Japanese Telecomm Predicts Fully Immersive Mainstream VR by 2020
With the expansion rate of Japan's wireless networks in terms of both bandwidth and decreasing cost, coupled with the rate of development of mobile phones into computing platforms in their own right, NTT DoCoMo, Japan's largest mobile phone carrier service believe that this estimate is about right.

DiveIn is a little bit of an oddity. Well, it would be, if the company that makes it, did not churn out similar worlds at a rate of knots.

 

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The LifeShirt is a garment (not necessarily a shirt) developed by VivoMetrics, which monitors tyhe wearer's vital signs. Collecting a continuous stream of respiration flow, heart rate, breathing regularity, sweat production and other key metrics.

The Trazer by Cybex Incorporated. Billed as a virtual reality exercise machine, this $6,495 USD (?3,300) machine tracks an infrared belt worn by the exerciser, and uses changes in the position of that, and senses of increase or decrease in heat rate, to determine how much they are exercising.

At CES 2009, Nvidea unveiled a system of active glasses. Specifically, shutter glasses. The frames alternate polarisation to block light out every second frame, so that each eye gets half the screen update rate of any normal monitor, but will work with a normal output stream just fine.

The dream of a prosthetic limb that touches and feels like a natural limb, is still some ways away. A natural arm or leg processes sensory data at a rate we just do not have the bandwidth to recreate, much less tie into the human nervous system. That said however, significant progress has already been made, and development continues at a rapidly accelerating pace.

Computers are becoming more powerful at an ever-increasing rate, but will they ever become conscious? Artificial intelligence guru Ray Kurzweil thinks so and explains how we will upload our minds and upgrade our bodies to become immortal before the dawn of the 22nd century. In this debate with his critics, including several Discovery Institute Fellows, Kurzweil defends his views and sets the stage for the central question: "What does it mean to be human?"

A Camera that Detects Vital Signs
Originally designed with Olympic events in mind, the INCA camera is a tiny recording device that is also perhaps the first SimStim device in existence. It is capable of interfacing with any body area network to record metadata of temperature, heart rate, breathing, potentially even mood of the subject on screen, and transferring that data directly onto the video file itself, as additional data.

A required reading book on real-time scene rendering that has been around for years, this book serves as a holistic, platform-independent guide for creating high frame rate renders that are as realistic as possible for the hardware available ? and teaches you where the bottlenecks are in the process so that you learn how to gauge new hardware from spec and understand how it will directly impact performance.

(05/09/2007)
Mitsubishi has revealed a new Blu-ray player that can convert existing 2D movies into 3D in real time.

The company showed off the technology to a few tech journalists at the Barclays? PGA Tour at Westchester Country Club, a...

(20/06/2010)
Google is getting faster and more comprehensive with a new Web indexing system called "Caffeine."

Carrie Grimes, a Google software engineer, said the Internet search giant had completed the system which "provides 50 percen...

(23/06/2004)
SecondLife, the social virtual reality world that's in many of the headlines at the moment for its ground-breaking achievements for VR has now achieved an exchange-rate for its in-world economy of 230 Linden dollars to one American dollar....

(06/06/2008)
At the recent Society for Information Display conference in Los Angeles, Samsung showed off a 15-inch display made with blue-phase liquid crystals, a type of liquid crystal that researchers have known about for years but that no one had eve...

(17/12/2008)
In a perhaps entirely expected development, Mayo Clinic has developed a surgical screw placement system that uses a combination of AR vision systems and robot manipulation, to place spinal screws with a far higher degree of accuracy than a ...