Lifeboat Foundation

On Wednesday, at the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in Geneva, a panel of government experts debated policy options regarding lethal autonomous weapons.

Dutch NGO Pax created a report that surveyed major players from the sector on their view of lethal autonomous weapons. They categorised companies based on 3 criteria: whether they were developing technology that’s potentially relevant to deadly AI, working on related military products, and if they had committed to abstaining from contributing in the future.

By these criteria, Microsoft scores rather highly in the birthplace of Skynet rankings. Microsoft has invested extensively in developing artificial intelligence products, has very close relationships with the US military, and Satya Nadella has committed to providing the military with their very best technology. While Microsoft has fallen short of explicitly developing AI for military purposes, we do know that they have developed a version of the HoloLens for the military that is specifically designed to increase the lethality of soldiers in the field.

Nearly one in 30 Americans over the age of 40 experience low vision—significant visual impairment that can’t be corrected with glasses, contact lenses, medication or surgery.

In a new study of patients with retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited degenerative eye disease that results in poor vision, Keck School of Medicine of USC researchers found that adapted augmented reality (AR) glasses can improve patients’ mobility by 50% and grasp performance by 70%.

“Current wearable low vision technologies using virtual reality are limited and can be difficult to use or require patients to undergo extensive training,” said Mark Humayun, MD, Ph.D., director of the USC Dr. Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg Institute for Biomedical Therapeutics, codirector of the USC Roski Eye Institute and University Professor of Ophthalmology at the Keck School.

There are lots of smart gadgets that track running, but few track swimming — that is, if you’d like something that’s built for swimming first, as opposed to a device with swim-tracking features tacked on. Form, a new fitness company founded by former Recon Instruments employees, is looking to solve this problem with its first product, the $199 Swim Goggles.

What if neither distance nor language mattered? What if technology could help you be anywhere you need to be and speak any language? Using AI technology and holographic experiences this is possible, and it is revolutionary.

Microsoft has created a hologram that will transform someone into a digital speaker of another language. The software giant unveiled the technology during a keynote at the Microsoft Inspire partner conference this morning in Las Vegas. Microsoft recently scanned Julia White, a company executive for Azure, at a Mixed Reality capture studio to transform her into an exact hologram replica.

Continue reading “Microsoft has a wild hologram that translates HoloLens keynotes into Japanese” »

Microchips are becoming ubiquitous as augmented and virtual reality become mainstream, USA Today reports.

O.o!

In what the German automaker is calling a “world premiere,” Volkswagen’s futuristic Golf GTI Aurora concept has a high-end sound system in its trunk that can be operated with a hologram.

You can leave your 3D glasses and augmented reality gloves at home: the hologram floats freely in the air and can be operated without any external aids. Though to be fair, VW is being very vague about the details of the technology behind the interface.

Continue reading “This Volkswagen Prototype Has a Holographic Interface” »

Imagine the possibility of integrating mixed reality (XR) tech with that of this AImagine having a long, open conversation about philosophy with either Immanuel Kant or David Hume. Imagine being given a private lesson in economics by either Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, or Karl Marx. The possibilities are seemingly abundant. But then so are the risks.

A lot of coverage has been done on the emergence of what are known as “deepfakes” here on Serious Wonder the last few years. They’ve captivated us at times and then frightened us. The implications of this growing technology are practically limitless, especially as our ability to tell the difference between what is real and what is fake diminishes even further.

Continue reading “Still Images Come to Life Thanks to Samsung’s Deepfake AI” »

Augmented reality can change “how you turn your head, how well you do on tasks, and how you connect socially with other physical people in the room…”

“Minecraft Earth,” announced today, will allow users to collect items, blocks, and creatures while roaming around in the real world with other real-world friends — think of it as a “Minecraft”-themed “Pokémon Go” experience, but with more fishing, building and resource management.

While the extremely popular smartphone game “Pokémon Go” relied on augmented reality only minimally, the new “Minecraft” title will double down on the technology. A new feature called Azure Spatial Anchors will allow users to plop down objects in augmented reality — and persist indefinitely. Other users will also be able to interact with those same objects.

The goal is to eventually have players build their own “Minecraft” worlds for others to experience in augmented reality through their phones.

Continue reading “New ‘Minecraft’ Game Will Let You Build Stuff in the Real World” »