Interact with your tweets with augmented reality
Cool application to read twitter without a mouse. Visit at Ydreams Flyar.
Augmented Reality Contact Lens
Some guys at the University of Washington have developed prototypes of a contactlens that projects a virtual image, about 50 centimeters from you.
Now I don’t wear contacts, but I would like to see the same technology built into my day-to-day glasses, with higher definition. All I need is a Windows start button in the left bottom corner of my vision. Still early days tho, this model projects just one whole 16×16 pixel grid.
OpenSim pioneers start hosting company
DeepThink has launched a service to the public to host OpenSim regions, grids and intergrid connections. The team behind the hosting includes oldtimers Adam Frisby (OpenSim developer) and James Stallings (longtime OSgrid tech administrator).
It is called SimHost and drives a good bargain when it comes to prices starting at $50 a month, together with a well documented range of supportive services. Good addition to the club of upcoming 3D hosting companies.
related : hypergridbusinessnews
Social networks and gaming rewire your brain
A thousand Facebook friends is an indication of an individual’s isolation rather than evidence they are comfortable in a school or social community. And exercise is far better for everybody than obsessively slaying monsters or indulging adolescent interests in online pornography. As a source of information, entertainment and economic development, the internet has changed the world enormously and for the better in the past 15 years. But every revolution brings unanticipated social side-effects. Mr Obama and Baroness Greenfield remind us that the world online is a simulacrum of society, and that Second Life is called that because compared with the real thing, it is.
Hand in your pen after you complete your testpaper
It took me a while to figure it out. So this is what it does: You write on a print of a document you want to add your handwritten text to. once you have added your written comments to the paper, you synchronise the pen with your computer, and it creates a new digital file, including the comments you made on the paperprint.
It will allow us to create questionaires with a computer, allow offline completion of the form and directly send the resulting data to a database once the pen gets ‘emptied’. I imagine this being very usefull in a wide variety of settings, including medical intake, course examinations or writing tickets for bad parking.
Cross media hardware platform toybots: Nabaztag 2.0
This hardware based network implants a form of artificial intelligence into any toy, and allows the toy’s ‘behavior’ to be updated over a GPRS update. You perform your updates online over the ‘Magic Network’ that Toybots offers. Build-a-bear has already created a way to get your offline teddybear represented in a virtual world; adding the possibility to add a Toybots module to your teddybear would create an even stronger crossmedia link.
We have been building the Toybots Platform for connected toys with full 3G, WiFi, GPS and accelerometer capabilities tied to online and mobile games. Imagine a physical toy you can tickle online and it giggles in the real world. Imagine a grandmother in Iowa recording a family story and the toy telling the story to her grandchild in Florida. You will be able to download audio books as well to the toys and play full online games with these toys. Toybots will bridge mobile, online and physical gaming worlds together for the first time in an inspirational and unique way.
Applying virtual reality in treatment of phobia
The article is from 2001. Can’t put a date on the movie.
Time: For millions of phobia sufferers, science offers new treatment and hope
The concept underlying FDR’s famous adjuration that there is “nothing to fear but fear itself” might not have a name, but the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth does. It is called arachibutyrophobia. The April 2 edition of Time magazine contains an in-depth feature on phobias and the treatments modern-day science is providing for millions of people suffering from a wide range of such fears. The article features David Barlow, CAS psychology professor and director of the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders, and details how the center helps people with debilitating fears. “There’s been nothing like this in the field of mental health,” says Barlow. “In the past few years, we’ve had a complete turnaround in the treatment of phobic disorders.” Modern-day fears, such as flying in an airplane, are processed in the same area of the brain as our ancestors’ fears — the paralimbic region, which governs a whole range of primal responses, including anger and sexual arousal. “It seems that contemporary people learned from their ancient ancestors what to be afraid of and how to handle it,” he says. The article states that the severity of a phobia is exacerbated by the main method people use to avoid discomfort: avoidance. The harder phobics work to avoid the things they fear, the more the brain is convinced that the threat is real. “The things you do to reduce anxiety just make it worse,” says Barlow. “We have to strip those things away,” which is what therapists at the center do with patients seeking help in confronting their phobias. For some phobias that are impossible to overcome in a clinical setting, such as the fear of heights, virtual-reality programs are available to provide simulated exposure under professional supervision. “Not all people respond to virtual reality,” says Barlow, “but on average, it’s just as effective for treating certain phobias.”
