down around our ears, and most of Wall Street was convinced the Macintosh was a computer for effete graphic designers and Apple was more or less on its way out.
Into this time of innocence came a radical vision of the future, epitomized by the movie Lawnmower Man. It was a future in which Hollywood starlets had virtual intercourse with developmentally challenged computer geeks in Tron-style bodysuits and everything looked like it was rendered by a Commodore Amiga.
Anyway, at that time Virtual Reality was a Big Deal. Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist most closely associated with the idea, was bouncing from one important position to another, developing virtual worlds with head mounted displays and, later, heading up the National Tele-immersion initiative, “a coalition of research universities studying advanced applications for Internet 2,” whatever the heck that was.
Even so, some sensed that the technology wasn’t bringing about the revolution that had been promised. In a 1993 column for Wired that earns a 9 out of 10 for hilarity and a 2 out of 10 for accuracy, Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab (who I’m praying will have a sense of humor about this) asked the question that was on everyone’s mind: Virtual Reality: Oxymoron or Pleonasm?
It didn’t matter if anyone knew what he was talking about, because time has proved most of it to be nonsense:
“The argument will be made that head-mounted displays are not acceptable because people feel silly wearing them. The same was once said about stereo headphones. If Sony’s Akio Morita had not insisted on marketing the damn things, we might not have the Walkman today. I expect that within the next five years more than one in ten people will wear head-mounted computer displays while traveling in buses, trains, and planes…. One company, whose name I am obliged to omit, will soon introduce a VR display system with a parts cost of less than US$25.”
Affordable VR headsets were just around the corner, really? And the only real barrier to adoption, according to Negroponte? Lag. Computers in 1993 just weren’t fast enough to react in real time when a user turned his or her head, breaking the illusion of the virtual.
According to Moore’s Law, we’ve gone through something like 10 doublings of computer power since 1993, so computers should be about a thousand times as powerful as they were when this piece was written – not to mention the advances in massively parallel graphics processing brought about by the widespread adoption of GPUs, and we’re still not there.
So what was it, really, that kept us from getting to Virtual Reality?
For one thing, we moved the goal posts – now it’s all about augmented reality, in which the virtual is laid over the real. Now you have a whole new set of problems – how do you make the virtual line up perfectly with the real when your head has six degrees of freedom and you’re outside where there aren’t many spatial referents for your computer to latch onto?
And most important of all, how do you develop screens tiny enough to present the same resolution as a large computer monitor, but in something like 1/400th the space? This is exactly the problem that has plagued the industry leader in display headsets, Vuzix. Their products are fine for watching movies, but don’t try using them as a monitor replacement.
Consumer-level Virtual Reality, it turns out, is really, really hard – not quite Artificial Intelligence hard, but so much harder than anyone expected that people just aren’t excited anymore. The Trough of Disillusionment on this technology is deep and long.
[The Gartner hype cycle]
That doesn’t mean Virtual Reality is gone forever – remember how many false starts touch computing had before technologists succeeded with, of all things, a phone?
And, just a coda, even though the public long ago gave up on searching for Virtual Reality, the news media never got tired of it. Which just shows you how totally out of touch we can be:
Into this time of innocence came a radical vision of the future, epitomized by the movie Lawnmower Man. It was a future in which Hollywood starlets had virtual intercourse with developmentally challenged computer geeks in Tron-style bodysuits and everything looked like it was rendered by a Commodore Amiga.
Anyway, at that time Virtual Reality was a Big Deal. Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist most closely associated with the idea, was bouncing from one important position to another, developing virtual worlds with head mounted displays and, later, heading up the National Tele-immersion initiative, “a coalition of research universities studying advanced applications for Internet 2,” whatever the heck that was.
Even so, some sensed that the technology wasn’t bringing about the revolution that had been promised. In a 1993 column for Wired that earns a 9 out of 10 for hilarity and a 2 out of 10 for accuracy, Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab (who I’m praying will have a sense of humor about this) asked the question that was on everyone’s mind: Virtual Reality: Oxymoron or Pleonasm?
It didn’t matter if anyone knew what he was talking about, because time has proved most of it to be nonsense:
“The argument will be made that head-mounted displays are not acceptable because people feel silly wearing them. The same was once said about stereo headphones. If Sony’s Akio Morita had not insisted on marketing the damn things, we might not have the Walkman today. I expect that within the next five years more than one in ten people will wear head-mounted computer displays while traveling in buses, trains, and planes…. One company, whose name I am obliged to omit, will soon introduce a VR display system with a parts cost of less than US$25.”
Affordable VR headsets were just around the corner, really? And the only real barrier to adoption, according to Negroponte? Lag. Computers in 1993 just weren’t fast enough to react in real time when a user turned his or her head, breaking the illusion of the virtual.
According to Moore’s Law, we’ve gone through something like 10 doublings of computer power since 1993, so computers should be about a thousand times as powerful as they were when this piece was written – not to mention the advances in massively parallel graphics processing brought about by the widespread adoption of GPUs, and we’re still not there.
So what was it, really, that kept us from getting to Virtual Reality?
For one thing, we moved the goal posts – now it’s all about augmented reality, in which the virtual is laid over the real. Now you have a whole new set of problems – how do you make the virtual line up perfectly with the real when your head has six degrees of freedom and you’re outside where there aren’t many spatial referents for your computer to latch onto?
And most important of all, how do you develop screens tiny enough to present the same resolution as a large computer monitor, but in something like 1/400th the space? This is exactly the problem that has plagued the industry leader in display headsets, Vuzix. Their products are fine for watching movies, but don’t try using them as a monitor replacement.
Consumer-level Virtual Reality, it turns out, is really, really hard – not quite Artificial Intelligence hard, but so much harder than anyone expected that people just aren’t excited anymore. The Trough of Disillusionment on this technology is deep and long.
[The Gartner hype cycle]
That doesn’t mean Virtual Reality is gone forever – remember how many false starts touch computing had before technologists succeeded with, of all things, a phone?
And, just a coda, even though the public long ago gave up on searching for Virtual Reality, the news media never got tired of it. Which just shows you how totally out of touch we can be:
For further reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Reality
Sunday, August 1, 2010
New Stereoscopic Book From Queen Guitarist Brian May — "A Village Lost And Found"
Pictured from L to R: Brian May, Darwin Foye, Elena Vidal
Brian May, guitarist of the glam rock band Queen, has been collecting stereoscopic photographs for over forty years. While on tour in cities all over the world, he would locate and purchase these vintage 3D photos, adding to his ever growing collection.
One collection that fascinated him, was that of 1850's photographer T. R. Williams, who was a successful stereo portraitist, and creator of still lifes and artistic views.
The subject of these particular photos were an idyllic village in England, but May did not know where they were taken. So he posted a photo of a church on his personal website, and within 36 hours, received numerous responses, all pointing to a quaint village of Hinton Waldrist in Oxfordshire.
Brian and his co-author/historian, Elena Vidal visited the village, and were able to locate every site that was photographed. Interestingly, the modern-day villagers were unaware of the historical photographs, thus the title of the book, A Village Lost And Found.
On July 27, 2010, I had the pleasure of seeing May's lecture about this book, and on 3D stereoscopy, which was not only educational, but quite fascinating! He projected a sampling of the collection of 150 year old images on a screen in 3D, and members of the audience wore passive 3D glasses to view them in all their realism and splendor.
Brian has an informative website detailing the creation of the book, as well as vintage and contemporary stereoscopic Queen images, viewable in 3D if you have a viewing device, one of which comes with his book. (In fact, he designed and patented his own viewing device which he calls the "Owl", due to its shape and all-seeing nature.)
Visit his stereoscopic website:
More on T.R. Williams:
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
The Ley Lines of Time
Just as the earth allegedly has magnetic lines known as “ley lines,” is it possible that time also has ley lines, as if “arteries” of time?
What if the most significant and major events of the world (geophysical, religious, political, etc.) all occur down specific time lines and specific dates, and could not occur otherwise?
In other words, could it be possible that events occur only when they are possible, according to the laws of some unknown and undiscovered physics, and not by random chance, or purposeful cause and effect?
Is it possible that wormholes (shortcuts through space and time) are also a ley line construct in the universe?
For further reading, check out these topics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ley_line
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecund_universes#Fecund_universes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time
What if the most significant and major events of the world (geophysical, religious, political, etc.) all occur down specific time lines and specific dates, and could not occur otherwise?
In other words, could it be possible that events occur only when they are possible, according to the laws of some unknown and undiscovered physics, and not by random chance, or purposeful cause and effect?
Is it possible that wormholes (shortcuts through space and time) are also a ley line construct in the universe?
For further reading, check out these topics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ley_line
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecund_universes#Fecund_universes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)