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Category: virtual reality

A team from the University of Zurich has trained an artificial intelligence system to fly a drone in a virtual environment full of obstacles before setting it loose in the real world, where it was able to weave around obstacles at 40 kph (25 mph), three times as fast as the previous best piloting software. Lead researcher Davide Scaramuzza, Director of the Robotics and Perception Group, says the work, carried out in partnership with Intel, could revolutionize robotics by enabling machines to learn virtually.

A paper describing the project, Learning high-speed flight in the wild, was published this month in the journal Science Robotics.

“Our approach is a stepping stone toward the development of autonomous systems that can navigate at high speeds through previously unseen environments with only on-board sensing and computation,” the paper concludes.

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Facebook has just announced it’s going to hire 10,000 people in Europe to develop the “metaverse”.

This is a concept which is being talked up by some as the future of the internet. But what exactly is it?

**What is the metaverse?
**
To the outsider, it may look like a souped-up version of Virtual Reality (VR) — but some people think the metaverse could be the future of the internet.

In fact, the belief is that it could be to VR what the modern smartphone is to the first clunky mobile phones of the 1980s.

Instead of being on a computer, in the metaverse you might use a headset to enter a virtual world connecting all sorts of digital environments.

Unlike current VR, which is mostly used for gaming, this virtual world could be used for practically anything — work, play, concerts, cinema trips — or just hanging out.

Most people envision that you would have a 3D avatar — a representation of yourself — as you use it.

But because it’s still just an idea, there’s no single agreed definition of the metaverse.

Full Story:

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Witness first-hand how your mountain of waste plastic expands over the years and what impact your food has on the rainforests. Virtual reality gives you a front-row seat to the impact of unsustainable behavior. Communication scientists Marijn Meijers and Hande Sungur have developed highly effective virtual worlds that give people an up-close and personal experience of how sustainable and unsustainable conduct make a substantial difference…

You walk around a supermarket and whenever you take a product from the shelves, a pop-up appears with information about the environmental impact of your choice, for example, clearcutting of tropical rainforest to cultivate the palm oil in your chocolate spread. You travel through time to see how much plastic waste your everyday products create in the future, and travel back to see how your mountain of waste shrinks when you make more sustainable decisions.

VR is shown to have a positive effect on sustainability.

The first findings from Meijers and Sungur’s projects are in and the results are positive. “Research into the VR supermarket shows it gets the message across more effectively and gives people the feeling that they have control over the problem,” says Meijers. “They clearly see how buying eco-friendly products contribute to a more sustainable world and that unsustainable choices have a negative effect. This positive effect on the participants’ behavior continued to be reflected in their real-world shopping habits after two weeks.”

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Ray Kurzweil — Singularitarian Immortalist, Director of Engineering at Google, famous inventor, author of How to Create a Mind http://GF2045.com/speakers/.

A world-class prolific inventor and leading futurist author, “the restless genius” (Wall Street Journal) points to 2045 for the technological singularity when A.I. will surpass human intelligence in his New York Times best seller The Singularity is Near, Amazon’s #1 book in science and philosophy.

In this video Ray Kurzweil discusses his predictions about radical life extension, singularity, life expansion and the imminence of physical immortality. He invites participants to the second international Global Future 2045 congress (June 2013) http://www.GF2045.com.

“If we have radical life extension only, we would get profoundly bored, we’d have profound existential ennui, running out of things to do, and new ideas, but that’s not what’s going to happen. In addition to radical life extension, we’re going to have radical life expansion, we’re going to have millions of virtual environments to explore, we’re going to literally expand our brains.”

“We’ll be routinely able to change our bodies very quickly, as well as our environments in virtual reality, but it will feel very real. We’ll ultimately be able to do that with real reality too, like self-organizing swarms of nanobots that can link themselves up into a virtual body.” says Ray Kurzweil.

For more information about the GF2045 congress, please visit http://www.GF2045.com

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Imagine a place where you could always stay young, name a city after yourself, or even become the president — sounds like a dream? Well, if not in the real world, such dreams can definitely be fulfilled in the virtual world of a metaverse. The metaverse is believed by some to be the future of the internet, where apart from surfing, people would also be able to enter inside the digital world of the internet, in the form of their avatars.

The advent of AR, blockchain, and VR devices in the last few years has sparked the development of the metaverse. Moreover, the unprecedented growth of highly advanced technologies in the gaming industry, which offer immersive gameplay experiences, not only provides us a glimpse of how the metaverse would look like but also indicates that we are closer than ever to experience a virtual world of our own.

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Traditional networks are unable to keep up with the demands of modern computing, such as cutting-edge computation and bandwidth-demanding services like video analytics and cybersecurity. In recent years, there has been a major shift in the focus of network research towards software-defined networks (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV), two concepts that could overcome the limitations of traditional networking. SDN is an approach to network architecture that allows the network to be controlled using software applications, whereas NFV seeks to move functions like firewalls and encryption to virtual servers. SDN and NFV can help enterprises perform more efficiently and reduce costs. Needless to say, a combination of the two would be far more powerful than either one alone.

In a recent study published in IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, researchers from Korea now propose such a combined SDN/NFV network architecture that seeks to introduce additional computational functions to existing network functions. “We expect our SDN/NFV-based infrastructure to be considered for the future 6G network. Once 6G is commercialized, the resource management technique of the network and computing core can be applied to AR/VR or holographic services,” says Prof. Jeongho Kwak of Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST), Korea, who was an integral part of the study.

The new network architecture aims to create a holistic framework that can fine-tune processing resources that use different (heterogeneous) processors for different tasks and optimize networking. The unified framework will support dynamic service chaining, which allows a single network connection to be used for many connected services like firewalls and intrusion protection; and code offloading, which involves shifting intensive computational tasks to a resource-rich remote server.

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❤️ Check out the Gradient Dissent podcast by Weights & Biases: http://wandb.me/gd.

📝 The paper “The Relightables: Volumetric Performance Capture of Humans with Realistic Relighting” is available here:
https://augmentedperception.github.io/therelightables/

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#vr

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I finally completed my extensive WebXR blog and multi-user VR chat server examples at these two link address… You are welcome to share the knowledge with others interested in creating a complete VR experience inside the browser using JavaScript libraries and HTML5. Check it out, enjoy, and follow me on twitter for recent updates. https://funbit64.com/ #technology #javascript #webxr #virtualreality #oculusquest2 #metaverse #webdeveloper #blog #sourcecode #learncoding #share #html #aframe #vrtraining #vrtechnology #vrexperience #vrdevelopment #vrheadset #vrgame #immersive #immersivetechnology #immersiveexperiences

A virtual reality blog for VR software developers, and VR content creators. Current and relevant working examples, original content and blogger commentary. Making use of VR technologies: WebXR, A-Frame, WebVR (depricated), JavaScript and HTML5.

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