A very cool experiment in virtual reality has shown it is possible to trick the mind into identifying with a virtual body:
… Read More “Virtual Out of Body Experiences”Through these goggles, the volunteers could see a camera
view of their own back – a three-dimensional "virtual own body" that
appeared to be standing in front of them.
Josh sent me this link. It’s a video of a new technology for doing laser graffitti on the sides of buildings at night. Josh and I have been discussing how to do this for years. You could also project onto clouds.… Read More “Very Cool Laser Graffitti Technology”
Umm…… take a look at this formula’s output…..
OK. That must be some kind of a cosmic joke.
A group of scientists and academics in Britain have come up with an approach for picking lottery numbers that appears to have a higher probability of success than picking randomly. After several years of playing the numbers, at a total investment of $8700, they finally just won $13M.… Read More “A Statistical Approach for Winning Lottery — Group Wins $13M!”
This critical article by an ex-World of Warcraft player is a real sign of the times — the kind of article that people will read in a few hundred years as a window into our particular moment in history. The author reached the highest levels of the game and found that it was ruining his life as well as the lives of other players.… Read More “Sign of the Times – View from the Top of World of Warcraft”
Where’s George, an internet game in which people track the spread of dollar bills as they move around, has yielded an unexpected breakthrough in the science of predicting the spread of epidemics.
After 11 years of painstaking research and inventor has finally achieved the "holy grail" — colored soap bubbles that don’t stain anything. But that’s just the beginning — his invention is based on a completely new kind of dye chemistry that could open the door to a wide range of new products.… Read More “Colored Bubbles”
Japanese researchers have developed a technology for the remote control of humans. Hmm… sounds kind of creepy. The system uses weak electrical stimulation of the vestibular system, causing the subject to shift balance and change direction. This technology can also be used to create vestibular illusions — for example, it can be used to make a person playing a computer game think they are experiencing motion.… Read More “Remote Control Humans”
An experimental driving interface enables a user to control the performance of a composition by driving through a landscape using a game-controller. This system is similar in some respects to my idea for driving through soundscapes of last year.
Here is an interesting article, written by a chess grandmaster, on how to trade information with alien civilizations, assuming they are ever contacted. The article proposes that at interstellar distances, the only realistic form of trade would be a trade in information — such as technology and scientific knowledge.… Read More “How to Talk to Aliens”
Many years ago I spoke with Will Wright — one of the most interesting visionaries I’ve met (and who happens to be the creator of Sim City) about his dream of a universe game — one in which the player could evolve life from the simple cellular level all the way up through galactic scale civilizations.… Read More “Creator of Sim City Previews Amazing New Game”
Watch the thought process of an AI as it struggles to cope with the onslaught of your genius (or ineptitude, as the case may be). Check out the “spheres of influence” too. Very nice.
This is pretty cool stuff — growing brains using live tissue and then teaching them to control software:
… Read More “Flying by Brain”from an article in Slashdot: “Scientists at the University of Florida made a living ‘brain’ by extracting 25,000 neurons from a rat’s brain and culturing them inside a glass dish.
This posting is the FAQ and introduction for a new, improved, second-generation meme experiment that is designed to spread faster and more broadly than the first meme experiment. We call this kind of meme a “GoMeme” (pronounced Go-Meem), because it is a meme that is designed to Go.… Read More “FAQ for GoMeme 2.0”
Here is a book that readers who are interested in multi-agent systems will find useful. The author, Andrew Ilachinski is also a reader of this blog, by the way — it’s called “Artificial War: Multiagent-Based Simulation of Combat” and provides an examination of the thesis that what happens on a battlefield (though the arena can be much more general of course) is a self-organized emergent phenomenon that can be understood, at least in part, by examining relatively “simple” underlying rules.… Read More “Artificial War”
I have been thinking a lot recently about the distribution of prime numbers — in particular, I’ve been trying to figure out if there is a way to predict the sequence of gap sizes between primes. But anyway, in the course of that investigation I came across a really cool site about number spirals in which the author develops a set of formulas and insights from them based on a particular way of aligning numbers in spirals.… Read More “Spatial and Audio Visualizations of Prime Number Distributions”
It just occurred to me that distribution of primes looks VERY much like the output of a cellular automaton rule. This makes me wonder whether it might be possible to use a cellular automaton to generate prime numbers. If we can find the rule that generates the prime numbers, perhaps this rule has other important properties.… Read More “Finding Primes Using Cellular Automata”
Wow. This is a very cool new project — controlling video games with a braincap.
A new online exchange for trading virtual cash between different online virtual gaming worlds goes online. This is cool — trading virtual currencies that have no meaning in the physical world but can buy things in virtual worlds. And of course, this is already convertible to cash because people resell virtual stuff for cash on eBay.… Read More “Virtual Currency Exchange Between Gameworlds Goes Live”
Couldn’t sleep. Woke up at around 4 AM. Channel surfing, I end up at a show about Machinima — a new form of moviemaking. Here is what Wordspy says about Machinima. It’s really cool stuff. Basically the idea is to use game engines such as Quake etc.… Read More “All About Machinima: Shooting Movies in Virtual Reality”