The future of senior living activities is virtual reality
Interestingly, VR use in older adults helps combat the symptoms and development of Alzheimer's disease, which 50% of residents experience, according to the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience. These impressive positive results also applied to senior motor control, balance, spatial waywardness and a host of other medical concerns.
The benefits are multiplied in residents who are bedridden or in wheelchairs by allowing them to relive the experiences of walking, skiing, swimming and other actions beyond their physical limitations. The power of instantly experiencing a wide range of new opportunities helps reignite residents' overall passions for life and mental engagement.
One of the most surprising discoveries is that VR provides twice the pain reduction as morphine, without any of the side effects of traditional pain medicine. In a breakthrough study by HIT Labs and Simon Fraser University, severe burn victims were given a snow themed VR experience during times of intense pain. Patients reported a 60% to 75% reduction in pain with VR sessions when using no painkillers compared with a 30% pain reduction when patients used only morphine.
See the full story here: https://www.mcknightsseniorliving.com/marketplace-columns/the-future-of-senior-living-activities-is-virtual-reality/article/779136/
Oasis Labs raises $45 million for ‘privacy first’ cloud on blockchain
Oasis Labs has raised $45 million to build a “privacy-first” cloud computing platform with blockchain technology.
Berkeley, California-based Oasis Labs is designing a platform to overcome the performance, security, and privacy limitations that have hampered blockchain adoption to date. The aim is to make blockchain, a distributed secure ledger that powers cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum, more useful to a broader set of companies.
said Oasis Labs CEO Dawn Song, in a statement. “The Oasis platform aims to give users control over their data, and at the same time deliver superior performance and privacy capabilities. Our goal is to build the scalable and secure decentralized internet that puts users first.”
The first funding round included a16z crypto, Accel, Binance DCVC (Data Collective), Electric Capital, Foundation Capital, Metastable, Pantera, Polychain, and others.
See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/09/oasis-labs-raises-45-million-for-privacy-first-cloud-on-blockchain/
AT&T will support Magic Leap’s augmented reality glasses, once they actually exist
AT&T will provide mobile data service for Magic Leap’s augmented reality glasses, the company has announced. The carrier is getting an exclusive partnership with the startup. In addition to selling the Magic Leap One glasses, it will let customers demo them at some stores in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco — though most buyers will likely be waiting for Magic Leap to release a still-unannounced consumer version of its product.
It notes that AT&T will only distribute the glasses once they come to consumers, and Magic Leap hasn’t offered a road map for a headset that’s mainly aimed at consumers, although it’s positioned the Creator Edition in an ambiguous space that could include them. An AT&T spokesperson tells The Verge that headsets will be available to demo in stores this year.
For people who believe Magic Leap will — as AT&T puts it — “transform computing,” this will probably conjure memories of the carrier’s exclusivity deal for Apple’s iPhone. And a consumer Magic Leap One headset is supposed to cost about as much as a high-end smartphone, with additional models that are more expensive.
Unlike with the iPhone, however, there’s no indication that you’ll only be able to get the Magic Leap One through AT&T.
See the full story here: https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/11/17560130/att-magic-leap-one-augmented-reality-spatial-computing
Zero Latency offers advanced wireless technology and motion tracking for older players, while Sands Cotai Central’s Planet J theme park caters to all ages.
Zero Latency Macau, located in Broadway Macau in the Cotai resort area, is a 200-square-metre (2,150-square-foot) VR game space where up to eight players can play together at the same time.
Despite actually playing on flat ground in the real world, your mind is fooled by what you see in the VR world, as if you are really walking uphill, downhill and even upside down.
Do not be disappointed if you are too young for these immersive VR games, or if you want to bring along your young children.
The solution is Planet J, the 9,300-square-metre live-action role-playing theme park at Sands Cotai Central, which welcomes gamers of all ages.
It comprises eight themed zones, with 200 game installations, augmented reality (AR) and VR gaming facilities.
Throughout the game, players are adventurers whose mission is to save the Magic Stone Kingdom from a mystifying dark power.
See the full story here: https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/tech-design/article/2154636/game-2150-square-foot-virtual-reality-space-opens-macau
The First Real Boom in Virtual Reality? It’s Pornography.
Naughty America, one of the world’s most prolific producers of VR content, is at the forefront of a lucrative niche driving adoption of the technology
Jill the babysitter is walking across the kitchen when she notices someone sitting at the counter. “Oh my god!” she says, clutching the towel wrapped around her body. “Mr. Johnson! I hope you don’t mind I used the shower.”
In the 18 months after producing its first VR video, the San Diego-based studio released 108 more, making it one of the most prolific producers of VR content in the world. In 2017, the company operated a booth at the annual International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and became the first adult business allowed to exhibit in 19 years.
In December 2016 alone, Naughty America’s customers downloaded more than 20 million VR videos, the company said.
Subscriptions to Naughty America’s website grew 55% in 2016, its first full year of offering VR; customers paid $25 a month to access unlimited videos (including more than 7,500 traditional two‑dimensional movies), or $74 for a year. And in the 18 months since releasing its first VR video, Naughty America’s revenue increased more than 40%; for all of 2016, VR-driven revenue was up 433%, the company said.
Naughty America isn’t the only producer in the industry. Adult-entertainment giant Pornhub contracted with Rochester, N.Y.-based virtual-reality porn production company BaDoinkVR to produce videos for its websites. Smaller players include dedicated VR startups like VirtualRealPorn.com, as well as an increasing number of solo performers who offer one-on-one live VR videoconferencing to clients.
One of the most enterprising small businesses in the space is run by Ela Darling, an entrepreneur who produced and starred in original virtual-reality porn for her company VRTube.xxx.
“I think there’s concern about minors accessing the content, but we’ve had pay-for-view on cable systems for years, so it’s not like that problem can’t be solved technologically. There’s a way you can do verification to avoid that. So I think a lot of it is political.”
This article is adapted from David M. Ewalt’s book “Defying Reality: The Inside Story of the Virtual Reality Revolution,” to be published July 17 by Blue Rider Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-first-real-boom-in-virtual-reality-its-pornography-1531320180
THERE’S A NEW VIRTUAL REALITY ARCADE AT DENVER MUSEUM OF NATURE AND SCIENCE
The new arcade — which is only considered a “pop-up” at the moment — will give visitors a chance to immerse themselves in 10 different experiences that ultimately relate to the other topics covered in the museum in some way. The only requirement is putting on a headset and holding a pair of controllers.
Though entrance to the arcade requires a separate ticket from the rest of the exhibits, the DMNS believes that these new technological additions will only heighten anyone’s enjoyment of the rest of the museum. And let’s be honest — anything that can be learned with an interactive game is going to be retained a little better, even if some of us have an odd affinity for those life-size dioramas.
The 10 games available to try are Google Earth VR, Beat Saber, V-Racer Hoverbike, Mars Odyssey, Plank Not Included, Eagle Flight, Job Simulator, Eleven: Table Tennis, Sea of Memories and Glider Island. To try one of the games, visitors will either use one of the six individual VR bays or form a team of four for the only group-oriented activity. Since the arcade only opened to the public on Monday, July 9 we can’t say for sure what each game is like but we can say that virtual reality is an experience that is adventurous yet safe, fun yet informative and a perfect topping to the educational cake that is the DMNS.
See the full story here: https://303magazine.com/2018/07/virtual-reality-arcade-dmns/
Facebook is testing augmented reality ads in the News Feed
At its F8 developer conference earlier this year, Facebook announced that it was working with businesses to use AR to show off products in Messenger. Now a similar experience will start appearing in the News Feed, with a select group of advertisers testing out AR ads.
These ads look like normal in-feed ads at first, but they include a “Tap to try it on” option, which opens up the AR capabilities. And of course if you like the way it looks in AR, you can go ahead and buy the product.
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/10/facebook-ar-ads/?utm_medium=TCnewsletter
Touching Masterpieces
See the full video here: https://touchingmasterpieces.com/
Crypto and venture’s biggest names are backing a new distributed ledger project called Oasis Labs
A team of top security researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and MIT have come together to launch a new cryptographic project that combines secure software and hardware to enable privacy-preserving smart contracts under the banner of Oasis Labs.
That vision, which is being marketed as the baby of a union between Ethereum and Amazon Web Services, has managed to attract $45 million in pre-sale financing from some of the biggest names in venture capital and cryptocurrency investing.
“We use a combination of trusted hardware and cryptographic techniques (such as secure multiparty computation) to enable smart contracts to compute over this encrypted data, without revealing anything about the underlying data. This is like doing computation inside a black box, which only outputs the computation result without showing what’s inside the black box,” Song wrote to me in an email.
Song says that her project has solved the scaling problem by separating execution from consensus.
“For each smart contract execution, we randomly select a subset of the computation nodes to form a computation committee, using a proof of stake mechanism. The computation committee executes the smart contract transaction,” Song wrote in an email exchange with TechCrunch. “The consensus committee then verifies the correctness of the computation results from the computation committee.
“We use proof-of-stake mechanisms to elect instances of different types of functional committees: compute, storage and consensus committees,” Song explained.
Song’s approach has managed to gain the support of firms including: a16zcrypto, Accel, Binance, DCVC (Data Collective), Electric Capital, Foundation Capital, Metastable, Pantera, Polychain
In all, some 75 investors have rallied to finance the company’s approach to securing data and selling compute power on a cryptographically secured ledger.
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/09/distributed-ledgeroasis-labs/?utm_medium=TCnewsletter
Meet the Millennial Who Is Taking Virtual Reality to the Front Lines of the Church
Disney-raised and Harvard educated, Benjamin Crockett, 28, dropped everything during the second year of his thesis at Harvard Divinity School to take a sabbatical in Rome.
His mission is to use the latest technology in virtual reality to document the Church and her advocacy.
“I want to resurrect that sense of heroic Christianity that the Church has always been involved in but that I think has largely been forgotten,” said Crockett.
What better way than virtual reality, he thought.
Thus far, Crockett has filmed a pilgrimage series through the 44 “Station Churches” of Rome and collaborated with the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) to film refugee camps in Malawi and Lebanon, as well as other celebrations, events and interviews in Rome.
“Rather than simply telling the audience a story, I want to give them an experience,” Crockett said.
With his aspiration to link every story to an action, his most sought-out endeavor is to create the Church’s first virtual-reality news program called VR2 (pronounced “virtue”), an immersive media brand to inspire, inform and educate the new generation of Catholic youth that takes people to the heart of the Church’s mission.
One of Crockett’s main supporters, Dudley Rose, Harvard associate dean of ministry studies, hopes to see his project bear fruit in the way he imagined to bring immersive content to thousands of young people.
“We are also very interested in seeing him experiment, research and test hypotheses,” Rose added. “As his work resides in the technology field and makes use of social media and other electronic means for distribution, he has the ability to learn what demographics he is reaching.”
See the full story here: http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/meet-the-millennial-who-is-taking-virtual-reality-to-the-front-lines-of-the