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According to a report from Cullen College of Engineering, Jose L. Contreras-Vidal, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the college, is pioneering a unique study on the brain’s reaction to art, which he hopes could help streamline brain-machine interface systems.

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.

Brown's BrainGate project is hailed as one of the premier research projects in the entire field of brain-machine interface. Researchers here have given paralyzed patients the ability to move robotic arms and check emails with their thoughts alone, thanks to experimental neural implants in their motor cortex. Dr. Beata Jarosiewicz has been with BrainGate project for years, with a specific focus on interpreting neurological signals and turning them into actionable outputs.
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It’s easy to see the many advantages of augmented reality (AR), such as transforming business and accelerating productivity, but AR may also have a downside, particularly when it comes to cybercrime.

According to a report in the Times of News, scientists in China have recently developed a robotic arm that is controlled by the user’s brainwaves. For the first time, the arm has been used on a human subject. The device gives hope for individuals who have lost a limb or suffer from motor disabilities.

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.

Pediatric Robot Surgeon

According to a recent report from NASA, some of their engineers and a team of researchers from The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) have recently developed a robotic surgical arm. Known as KidsArm, the robot has an external positioning system and is roughly the same size as a human arm. The robot will allow surgeons to easily explore surgical sites within a patient’s body and automate specific tasks to make pediatric surgery less invasive.  The arm is still undergoing testing so that its dexterity can be fine-tuned. Potentially, KidsArm could greatly reduce the cost of surgical procedures, as well as improve the precision and consistency of patient interventions.

Ariel Garten is the founder of InteraXon, the neurofeedback company that developed the well-known Muse headband, one of the first "non-invasive" brain-machine interface headbands on the market. Garten talks about why the Muse headband is focused on helping users calm their minds, gain clarity and focus, and on what other non-invasive BMI technologies may allow for in the coming five to 10 years.

Joe Rampolla was like any other police officer assigned to a cybercrime unit. But after seeing the posibilities for extreme good and potential abuse with VR and AR technologies, he wanted to go deeper. He's not one of the most connected people in the Augmented Reality community, and in this interview he talks about the considerations that responsible people might want to make now with respect to the "good" and "bad" use of technology.
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Robot Swarm Works Together Spontaneously

Scientists at Harvard University have designed a swarm of 1,024 mini robots that can assemble, change formation and work together without needing any guiding intelligence. A report in Science Alert explains that the coin-sized robots are able to assemble themselves into a range of 2D formations by wobbling around with a vibrating movement until they have formed shapes such as stars or letters of the alphabet. Each Kilobot is programmed to know how to follow the group's perimeter, how to map the distance it travels, and how to maintain an understanding of its relative position. The swarm of bots may become useful for creating programmable matter.