Lifeboat Foundation

Video games could give ophthalmologists an easy window not into the soul, but into eye health and the eye-brain-body connection — the three-way reciprocal communication that influences our actions.

“Infusing science into games is like sneaking broccoli into ice cream,” said Khizer Khaderi, MD, a clinical associate professor of ophthalmology. “It removes the resistance to do something that may not be viewed as fun, such as eating vegetables.” Or in this case, evaluating your vision health.

In a Stanford Medicine-led study, researchers employed video games to evaluate participants’ field of vision and visual stamina, their ability to distinguish contrast, and other factors that can indicate common eye diseases.

September is the start to a new academic year. For many students, this means a fresh start and perhaps a chance to acquire some new study habits. Maybe this is the year you will stop putting everything off until the night before the exam? Now, there is some new evidence to explain why last-minute high-pressure cramming might not be the best way to retain information in the long term.

Imagine you’re an art thief planning an art heist. That was the role people played in a computer game under guidance of researchers from Duke University. But what they remembered about it one day later depended on the instructions they got when they started the game.

In this study, published in Proceedings of the… More.

Continue reading “Curiosity-Driven Exploration Makes Things More Memorable” »

Parents who limit their kids’ screen time, it seems, may be doing them a service: a new study has found that babies who spend a lot of time looking at iPads and other screens experience developmental delays.

Published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association of Pediatrics, this new research out of Japan suggests that watching screens may limit infants’ practicing of real-life motor skills that they glean from mimicking the people near them.

In a questionnaire, the parents of the more than 7,000 kids surveyed were asked a simple question: “On a typical day, how many hours do you allow your children to watch TV, DVDs, video games, internet games (including mobile phones and tablets), etc?”

Only five bots will be made and are priced at $2.5 million a piece.

Japanese company Tsubame pulls this straight from science fiction and makes Transformer-like mecha robots. The first, dubbed Archax, has a cockpit where a human can sit to pilot the bot and, at the touch of a button, can even take a different form. Although not with the finesse, the Autobots manage with animation in the movie franchise.

Continue reading “Archax, the 15 foot tall mecha that can be piloted by a human” »

A film that has spawned a thousand imitations but never been bettered — Mamoru Oshii’s legendary anime film GHOST IN THE SHELL returns in a stunning new edition remastered by Oshii himself. Set in a re-imagined Hong Kong at a time when cyberspace is expanding into human reality, the story follows top cyberwarrior Major Motoko Kusanagi as she hovers on the border of total immersion in the digital world.

The latest advancements in AI for gaming are in the spotlight today at Gamescom, the world’s largest gaming conference, as NVIDIA introduced a host of technologies, starting with DLSS 3.5, the next step forward of its breakthrough AI neural rendering technology.

DLSS 3.5, NVIDIA’s latest innovation in AI-powered graphics is an image quality upgrade incorporated into the fall’s hottest ray-traced titles, from Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty to Alan Wake 2 to Portal with RTX.

Continue reading “NVIDIA Debuts AI-Enhanced Real-Time Ray Tracing for Games and Apps With New DLSS 3.5” »

An experimental video shows what video games could feel like if characters were aware of and responsive to themselves and their surroundings.

YouTuber Foxmaster took on the classic game “Tomb Raider” in its original version. Using various AI tools for machine vision, localization, object recognition, animation, text, and speech, he breathed digital life into the game character, or more specifically, a Lara Croft bot that controls its own character.

Continue reading “AI makes Lara Croft ‘self-aware’ in Tomb Raider, a glimpse into the future of video games” »

Jordi van den Bussche has been posting gaming content on YouTube for over a decade. He’s now announced he’ll be stepping away from the camera, thanks to an AI replacement. Some viewers are skeptical about the change, but the YouTuber is confident it will bring success.

A YouTuber has launched his own AI replacement, which will now be starring in and producing videos on his behalf. It’s caused quite a stir among viewers who are debating whether they’re fans of the drastic change.

Jordi van den Bussche, a gaming creator based in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, has been posting on YouTube under the moniker “Kwebbelkop” since 2011 and has so far amassed a following of 15.1 million subscribers.

The central problem quantum state engineering is trying to solve, says Ryan Glasser is “what do I need to do to get my quantum system to be in the state I desire?” Researchers hope ManQala, a version of the ancient game mancala, has answers. (Credit: Tobias Tullius/Unsplash)

The game mancala may have originated as far back as 6,000 BCE in Jordan and is played around the world to this day. It consists of stones that players move between a series of small pits on a wooden game board. The point of the game is to get all the stones into the last pit at the end of the board.