Lifeboat Foundation

“You can take any anatomical part and show any of it. You can move it around you can make it kind of translucent so you can see through the outside”

Consider the paradox of the modern business office: It’s a place of productivity where busy people meet deadlines, yet it’s teeming with distractions.

Companies are loading up on game rooms and snack bars, while 70 percent of American offices have adopted an open-office floor plan. The hope for open offices was to encourage random hallway banter, which can lead to innovation, but it’s not working out so great. Turns out privacy is a necessary condition for supporting productive people.

To end the oppression of open offices, several startups are building workstations of the future: software that pulls everything we normally do on a computer inside of virtual reality (VR). After all, what’s more private than a VR display around your head?

Continue reading “I Worked in a VR Office, and It Was Actually Awesome” »

Fighter pilots and brain surgeons have a lot in common. With limited time and a high degree of risk, they must zero in on a dangerous target with the intent to destroy, making sure to minimise any collateral damage.

Perhaps no one understands that relationship better than Alon Geri and Moty Avisar, veterans of the Israeli Air Force and co-founders of Surgical Theatre, an Ohio-based company that brings state-of-the-art virtual reality to brain surgeons.

Physicians in thick black goggles can step inside a patient’s skull, explore the malformed region, craft a strategy for entry, elimination, and exit, and even do dry runs of the surgery itself. When it comes time to make the first incision, there are fewer surprises.

Continue reading “A team of ex-fighter pilots have invented a new way for surgeons look inside brains” »

VR again helping people and their fears.

Actual crowds may be replaced by what we might call distributed crowds, with virtual and augmented reality’s help.

HP’s boldly goes where no monitor has gone before — virtual reality.

“The key to understanding why “social VR” will be important is to think about virtual (and augmented) reality as a computing platform, rather than as a PC peripheral for gaming.”

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Facebook said from the start that it would open source its Surround 360 camera this summer, and it’s following through on that promise. You can now visit GitHub to learn how to build the camera, install its software and (naturally) tweak both the hardware and software to meet your needs. Just keep in mind that this isn’t exactly a homebrew project — you’ll need about $30,000 in parts to build the official version. It’s more for video pros that want to produce 360-degree content without having to turn to pricier, pre-packaged offerings like Nokia’s Ozo. Still, it’s worth exploring the source if you want to either see how Facebook’s VR cam works or design a lower-cost alternative.

The team is now embarking on its most ambitious project yet, a wide-reaching virtual reality network called Project Sansar that is, in many ways, aiming to become a new layer of reality that gives individuals and businesses a space to experiment with VR environments for their first time.

I had the chance to sit down for a demo of Sansar with Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg this past week and take an early look into some of the platform’s first environments.

Traversing the worlds of Sansar and chatting with my guide, Linden Lab VP of Product Bjorn Laurin, was a mostly seamless experience but still an oddly unsettling one. It’s not that anything was particularly creepy about the place I was viewing through an Oculus Rift headset. Sansar is visually placid and often beautiful, but it’s also startlingly scalable and boundless. Scale is something that’s often taken for granted in an age of video game epics like Skyrim and GTAV, but when every horizon you see through your own point-of-view is conquerable, you’re left to either feel very bold or very lost.

Continue reading “How Heidi Klum fooled the Internet into thinking her new ad is a Sia video” »

5 Theories on Motion Sickness with VR’s help.

When people dream about what they want to do in VR, it inevitably involves actually moving around within a virtual environment. But VR locomotion triggers simulator sickness in a lot of people, and solving it is one of the biggest open problems in virtual reality. NextGen Interactions’ Jason Jerald wrote a comprehensive summary of much of the pertinent academic research about VR in The VR Book, and in Chapter 12 he summarizes the five major theories of what may cause simulator sickness.

Continue reading “Five Theories of Motion Sickness Triggers in Virtual Reality” »