Tag Archives: virtual reality

Decentraland

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I always assumed that Second Life popped up in response to the novel Snow Crash, and I always thought that Second Life was a bit lame because the technology just wasn’t there yet. Second Life may still be limping along on fumes, but it has been seeming to me that the sequels to Second Life have been evolving through video games like World of Warcraft, Minecraft, Fortnite, etc. Today I heard about a plot of virtual land being bought and sold for $2.43 million in a new (to me) one called Decentraland. This is clearly speculation at the moment, and you would expect booms and crashes. These platforms are slowly but surely creating their own marketplaces and even currencies behind the scenes. It may already be possible to create and run a business through these platforms. A big question is whether they will become interoperable at some point. I assume it is a given that they will take advantage of virtual reality technology as that continues to evolve. Another question is to what extent they will remain in the entertainment realm, as opposed to connecting to the real world economy and workplace at some point, which is where actual value would start to be created.

The Metaverse (what is it?)

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This supposedly influential article from January 2020 (remember that innocent time?) is called The Metaverse: What it is… But at the end, you are still not quite sure what it is. It will involve references to Snow Crash and Ready Player One, obviously. It will be the successor to the current internet. It will be interoperable between platforms and technologies, and it will be always on and always accessible. It will not be a “virtual world”. Okay, I have to admit that is exactly what I thought it would be.

There are a couple things I can imagine coming in the near future. One is much better video conferencing using avatars with facial expressions and eye contact. Those of us who have participated in the last year and a half of mostly remote work have learned that video conferencing has come a long, long way, but this is a key next step to make it more engaging and realistic. I still think augmented reality has to be a big deal (see Rainbow’s End). This will project an additional layer of information/content onto the real world, which I personally am looking forward to although I can imagine it becoming addictive and making the un-augmented real world seem dull and ultimately be neglected (see Rainbow’s End). We just need the right sort of unobtrusive glasses or visor to make it work in the short term.

People will be able to live much farther off the (physical) grid if that is what they want to do, and real-world cities might suffer as a result. On the other hand, real-world cities might become even more interesting than they are now. Cities are information and experience-rich, after all.

Pollinator Park

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Pollinator Park is a sort of virtual botanical park tour created by the EU. The idea is to show us “what a world without pollinators would be like”. It sounds and looks cool, but didn’t load correctly in my web browser. It is also supposed to work in Oculus Rift, which I am sure is cool. There are some nice pictures in this Inhabitat article.

I have certainly heard that pollinators, and insects more generally, are disappearing, not just on a species diversity basis but on an absolute biomass basis. It makes complete sense that the loss and fragmentation of natural habitats and native vegetation would lead to a loss of insects. Pollution, agricultural chemicals, and climate change (heat/drought/fires/floods/storms) can’t be helping. I have seen at least one dissenting paper on insect loss however and would like to understand the evidence for it better. But taken at face value, it is very concerning. Pollination is undoubtedly a critical ecosystem service that we can’t do without, and this is fairly easy to understand. Unless we can go to some kind of high-tech indoor agriculture, which currently would not be a feasible way to feed 7+ billion people.

I’d also like to understand to what extent it is important to preserve some natural habitat and native vegetation (or other pollinator-friendly vegetation?) in the midst of farmland to maintain yields. What size and what shape should these habitat islands or corridors be, and do they need to be paired with specific crops? More esoterically, if you change the type of crop being grown but leave the insects and vegetation in place, does the ecosystem service value diminish? (economically, yes, but logically and morally, this makes no sense to me and I think it helps illustrate the limits of the economic approach.) Could these designed/managed habitats act as useful buffer/transition areas to more natural preserved areas? Or would they do the opposite, importing non-native plants and animals that would have an adverse impact? Can urban and suburban parks and gardens play a meaningful role? Or is it hopeless and only trying to preserve vast swathes of untouched wilderness would do? (maybe add a placeholder for this on our next planet.) Should we be releasing vast swarms of genetically modified or self-replicating robot insects? (I’m going to go with no!)

December 2020 in Review

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2020 is officially in the books!

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The “Map of Doom” identifies risks that should get the most attention, including antibiotic resistance, synthetic biology (also see below), and some complex of climate change/ecosystem collapse/food supply issues.

Most hopeful story: The Covid-19 vaccines are a modern “moonshot” – a massive government investment driving scientific and technological progress on a particular issue in a short time frame. Only unlike nuclear weapons and the actual original moonshot, this one is not military in nature. (We should be concerned about biological weapons, but let’s allow ourselves to enjoy this victory and take a quick trip to Disney Land before we start practicing for next season…) What should be our next moonshot, maybe fusion power?

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Lists of some key technologies that came to the fore in 2020 include (you guessed it) mRNA vaccines, genetically modified crops, a variety of new computer chips and machine learning algorithms, which seem to go hand in hand (and we are hearing more about “machine learning” than “artificial intelligence” these days), brain-computer interfaces, private rockets and moon landings and missions to Mars and mysterious signals and micro-satellites and UFOs, virtual and mixed reality, social media disinformation and work-from-home technologies. The wave of self-driving car hype seems to have peaked and receded, which probably means self-driving cars will probably arrive quietly in the next decade or so. I was surprised not to see cheap renewable energy on any lists that I came across, and I think it belongs there. At least one economist thinks we are on the cusp of a big technology-driven productivity pickup that has been gestating for a few decades.

why pay for office space?

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I figured cheap-ass companies would try to keep people working from home to avoid paying for office space. This confirms it:

  • “A Gartner, Inc. survey of 317 CFOs and finance leaders on March 30, 2020, revealed that 74% will move at least 5% of their previously on-site workforce to permanently remote positions post-COVID 19.”
  • “In fact, nearly a quarter of respondents said they will move at least 20% of their on-site employees to permanent remote.”

virtual reality and philosophy

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That’s right, this article is about virtual reality and philosophy.

Why Is Virtual Reality Interesting for Philosophers?

This article explores promising points of contact between philosophy and the expanding field of virtual reality research. Aiming at an interdisciplinary audience, it proposes a series of new research targets by presenting a range of concrete examples characterized by high theoretical relevance and heuristic fecundity. Among these examples are conscious experience itself, “Bayesian” and social VR, amnestic re-embodiment, merging human-controlled avatars and virtual agents, virtual ego-dissolution, controlling the reality/virtuality continuum, the confluence of VR and artificial intelligence (AI) as well as of VR and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), VR-based social hallucinations and the emergence of a virtual Lebenswelt, religious faith and practical phenomenology. Hopefully, these examples can serve as first proposals for intensified future interaction and mark out some potential new directions for research.

The main thing I got from this article is that it is really…long. It starts with a glossary of terms you need to learn before you read the rest of the paper, then gets longer from there.

Google Glass is back

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According to Wired:

Google relaunched the gadget as a tool for businesses called Google Glass Enterprise Edition. Pilot projects have involved Boeing workers using Glass on helicopter production lines, and doctors wearing it in the examining room.

Anat Karni, product lead at Plataine, slid on a black version of Glass Tuesday to demonstrate the app. She showed how the app could tell a worker clocking in for the day about production issues that require urgent attention, and show useful information for resolving problems on the device’s display.

A worker can also talk to Plataine’s app to get help. Karni demonstrated how a worker walking into a storeroom could say “Help me select materials.” The app would respond, verbally and on the display, with what materials would be needed and where they could be found. A worker’s actions could be instantly visible to factory bosses, synced into the software Plataine already provides customers, such as Airbus, to track production operations.

what’s new with Magic Leap?

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Actually, nobody knows what is new with Magic Leap. But there is supposed to be something new in 2018.

 at long last, Magic Leap has unveiled a prototype and will make its headset available with developer tools in 2018. The goggles, dubbed the Magic Leap One, come with a controller and battery pack the size of my palm, and have a steampunk vibe. They’re sleek, with bug-eyed lenses, and a Rolling Stone preview suggests they’ll be expensive. Truthfully, there’s not much more information available. Developers haven’t tried them, so it’s impossible to compare them directly to other available prototypes. But what’s distinctive about these glasses is that they exist at all—that Magic Leap has finally come forth with evidence that its technology, which until now has only been seen by those of us who have signed lengthy and complicated nondisclosure agreements, will have form.

virtual Mark Zuckerberg tours Puerto Rico

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Mark Zuckerberg (yes, it turns out he has a Facebook page) has taken a lot of heat for this “virtual tour” of Puerto Rico. I don’t know, it reminds me of Google Street View with Mystery Science Theater cartoons up front cracking insane jokes. Except that on MST, the characters got the jokes. Nonetheless, I did get more of a sense of the scale of destruction from the images than I had before.

It also reminded me of this.

https://www.truthorfiction.com/bushvacation/

https://www.truthorfiction.com/bushvacation/