Articles by Bill
8 articles
A couple of months ago, a Emerj podcast featured Augmate CEO Pete Wassell predicting that the first mainstream uses of Augmented Reality might be a bit more "blue collar" than "Buck Rogers." And now, in addition to Augmate's digital eyeware, a new "Smart Helmet" from Daqri is helping to put AR to work in the workplace, wherever that work site may be.
Whether its H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, Stephen King's mysterious portal in his book 11/22/63 or Marty McFly's nuclear-powered DeLorean in Back To The Future, the idea of time travel has long been a fantasy to those who ask, "What if we could go back in time?" Now, however, thanks to immersive virtual reality (IVR), time travel is indeed a possibility.
When you consider that our world creates 1.7 million bytes of data every minute, roughly the equivalent of 360,000 DVDs, you can understand why many people might have trouble wrapping their head around big data. However, thanks to the Collective Experience of Empathic Data Systems (CEEDs) project, just about anyone can "step inside" a large data set through virtual reality.
While I'm pretty sure my mom had eyes in the back of her head, motorists and motorcyclists have always been limited to looking forward with only rear view mirrors offering a glimpse of what's behind them. Thanks to a revolutionary new augmented reality helmet from Skully, motorcycle riders now, literally, have eyes in the back of their head.
With news that the much-heralded Oculus Rift has begun shipping, the virtual reality world is already relishing the opportunity to take that next big step. But, what if you could sit on your couch and step not just into a video game, but into a front row seat for tonight's Dodgers' game? Or, how about sharing the stage this weekend with Jay Z and Beyoncé? Very soon, thanks to a new cinematic VR platform from Jaunt, you'll be able to fully experience all that action and more, live from your own living room.
Whether as kids, adults or both, most of us have played with Lego bricks at some point in our lives. If you have children, odds are your children play with them now, too (and, as a parent, the odds are even better that you've had the pleasure of stepping on a stray Lego with your bare feet, but I digress). And though their product line has expanded exponentially in the last 20 years, according to a recent article on The Verge, those little Danish bricks are now the building blocks of a new augmented reality experience.
As the gaming community eagerly awaits the Oculus Rift, the virtual reality headset that will allow gamers full, 360° immersion into their games and virtual worlds, the medical community is also developing a wide variety of applications for the new VR device. And, as a recent Forbes article points out, the use of virtual reality as a therapeutic aid is just beginning.
As the world watched, the FIFA World Cup 2014 in Sao Paulo, Brazil was officially kicked off last week by a 29-year old Brazilian named Juliano Pinto. Nothing unusual about that, until you consider that Pinto is a paraplegic and made the ceremonial kick-off through the use of an exoskeleton controlled by brain waves transmitted through a brain-machine interface (BMI). Pinto’s robotic suit was developed as part of Duke University’s Walk Again Project, led by Brazilian neuroscientist and Duke University faculty member Miguel Nicolelis and his team of over 150 scientists and researchers, representing 25 countries.
