Magic Leap is fascinating tech with the ability to create realistic holograms in the field of view that interact with real-world objects. It requires glasses (not shown in the marketing image below) which are less bulky than current VR glasses and less obtrusive than Google Glass.
Originally shared by Kevin Kelly
This is the best technical guessimate of how Magic Leap’s VR technology works; it matches what I saw in person. http://uploadvr.com/magic-leap-how-it-works/ …
Originally shared by Eduardo Suastegui
He Wants to Inject Your Bloodstream With Healing #Nanobots
As far as Samuel Sánchez is concerned, science fiction is temporary fiction. In his not-too-distant future, an army of cell-size, self-propelled nanorobots will do enormous good. They’ll be injected into our bodies, where they’ll hunt down tumors and deliver targeted medicines. They’ll save our rivers and oceans by cleaning up contamination. The bots will be our friends…
http://www.ozy.com/rising-stars/he-wants-to-inject-your-bloodstream-with-healing-nanobots/70286
Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger
This is a new technology that I can only describe as “unbelievably cool.” The idea is simple, if you’ve ever held a glass up to sunlight: when light passes through a curved, transparent surface, it gets bent and forms patterns when it lands. What this company has done is worked out an algorithm that lets them delicately shape pieces of glass so that the resulting pattern forms any image you want.
The result feels like magic: you’re holding what looks like normal glass in your hand, but as the light shines through it, it projects an image.
There’s nothing actually magical at all, of course; the challenges are all in some algorithmics to compute the right surface shape, and in the practicalities of shaping glass so precisely. But as the video evidences, the results are beautiful. I can’t wait to see this hit the market.
h/t Autumn Ginkgo Leaves™
Originally shared by Stewart Brand
Here’s my summary of Kevin Kelly’s recent talk for Long Now:
Digital is just getting started
IN KEVIN KELLY’S VIEW, a dozen “inevitable” trends will drive the next 30 years of digital progress. Countless artificial smartnesses, for example, will be added to everything, all quite different from human intelligence and from each other. We will tap into them like we do into electricity to become cyber-centaurs — co-dependent humans and AIs. All of us will need to perpetually upgrade just to stay in the game.
Every possible surface that can become a display will become a display, and will study its watchers. Everything we encounter, “if it cannot interact, it is broken.” Virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) will become the next platform after smartphones, conveying a profound sense of experience (and shared experience), transforming education (“it burns different circuits in your brain”), and making us intimately trackable. Everything will be tracked, monitored, sensored, and imaged, and people will go along with it because “vanity trumps privacy,” as already proved on Facebook. “Wherever attention flows, money will follow.”
Access replaces ownership for suppliers as well as consumers. Uber owns no cars; AirBnB owns no real estate. On-demand rules. Sharing rules. Unbundling rules. Makers multiply. “In thirty years the city will look like it does now because we will have rearranged the flows, not the atoms. We will have a different idea of what a city is, and who we are, and how we relate to other people.”
In the Q&A, Kelly was asked what worried him. “Cyberwar,” he said. “We have no rules. Is it okay to take out an adversary’s banking system? Disasters may have to occur before we get rules. We’re at the point that any other civilization in the galaxy would have a world government. I have no idea how to do that.”
Kelly concluded:
“We are at the beginning of the beginning — the first hour of day one. There have never been more opportunities. The greatest products of the next 25 years have not been invented yet.
“You‘re not late”
—
[Video of the talk is at the link.]
http://longnow.org/seminars/02016/jul/14/next-30-digital-years/
Originally shared by David Brin
Vertical farming stacks crops on top of one another in a climate controlled, indoor facility, using aeroponic technology, which involves misting the roots of the plants, using an astonishing 95% less water. The plants are grown organically, in a reusable cloth made from recycled plastic, so no soil is needed. What’s cool is that the technology is mature… it actually works on pragmatic and commercial scales, at least for table greens. Doubtless there are some crops that won’t apply. But this — plus tissue-culture meat — could loosen humanity’s death grip on the planet’s arable land, just in the nick of time, and make our cities much more sustainable.
If you want to imagine a very alien-seeming society, Japan is often a good place to start for a Westerner.
Originally shared by Winchell Chung
Experts say “the flight from human intimacy” in Japan comes from having a highly developed economy and high gender inequality. “There’s a word for married working women: oniyome, or ‘devil wives.'”
At the same time, Japan’s population is shrinking and graying, setting up a “demographic time bomb” that could radiate out globally through the country’s Greece-level national debt and deep economic ties with China and the US.
http://www.techinsider.io/half-of-japanese-people-arent-having-sex-2015-7
According to Gordon Van Gelder, the publisher of F&SF, this competition’s closing date has been extended to 30 July.
So submit a funny rewrite that updates an SFF classic, and win modest prizes.
I know nothing about this author except what is in this article, but I like what she says there.
Via Charlie Loyd’s excellent newsletter, some different perspectives on cultural appropriation.
Tangentially, I was watching Elementary, and it did a horrible anthropological fail. One of the characters who was part of the investigation they were doing in this particular episode owned an ISP of some kind, and he said, “We’ve just picked up New Zealand.” Cut to a piece of sculpture which anyone at all familiar with NZ native art would know had nothing whatsoever to do with New Zealand.
It wasn’t even close; even the colours were ones that are never used here. Perhaps Pacific Northwest, but I’m no anthropologist. And I thought, how hard is it to get something like that right? Have an intern spend 30 seconds on Google Images. Don’t just fish some random tribal-looking sculpture out of the props department and pretend it’s from New Zealand because that’s what it says in the script.
Via Publishers Weekly, a look at the indie romance industry, which is huge.
“Romance novelist Nora Roberts, one of the best paid authors of any genre in the world, has sold an average of 13 books per minute over the last twenty years, according to publisher Penguin” – and that’s in trad pub.