Lifeboat Foundation

Summary: Researchers unveiled a pioneering technology capable of real-time human emotion recognition, promising transformative applications in wearable devices and digital services.

The system, known as the personalized skin-integrated facial interface (PSiFI), combines verbal and non-verbal cues through a self-powered, stretchable sensor, efficiently processing data for wireless communication.

This breakthrough, supported by machine learning, accurately identifies emotions even under mask-wearing conditions and has been applied in a VR “digital concierge” scenario, showcasing its potential to personalize user experiences in smart environments. The development is a significant stride towards enhancing human-machine interactions by integrating complex emotional data.

MIT researchers unveil a revolutionary smart glove integrating tactile feedback for enhanced learning, robotics, and virtual reality interactions.

Discover how MIT’s new smart glove is transforming education, robotics, and virtual reality experiences with personalized tactile feedback.

The technology can reconstruct a hidden scene in just minutes using advanced mathematical algorithms.

Potential use case scenarios

Law enforcement agencies could use the technology to gather critical information about a crime scene without disturbing the evidence. This could be especially useful in cases where the scene is dangerous or difficult to access. For example, the technology could be used to reconstruct the scene of a shooting or a hostage situation from a safe distance.

Continue reading “New technology can reveal what’s hidden behind objects using algorithm” »

In the short term, CSI technology enables an entirely new form of communication in which thoughtful deliberations can be conducted among groups of nearly any size. This has potential to enhance a wide range of fields from enterprise collaboration and market research to large-scale civic engagement.

In the longer term, this approach could enable a new pathway to superintelligence that is inherently aligned with human values, morals and sensibilities. Of course, companies like OpenAI and Anthropic should keep working around the clock to instill their AI models with human values and interests, but others should be pursuing alternative methods that amplify rather than replace human intelligence. One alternative is Collective Superintelligence, which looks far more feasible today than in years past.

Continue reading “The promise of collective superintelligence” »

Apple’s new Vision Pro headset VR doesn’t support “immersive” adult content — and the people who bought it for that are not happy.

Apple’s Vision Pro will be released on Friday, and reviews of the VR goggle’s custom digital avatars are already pouring: unsettling and bad.

Two tech titans are now duking it out in the headset wars. Apple’s Vision Pro and Meta’s Quests offer different price points, different specs, and most importantly, different visions of the future of virtual reality. And both have big hurdles to clear. This week on TechCheck, why the headset battle is Apple’s to lose.

Chapters:
0:00 – Who will win the headset wars?
0:42 – The case for Apple.
5:35 – The case for Meta.
7:56 – The case for both… or neither.

Continue reading “The headset wars: Why it’s Apple’s to lose” »

Psychologists from Edith Cowan University (ECU) have used virtual reality (VR) technology in a new study that aims to better understand criminals and how they respond when questioned. The results are published in the journal Scientific Reports.

“You will often hear police say, to catch a criminal, you have to think like a criminal—well that is effectively what we are trying to do here,” said Dr. Shane Rogers, who led the project alongside ECU Ph.D. candidate Isabella Branson.

The forensic psychology research project involved 101 participants, who role-played committing a burglary in two similar virtual mock–crime scenarios.

Apple’s Vision Pro launch resembles its Apple Watch debut in more ways than one, but to me the most telling similarity is in the marketing approach. Apple has striven to distance the Vision Pro from the existing crop of virtual reality (and even mixed reality) devices — many of which are objective failures — by exclusively focusing on the term “spatial computing”; however, the marketing seems focused on identifying a few key use cases it thinks will best drive consumer interest.

The company took the same approach with the Apple Watch, which like its face computer cousin, was more or less a solution in search of a problem when it originally debuted. Apple initially focused on a lot of features the Apple Watch has now actually done away with entirely, including its Digital Touch stuff that was meant to be a new paradigm for quickly communicating with friends and loved ones across distances. In general, it was presented as a relatively robust and full-featured platform nearly on par with the iPhone in terms of future potential.

The intervening years and generations of Apple Watch have seen it grow considerably in terms of pure technical capability and specifications, yet the marketing and focus around the product from Apple’s side has been more economical, spending outsized effort at the areas that seemed to resonate best with users — including health and wellness, and more recently, safety.