Lifeboat Foundation

Hands are old news. VR navigation, control and selection is best done with the eyes—at least that’s what HTC Vive is banking on with the upcoming HTC Vive Pro Eye, a VR headset with integrated Tobii eye tracking initially targeting businesses. I tried out a beta version of the feature myself on MLB Home Run Derby VR. It’s still in development and, thus, was a little wonky, but I can’t deny its cool factor.

HTC announced the new headset Tuesday at the CES tech show in Las Vegas. The idea is that by having eye tracking built into the headset, better use cases, such as enhanced training programs, can be introduced. The VR player also says users can expect faster VR interactions and better efficiency in terms of tapping your PC’s CPU and GPU.

Of course, before my peepers could be tracked I needed to calibrate the headset for my special eyes. It was quite simple, after adjusting the interpupillary distance appropriately, the headset had me stare at a blue dot that bounced around my field of view (FOV). The whole thing took less than a minute.

Continue reading “HTC Vive Pro Eye Hands-On: Feeling Powerful With Built-In Tobii Eye Tracking” »

February 4th, 2019 saw the Longevity Leaders Conference hosted in Aldersgate, London. I was fortunate enough to have been invited to attend this interesting event, so I thought that today was the ideal time to share some experiences of the conference with you.

The conference was quite broad in scope and included people from the aging research community, the pharmaceutical industry, general healthcare, and the business and insurance fields.

Now with its cover in place, our NASA InSight lander will collect accurate data despite wind and temperature changes on the Red Planet: https://go.nasa.gov/2St6gUj

OTTAWA — A Chinese telecommunication company secretly diverted Canadian internet traffic to China, particularly from Rogers subscribers in the Ottawa area, says an Israeli cybersecurity specialist.

The 2016 incident involved the surreptitious rerouting of the internet data of Rogers customers in and around Canada’s capital by China Telecom, a state-owned internet service provider that has two legally operating “points of presence” on Canadian soil, said Yuval Shavitt, an electrical-engineering expert at Tel Aviv University.

Shavitt told The Canadian Press that the China Telecom example should serve as a caution to the Canadian government not to do business with another Chinese telecommunications giant: Huawei Technologies, which is vying to build Canada’s next-generation 5G wireless communications networks.

Continue reading “Israeli cyberexpert detects China hack in Ottawa, warns against using Huawei 5G” »

For example, Musk said, “Initially making one 200 metric ton thrust engine common across ship & booster to reach the Moon as fast as possible. Next versions will split to vacuum-optimized (380+ sec Isp) & sea-level thrust optimized (~250 ton).”

This comment is notable for a couple of reasons. First of all, the company appears to have decided to streamline the Raptor engine to a single design that will power both the rocket at liftoff, and the spaceship in the upper atmosphere and outer space. It will take less time to develop, test, and qualify a single engine. It will also cost less money.

Additionally, Musk notes that the goal is “to reach the Moon as fast as possible.” The company still appears to be focused on lunar orbital flights, such as the #dearMoon project for Japanese businessman Yusaku Maezawa, as the first missions for Starship.

Continue reading “In new Starship details, Musk reveals a more practical approach” »

Journalist Ashlee Vance travels to Montreal, Canada to meet the founders of Lyrebird, a startup that is using AI to clone human voices with frightening precision.

Hello World is a Webby and Emmy-nominated video series from Bloomberg that invites the viewer to come on a journey across the globe to find the inventors, scientists and technologists shaping our future. Join journalist and best-selling author Ashlee Vance on a quest to find the freshest, weirdest tech creations and the beautiful freaks behind them.

Continue reading “This AI Can Clone Any Voice, Including Yours” »

Bug and vulnerability hunting is a big business and the need for it is getting larger and larger. Up until this point, the majority of work had been from people. Either as hackers discovered holes and released exploits or as companies paid people to do the testing.

The machine triumphed in DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge, where teams automated white-hat hacking.

Early November 2018, Conrad Holton visited Japan at the invitation of Hamamatsu Photonics to attend the three-day Photon Fair, the company’s big event looking at its technologies and vision for the future. The Fair is held every five years near its headquarters in Hamamatsu City, about 150 miles southwest of Tokyo. In addition to thousands of customers, suppliers, and students who attended, the event was open to the public for one day to show the many technologies just emerging from the company’s research labs and how these technologies might impact fields ranging from the life sciences to transportation and manufacturing.

An interview with the CEO of Hamamatsu Photonics shows how an engineering company with a singular focus on photonics can succeed.

The adorable and enigmatic axolotl is capable of regenerating many different body parts, including limbs, organs, and even portions of its brain. Scientists hope that a deeper understanding of these extraordinary abilities could help make this kind of tissue regeneration possible for humans. With news today of the first complete axolotl genome, researchers can now finally get down to the business of unraveling these mysteries.

Axolotls are tiny aquatic salamanders whose only native habitat is a lake near Mexico City. Many animals, such as frogs, sea stars, and flatworms, are capable of tissue regeneration, but the axolotl is unique in that it can regenerate many different body parts over the course of its entire life cycle, including limbs, tail, heart, lungs, eyes, spinal cord, and up to half of its brain.