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expects that library of content to grow “very rapidly,” especially as the company works with YouTube creators to get more VR content up on the platform

According to Variety, these YouTube stars are even more influential among US teens than Hollywood celebrities.

The one stumbling block is that not that many people have the equipment to experience VR. Google says some 1 million folks already own the Cardboard viewer

it’s convenient that the company is launching these virtual reality features right before The New York Times ships 1.3 million Google Cardboard sets this weekend, as it debuts its new VR documentary, “The Displaced.”

Studies consistently show users thumb through only a handful of apps on a regular basis

This is why tech bellwethers — from social media platforms such as Facebook to traditional hardware companies like Apple — are churning out news products, designed to court and engage audiences to their brand-ecosystems.

Facebook plans to announce the launch of Notify, a standalone news app, the Financial Times reports. Featured content will come from media partners including Vogue, The Washington Post and CBS.

Professional content already is splintered across content creators and technology platforms

Apple News, for iOS 9. The mobile app aggregates news from a wide range of sources into a mobile-friendly format,

Twitter Moments is a feature on Twitter that links tweets in a traditional story format, from beginning to end.

Snapchat has been partnering with publishers for Snapchat Discover. The app, widely popular with millennials, includes a "Discover" feature that showcases stories from publishers including Vice, People, CNN and National Geographic

For example, with instant articles Facebook directly hosts outside publishers' articles on its social network — and Facebook pockets the traffic

Facebook on Wednesday also said its daily video views have reached 8 billion, though some tech analsyts including Pfeiffer wonder if a single view is measured by only a few seconds on an autoplay setting.

Facebook in fact is testing its own, site-specific video hub, as Re/code has reported.

“Ultimately, new technology can reveal desires that already exist on a deep level in society,” says Rafman of the works, which pull from and amplify the seductive forces of video games and cinema. “This desire to escape completely into another dimension has existed for a long time.”

Virtual reality’s recent resurgence in prominence begins with Oculus and its visionary 23-year-old founder, Palmer Luckey. In 2012, the then-18-year-old with an affinity for retooling defunct ’90s VR headsets took a hacked-together model to Kickstarter with a funding goal of $250,000. A month later, over 10,000 individuals contributed $2.4 million to the campaign for what was at the time mainly aimed at being a gaming peripheral. Two years later, Facebook wrote a check to buy Oculus VR for $2 billion

“This is not a drill. It’s real. It’s a moment,” says Michael Naimark, Google’s first resident virtual reality artist (like Char Davies, he’s listed as a pioneer of VR on Wikipedia). “And the arts community can play a huge role in propagation.

Throughout art history, art has reflected the prevalent social relations of the time. It makes sense, then, that the most relative and innovative art forms being produced today would mirror our reality—one defined by a perceived sense of agency in a world filled with invisible algorithms and clicks baited to us by past clicks. The internet spoils us with infinite choice: opportunities to invent our personas, refashion our self-brands, optimize our lives, and enhance our experience. But with mega-corporations quietly holding the joystick, can we really self-determine our destiny?

3D holographic imaging

"By 2050, you'll be able to invite your aunt from Australia for Sunday lunch

Those

emotion-sensing technology could build on the already booming field of adaptive learning software that assesses students’ mastery and delivers content appropriate to their skill level.

Zwift’s software can then convert the signal into power data, which is calculated by considering rider weight, the virtual terrain and even drafting into account to convert the power to speed within the game.

the virtual environment is impressive as it gives off sound effects from your surroundings and from the other riders that pass or are around you, making it a supremely immersive training session

What they’re building in its place is all so fragile and new. Parrish is worried even about the effect of U.S. Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez coming to shake the coders’ hands, or reporters like me coming to do stories. “We just don’t want all the notoriety to give the false illusion that we developed all the skills.”

BitSource would like to hire a second class of coders at the beginning of the new year. He, Parrish, and Hall want to fill up their buildings, create an incubator for entrepreneurs, a makerspace for craftsmen, and, someday, if they play their cards incredibly well, a bonafide Pikeville tech scene. You know, make Bloomberg in his smart suit eat crow for once.

Millennials, it seems, have discovered that the need to socialize face-to-face is waning, as food, shopping, friends, entertainment and even sex are all an app tap away.

The study also found that millennials spend about 3.1 hours a day on their mobile devices, compared with Generation X’s 1.7 hours.

You know, the whole ‘Netflix and chill,’ whatever you think about it . . . it’s kind of a trend,” he says.

They’re not consuming alcohol, but they’re consuming a lot of media — and it’s depressing them,

t’s much more entertaining to watch a sport like this where you don’t have to know what the rules are

We’re starting some VR projects around Ark

One of the biggest trends right now is people watching other people play video games.

Schilowitz believes you could take that experience into the theater. Have two people playing a virtual reality game while strapped into Oculus Rift-type devices and people would pay to watch the game on the big screen if top- ranked players were competing.

Escape will also be used to show things like concerts which can be better experienced with a wider screen. A Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett show will debut in Escape theaters in 2015.

The results of the other experiments came to the controversial conclusion that those with wealthier backgrounds were more likely to cut off other drivers, lie in negotiating, or cheat.

“The way kids talk and communicate is very different from how adults do, both in terms of how they use language and the fundamental frequencies that come out of their throats,

But as he points out, the way today’s children use technology will likely dictate the tech landscape for decades to come. If you can get kids hooked on speech technology young, they’ll stay with it forever.

Kids don’t want to ask a monkey character in a game what the weather will be on Tuesday. They want to sing him a song or ask him about life in the zoo.

While ToyTalk uses existing third party technology for its raw speech recognition, it works with those partners to develop better recognition models using ToyTalk’s own data. Now, ToyTalk has a trove of some 20 million children’s utterances, which Jacob believes is the largest database of kids conversation in the world

“Virtual assistants are awesome when they can answer every question. In our case, it’s the opposite,” Jacob says. “I have to know a lot of things that I’m not able to answer, and redirect the conversation to something that is within character.”

And Jacob says some toy companies are already testing PullString to power apps based on existing characters.

this technology could give kids a whole new way to play that falls somewhere in between the playground and the imaginary friend. “I think at some deep level if we succeed, we’ll inspire the imagination of kids to talk about things they might not otherwise talk about,”

They need time to daydream, deal with anxieties, process their thoughts and share them with parents, who can provide reassurance.

Texting looms as the next national epidemic, with half of teenagers sending 50 or more text messages a day and those aged 13 through 17 averaging 3,364 texts a month, Amanda Lenhart of the Pew Research Center found in a 2012 study