Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Virtual-Reality Expert Jaron Lanier on the Potential of Avatars - WSJ.com

See original WSJ article at Virtual-Reality Expert Jaron Lanier on the Potential of Avatars

Do brains make minds, or do minds make brains? Recent approaches to AI have begun exploring the idea that not only do minds need brains, they need bodies as well. Disembodied thought may be impossible. The linked article takes an interesting tangent on the mind-brain problem by giving a preview of how our brains might adapt to being 're-embodied' in some other form. Sure to be of interest to gamers, but perhaps also to the most philosophically-minded.
"Becoming an avatar in virtual reality, as a full-bodied human (or even nonhuman), has the potential to be vastly more interesting and important than one would expect from a technological amusement. What is really going on is the opening up of a new frontier of human potential, which can be called 'somatic cognition'—somatic meaning 'of the body.'"

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

The coming ubiquity of Human-Agent Collectives

Or, why (you+tech) > (you) + (tech)

See original story at New science to enable humans and computers to interact more effectively
 
"Embryonic and relatively unsophisticated examples of current human interactions with autonomous software entities include the crowd-sourcing that provides a growing element of our traffic information, user-generated content for weather reports, and our interactions with software that can find us hotels according to our preferences.

Professor Jennings says: “We are fast approaching an ‘era of ubiquity’ where each of us will become increasingly dependent on multiple smart and proactive computers that we carry with us, access at home and at work, and that are embedded into the world around us."

Saturday, October 9, 2010

Google Cars Drive Themselves

Image courtesy NYTimes
See original story at NYTimes - Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic

I've posted links before to government and academic research projects working on autonomous navigation, but now apparently Google has gotten into the fray.

"The car is a project of Google, which has been working in secret but in plain view on vehicles that can drive themselves, using artificial-intelligence software that can sense anything near the car and mimic the decisions made by a human driver."

"Robot drivers react faster than humans, have 360-degree perception and do not get distracted, sleepy or intoxicated, the engineers argue. They speak in terms of lives saved and injuries avoided — more than 37,000 people died in car accidents in the United States in 2008. The engineers say the technology could double the capacity of roads by allowing cars to drive more safely while closer together. Because the robot cars would eventually be less likely to crash, they could be built lighter, reducing fuel consumption. But of course, to be truly safer, the cars must be far more reliable than, say, today’s personal computers, which crash on occasion and are frequently infected.

Portable, personal augmented reality a step closer

Image courtesy BBC News at news.bbcimg.co.uk/
See original story at BBC News - Smart specs unite world and data

Very cool -- images are superimposed on the real world by projecting them directly onto the retina.
"A lightweight pair of augmented reality glasses that overlay the world with digital content, such as directions or a travel guide, has debuted in Japan.

The headset, created by Olympus and phone-maker NTT Docomo, uses augmented reality software on an attached phone."