These past few weeks were remarkable: Facebook-people talking about Full Augmented Reality Glasses and Elon Musk about his Neuralink company, which wants to develop implantable brain–computer interfaces (BCIs). The goal is not just to treat brain diseases but to enhance the human being so that it can compete with AI-powered robots…. Continue reading
This is a fascinating presentation by Michael Abrash, Chief Scientist at Oculus/Facebook, during the F8 conference. It’s about nothing less than augmenting the capabilities of the homo sapiens. He advocates full AR glasses and boy, they go far beyond Pokemon Go on your smartphone. Abrash refers to J.C.R. Licklider’s famous… Continue reading
Facebook launches the social virtual reality thing Facebook Spaces. It seems to include Messenger (friends who don’t have an expensive Oculus Rift) can join through “windows”), 360 degrees video, real life pictures and Snapchat-like filters. Very mixed reality, but of course there are some challenges here: – It’s based on… Continue reading
Snapchat introduces World Lenses, cute 3D objects which can fit in about everywhere. In the meantime Facebook announced during its F8 Developer Conference that augmented reality is ready to go mainstream. One obvious point to note is that Facebook is just following Snapchat here. The other: the clever guys at… Continue reading
I’m reading the book Homo Deus these days, written by Yuval Noah Harari, the author of another bestselling book,Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Homo Deus is about “a brief history of tomorrow”, it goes back to the hunter-gatherers and leaps into a largely unknown future of a possible successor… Continue reading
I launched a page on Facebook about the same subjects I cover here on this blog: virtual worlds, virtual reality, augmented and mixed reality. On MixedRealitiesMusings I’ll post links to this blog but also to posts and videos on other blogs and sites. The very first visitor to post on… Continue reading
Crazy times for virtual reality, or so it seems. ‘It’s the future’, people at Facebook say. Users will not only be able to experience immersive Facebook-experiences, but will also create them, Eric David posts on SiliconAngle. ‘Users’ means not just developer-types, but the average user. However, it is totally unclear… Continue reading
In case you still have any doubts: virtual reality is hot. News from the Digits blog (The Wall Street Journal) by Timothy Hay: Oculus/Facebook bought two start-ups: Nimble VR, which was formerly known as 3Gear Systems (San Francisco), they are specialized in skeletal hand-tracking using tiny cameras, and Swedish start-up 13th Lab which… Continue reading
Reacting on my previous post about Second Life veterans uniting, draxfiles asked on this site and on Facebook: Interesting how some folks get “tired†of a world unlimited in its creative possibilities, a world that is continuously mind-boggling in the sense that folks make awesome things and yes: a LOT… Continue reading
I remember, in the good old days of the Metanomics show in Second Life, that we discussed a study about what happens when people have to leave a virtual world. You get a virtual diaspora, groups of people settling in new virtual worlds, and eventually you get tensions between those… Continue reading