Group items tagged

"CyberSim Game: ECE 6570 combines Virtual Worlds, Augmented Reality, and Classroom Lectures in a serious game, which is based on principles of Cyber Security (virtual world), Physical Security (augmented reality), and Social Engineering (reality/class lectures). "

"Human brains will someday extend into the cloud, futurist and computer pioneer Ray Kurzweil predicted at the DEMO conference here on Tuesday. Moreover, he said, it will become possible to selectively erase pieces of our memories, while retaining some portions of them, to be able to learn new things no matter how old the person is." Of course, it's all about AI and augmented reality, leading right up to our having an augmented brain. Which, in a sense, we have for so long already - at least since we invented writing. But okay, in many ways we're re-inventing writing.  You'll find the video at Computerworld. 

"Microsoft has it's own Project Glass cooking in the R&D labs. It's an augmented reality glasses/heads-up display, that should supply you with various bits of trivia while you are watching a live event, e.g. baseball game. " The information is based on a patent application, so don't expect a Microsoft Glass for Christmas. 

"Thingiverse is also introducing a new "Follow" button that will connect you to the things, digital designs, designers, users, tags, categories: all the stuff you care about most. By following a Thing, you'll get a notification when someone comments on it, makes a copy of it, or remixes it. Some new digital designs inspire a whole family of new Things, and the Follow button helps you keep track of those.  " As Bruce Sterling says, it's almost a social network of things. Now just imagine to have this affordance in augmented reality - you just point your smartphone, tablet or google glass to a thing, you activate some app and you get all this information. Also in the press release, the guys from Thingiverse explain how users have been tagging their uploads with useful descriptors - and so now you can follow tags or categories to get updates in a dashboard. We're talking here about the annotation of our physical reality, bookmarking no longer just the digital world of websites but of the objects which surround us. 

An academic study co-authored last year by leading virtual world academic Edward Castronova suggests that people get more happiness from being in Second Life than they do from good news in their real life.  Wagner James Au on New World Notes says this is probably also true for other virtual environments, not onlt for Second Life. He also points to the bigger question of the shifting boundaries between virtual and real.  Social media help extend immersive experiences to so-called real world networks. Virtual money is convertible in real money, and solidarity actions for real world issues can start out in virtual environments.  Manuel Castells says we live in a cultural of virtual reality - I think the deconstruction of the boundaries between real and virtual is becoming fairly obvious. Virtual is not some exclusive feature of 3D environments, and reality is ever more being augmented and digitally annotated.