Is Virtual Reality The Ultimate Training Machine For School Shooters?
This is exactly what President Trump recently suggested. "I’m hearing more and more people seeing the level of violence in video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts," the president said in Florida recently. Thankfully, scientific studies---not to mention the Supreme Court---suggest otherwise. For the time being at least, the First Amendment remains outside Second Amendment hardliners' cross-hairs.
Writing at CNN, Jeremy Bailenson, author of Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do and director of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, argues that VR could be a dangerously accessible way for mass shooters to learn how to kill more efficiently.
"if a possible mass-shooter wants to hone his craft, we shouldn't hand him an over-the-counter digital boot camp."
This is a rather extreme claim with frankly staggering implications. It's also incredibly silly, bordering on preposterous. Bailenson doesn't argue that we should censor or ban VR shooting games, but he does come up with some odd suggestions to make them less effective as "virtual bootcamps" despite, well, not being that at all.
Writing op/eds about virtual boot camps is only good for one thing: To provide virtual ammunition for the NRA and its toadies in government to steer the conversation away from guns and toward a scapegoat.
See the full opinion piece here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2018/03/08/no-virtual-reality-games-are-not-virtual-bootcamps-for-mass-shooters/#1e32a9646a2c
Virtual Reality Offers a World Without Rules for Filmmakers
... Angel Manuel Soto, director of alien abduction drama Dinner Party...
There was a learning curve. The continuous nature of VR required constant communication with his actors to keep their performances scaled to match their spatial relationship with the camera and the narrative importance of their scene.
This also meant no downtime for any of the performers, because the VR environment demands providing audiences with something to look at in all directions, even as the director tries to redirect their attention to what's truly important.
See the full story here: https://www.austinchronicle.com/screens/2018-03-09/virtual-reality-offers-a-world-without-rules-for-filmmakers/
Invasive Use of Facial Recognition Tech Already Widespread
Facial recognition is getting better by leaps and bounds, and some of the examples of how it is being used are disturbing. In Russia, the website FindFace matches submitted photos to VK, that country’s Facebook knock-off. Trolls are using it to identify and harass women who appear in adult videos. China uses cameras with facial recognition to tag jaywalkers, and, in Dubai, police wear Google Glasses to identify people. In the U.S., the government facial recognition system can already identify the faces of half of all American adults.
Psychology Today ticks off more of the ways that facial recognition is being developed, many times with sobering implications. “Now researchers are developing techniques that not only identify people by their faces but also infer what’s in their minds,” using facial expressions to identify emotions and “facial structure [to] hint at our genetic makeup.”
At Carnegie Mellon University, privacy researcher Alessandro Acquisti matched student photos to Facebook profiles to harvest names, interests and other information, then used these data points and “another algorithm” to find Social Security numbers. His team was able to successfully find the first five digits for about 25 percent of the participants. Next, Acquisti’s team created a demo iPhone app that, when the phone’s camera was pointed at a stranger, displayed his name, SSN, and date and state of birth.
“Informed consent” may be an illusion, says Psychology Today...
“It’s easy to see race and class biases becoming embedded and amplified,” concluded Psychology Today.
See the full story here: http://www.etcentric.org/invasive-use-of-facial-recognition-tech-already-widespread/
Segway’s new scooter is a cute, $1,300 rolling robot that carries your stuff and follows you around — and it’s straight out of science-fiction
- Segway Robotics is opening pre-orders for Loomo, a robotic scooter.
- A cross between a Segway scooter and an Amazon Echo, Loomo is a $1,300 two-wheel transport that responds to voice commands.
- In addition to transporting you, it can take your picture on command, automatically follow you around, and act as a telepresence robot that you control remotely.
See the full story here: http://www.businessinsider.com/segway-robotics-opens-preorders-for-its-loomo-robotic-scooter-2018-3
VRcade PowerPlay enables location-based virtual reality esports
Today, the company is launching VRcade PowerPlay, an esport game built for location-based entertainment.
VRstudios has 55 VRcades in 14 countries, where players can line up in a pay-per-play experience, much like old video game arcades. The Bellevue, Washington-based company said, “VRcade PowerPlay is an intensely athletic team esport played in free-roaming, arena-scale virtual reality.”
It pits anywhere from two to eight players together in a 60 feet by 40 feet configurable VR battlefield. The competitive matches can be dynamically configured with millions of distinct combinations of multiplayer game modes, arm cannon presets, and battlefield configurations.
See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/2018/03/07/vrcade-powerplay-enables-location-based-virtual-reality-esports/
VR Headset Uses Robot Arm To Feed You Candy
Of course the most prominent of these experiences center around interacting with virtual girlfriends, a common practice in modern Japan. We’ve seen AR girlfriend cafes, actual marriages to virtual wives, even VR ear cleaning by anime-style waifus. But out of all the many digital companion immersive experiences available, none of them gave Japanese users the one activity they’ve been desperate for: being hand-fed candy by a gorgeous idol.
Dream no more friends, as Puccho’s 4-D candy-feeding headset and VR experience is on the way.
BBC Nile report films with Virtual Reality camera
The BBC used a Virtual Reality camera to film a news report looking at the political implications of the damming of the River Nile in Ethiopia.
Alastair Leithead, the BBC’s Africa correspondent, took a trip down the iconic river through Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt for the two-part report entitled Damming the Nile VR.
Much of the project was shot using an Insta360 Pro, a 1.2kg VR camera with six fisheye lenses that is usually mounted on a tripod and was supervised by VR expert Phil Harper.
The camera generates immersive VR with fully spatialised audio, meaning the sound changes depending where the user looks.
The Insta360 Pro is designed to be mobile and Leithead and his team sheltered the camera with a sunhat to prevent the unit overheating between takes.
“Crucially, the trip was going to be happening anyway and it seemed like a good opportunity to help kick-start the BBC’s VR content with a journey down a scenic river,” says Leithead, in comments to KFTV. "The trip would ordinarily be too expensive if planned as a project organised solely around VR."
See the complete story here: http://www.kftv.com/news/2018/03/06/bbc-nile-report-films-with-virtual-reality-camera