April 2017

This Tech would be a super powerful VR Enabler: How Adobe Wants to Turn Flat 360-Degree Videos Into True Virtual Reality (Janko Roettgers)

Hardly a day has gone by this month without the announcement of a new virtual reality (VR) camera system. Facebook, Google and GoPro all aim to make VR more immersive with new cameras, some of which won’t be commercially released for the foreseeable future. However, researchers at Adobe believe that you may not need new camera hardware at all for a big leap in immersion.

Adobe’s head of research Gavin Miller is going to present new cutting-edge technology at NAB in Las Vegas this Tuesday that could one day be used to turn flat, monoscopic 360-degree videos shot with consumer-grade spherical cameras into fully immersive VR video, complete with the ability to lean into the video — something that’s being called six degrees of freedom (6DoF) among industry insiders…

via Adobe Is Using Algorithms to Add 6DoF to Monoscopic VR Videos | Variety

April 27, 2017 0

For IoT security to be successful, there needs to be an effective way to reason about how humanity can trust the security, safety, and privacy of this massive transformation of the world. Most importantly, “ordinary people,” whether they are consumers or workers, must be able to safely, reliably, and intuitively interact with vast, complex, interconnected systems of IoT devices. It can be overwhelming to think about all the ways individuals and society can be damaged by the haphazard engineering of systems that merge the physical and digital worlds. Technologists have done a terrible job with security technology so far, yet now we are about to impose those failures onto the physical world on a scale that only ubiquitous, pervasive, even invasive computing and connectivity can accomplish. Continuing the status quo is unsustainable…

via A human-centric trust model for the Internet of Things – O’Reilly Media

Silicon Valley’s elite have a new buzzword technology to dangle over our heads (Dave Gershgorn)

One day we won’t need technology, because we’ll be the technology. At least that’s the promise of tech leaders like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Regina Dugan, who have all expressed interest (and Musk even started a company) around the idea of merging our brains with computers. At Facebook’s F8 developer conference, Zuckerberg said this will undoubtedly be the future, and Regina Dugan, head of Facebook’s secretive Building 8 research lab spoke at length about the company’s pursuits…

https://qz.com/963587/silicon-valleys-elite-have-a-new-buzzword-technology-to-dangle-over-our-heads/

April 21, 2017 0

The Coming Electrification of Everything (Andrew Beebe)

At Obvious Ventures, we believe stored electricity, increasingly derived from renewable sources, will entirely replace fossil fuels as the preferred method to power everything in our lives. From cars to scooters to boats to locomotives to industrial equipment, we are in the midst of a transition that will electrify everything previously driven by combustion.

There are two simple reasons we’ll make this change sooner than most people think. First, electrically powered things just work better. And people want things that work better. The second reason is really just a piece of the first…

via The Coming Electrification of Everything – World Positive

April 20, 2017 0

Great long-read: God in the machine – my strange journey into transhumanism (Meghan O’Gieblyn)

I first read Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, in 2006, a few years after I dropped out of Bible school and stopped believing in God. I was living alone in Chicago’s southern industrial sector and working nights as a cocktail waitress. I was not well. Beyond the people I worked with, I spoke to almost no one. I clocked out at three each morning, went to after-hours bars, and came home on the first train of the morning, my head pressed against the window so as to avoid the spectre of my reflection appearing and disappearing in the blackened glass…

via God in the machine: my strange journey into transhumanism | Technology | The Guardian

April 20, 2017 0

ANDRÉ CRAMER

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