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Archive for the ‘augmented reality’ category: Page 67

Oct 19, 2014

Stopping the Spread of Ebola through Augmented Reality

Posted by in categories: augmented reality, biotech/medical, mobile phones

Flickr By spcbrass

The headlines pound away at us day after day with ominous news. Ebola has the potential to spread around the globe through rapid transport on airplanes, trains and automobiles. The United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and other health experts do not recommend shutting down air travel from West Africa. “If you try to shut down air travel and sea travel, you risk affecting to a huge extent the economy, people’s livelihoods and their ability to get around without stopping the virus from traveling,” said Greg Hartl, a World Health Organization spokesperson.

In a recent poll, a majority of Americans believe air travel restrictions are a necessity to stop the spread of Ebola in the United States. In fact, 56 percent said the federal government should bar those who have “recently” been in Ebola nations from entering the U.S. It is obvious we must find better ways to use technology to our advantage to detect people who are showing symptoms of the virus. This is where augmented reality and wearable technology can improve our detection rate of sick people stricken with Ebola.

Currently Ebola screening is taking place at five United States airports: Newark, Atlanta, Chicago, New York and Washington. US government officials claim that 95% of travels from West Africa would go through those airports to enter the United States. Once a traveller passed a screener check-point, they would be free to enter the US without being monitored after that point.

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Aug 2, 2014

What Else Could Smart Contact Lenses Do?

Posted by in categories: augmented reality, bionic, biotech/medical, cyborgs

By Suzanne Jacobs — MIT Technology Review

Last week Google and Novartis announced that they’re teaming up to develop contact lenses that monitor glucose levels and automatically adjust their focus. But these could be just the start of a clever new product category. From cancer detection and drug delivery to reality augmentation and night vision, our eyes offer unique opportunities for both health monitoring and enhancement.

“Now is the time to put a little computer and a lot of miniaturized technologies in the contact lens,” says Franck Leveiller, head of research and development in the Novartis eye care division.

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May 10, 2014

What to make of the film ‘Transcendence’? Show it in classrooms.

Posted by in categories: 3D printing, augmented reality, bionic, computing, cyborgs, disruptive technology, existential risks, fun, futurism, homo sapiens, human trajectories, innovation, nanotechnology, philosophy, posthumanism, privacy, robotics/AI, science, singularity, transhumanism

transcendence
I recently saw the film Transcendence with a close friend. If you can get beyond Johnny Depp’s siliconised mugging of Marlon Brando and Rebecca Hall’s waddling through corridors of quantum computers, Transcendence provides much to think about. Even though Christopher Nolan of Inception fame was involved in the film’s production, the pyrotechnics are relatively subdued – at least by today’s standards. While this fact alone seems to have disappointed some viewers, it nevertheless enables you to focus on the dialogue and plot. The film is never boring, even though nothing about it is particularly brilliant. However, the film stays with you, and that’s a good sign. Mark Kermode at the Guardian was one of the few reviewers who did the film justice.

The main character, played by Depp, is ‘Will Caster’ (aka Ray Kurzweil, but perhaps also an allusion to Hans Castorp in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain). Caster is an artificial intelligence researcher based at Berkeley who, with his wife Evelyn Caster (played by Hall), are trying to devise an algorithm capable of integrating all of earth’s knowledge to solve all of its its problems. (Caster calls this ‘transcendence’ but admits in the film that he means ‘singularity’.) They are part of a network of researchers doing similar things. Although British actors like Hall and the key colleague Paul Bettany (sporting a strange Euro-English accent) are main players in this film, the film itself appears to transpire entirely within the borders of the United States. This is a bit curious, since a running assumption of the film is that if you suspect a malevolent consciousness uploaded to the internet, then you should shut the whole thing down. But in this film at least, ‘the whole thing’ is limited to American cyberspace.

Before turning to two more general issues concerning the film, which I believe may have led both critics and viewers to leave unsatisfied, let me draw attention to a couple of nice touches. First, the leader of the ‘Revolutionary Independence from Technology’ (RIFT), whose actions propel the film’s plot, explains that she used to be an advanced AI researcher who defected upon witnessing the endless screams of a Rhesus monkey while its entire brain was being digitally uploaded. Once I suspended my disbelief in the occurrence of such an event, I appreciate it as a clever plot device for showing how one might quickly convert from being radically pro- to anti-AI, perhaps presaging future real-world targets for animal rights activists. Second, I liked the way in which quantum computing was highlighted and represented in the film. Again, what we see is entirely speculative, yet it highlights the promise that one day it may be possible to read nature as pure information that can be assembled according to need to produce what one wants, thereby rendering our nanotechnology capacities virtually limitless. 3D printing may be seen as a toy version of this dream.

Now on to the two more general issues, which viewers might find as faults, but I think are better treated as what the Greeks called aporias (i.e. open questions):

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Mar 20, 2014

Graphene smart contact lenses could give you thermal infrared and UV vision

Posted by in categories: augmented reality, nanotechnology

By - ExtremeTech
Google's smart contact lens, for detecting glucose levels (diabetes)
A breakthrough in graphene imaging technology means you might soon have a smart contact lens, or other ultra-thin device, with a built-in camera that also gives you infrared “heat vision.” By sandwiching two layers of graphene together, engineers at the University of Michigan have created an ultra-broadband graphene imaging sensor that is ultra-broadband (it can capture everything from visible light all the way up to mid-infrared) — but more importantly, unlike other devices that can see far into the infrared spectrum, it operates well at room temperature.

As you probably know by now, graphene has some rather miraculous properties — including, as luck would have it, a very strong effect when it’s struck by photons (light energy). Basically, when graphene is struck by a photon, an electron absorbs that energy and becomes a hot carrier – an effect that can be measured, processed, and turned into an image. The problem, however, is that graphene is incredibly thin (just one atom thick) and transparent — and so it only absorbs around 2.3% of the light that hits it. With so little light striking it, there just aren’t enough hot carrier electrons to be reliably detected. (Yes, this is one of those rare cases where being transparent and super-thin is actually a bad thing.)

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Feb 26, 2014

A Telepresence RoboCop Piloted by Oculus Rift and Sensored Gloves

Posted by in categories: augmented reality, robotics/AI

Written By:

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Jan 3, 2014

Hey, Elon and Sergey, did you see these SpaceGlasses?

Posted by in categories: 3D printing, augmented reality, business, engineering, futurism, human trajectories

By 3D Printing Industry

http://youtu.be/LuMv29nKo2k

Two-thousand-and-fourteen is already looking like a great year for 3D creativity. Assembled 3D printers are coming out priced at under 500 euros, new low-cost high-quality 3D scanners are launching and, if that weren’t enough, the first SpaceGlasses are going to be delivered in July.

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Dec 18, 2013

Minimally Invasive Medical Technology – For the betterment of the human condition.

Posted by in categories: 3D printing, augmented reality, bioprinting, biotech/medical, drones, futurism, robotics/AI, transhumanism

image credit - Protomag.com

Technology for pain-free healing:

“Your threshold for pain is near zero”, said my dentist, as she deftly moved the extremely thin fiber optic laser head away.

“That’s why I chose to fly in here. Gum filet carving doesn’t appeal to me”, I mumbled, my lips feeling leathery from the anesthetic spray.

Continue reading “Minimally Invasive Medical Technology – For the betterment of the human condition.” »

Dec 5, 2013

Could Apple’s next products have Minority Report-like control?

Posted by in categories: augmented reality, business, futurism, human trajectories, media & arts

Dec 2, 2013

Boardroom lies, bedroom truths may come from augmented reality-artificial intelligence partnership

Posted by in category: augmented reality
Michael del Castillo
Upstart Business Journal Technology & Innovation Editor

The UpTake: Enon Landenberg is taking augmented reality into uncharted territory by integrating it with artificial intelligence.

Augmented reality took another step towards being something more than just a gimmick with today’s announcement that Infinity AR has partnered with Beyond Verbal, an Israeli startup that decodes and measures human emotions in voice.

“Augmented reality is the front end. It’s just presentation,” said Infinity AR founder Enon Landenberg in an interview with Upstart Business Journal. But this new partnership, according to Landenberg, will enable users to determine if a potential investor is lying during a business meeting, or if a romantic interest means it when she tells you she’ll call later.

“We don’t need to develop tone recognition,” he said. “We take it from Beyond Verbal.”

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