Virtual reality, like the new Facebook Oculus and HTC Vive, completely immerse you inside a computer generated world. It’s like being inside a 360-degree video game, or movie, or computer-generated simulation.
according to a report in The Information today, Google’s long-term bet is on augmented reality. The company is making not one but several follow-ups to Glass, and has a project called “Tango” that aims to outfit smartphones with computerized “eyes” that can map a 3D space.
Rabey, Lisa. [Lita-L] Internet Of Things. 2016. E-mail.
A month or so ago, I asked on ALA Think Tank if anyone was using IoT in their libraries, and if so: what, how, when, where; details man, details! Other than someone asking me what the IoT is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_Things), I got crickets.
Sign in here: https://www.google.com/edu/expeditions/. A minimum of 6 interested teachers. In order to take as many students as possible on an Expedition, we’ll visit schools showing the most interest first.
Here is a taste of what lies ahead:
When viewing on a mobile phone, the user can change the point of view of the video fluidly in 360 degrees simply by moving the device around.
How mainstream is this technologyreallygoing to be?Facebook sees VR as the next big computing platform, but that will depend on it becoming a truly mainstream device
the power of VR goes beyond simply recruiting. The University of Michigan uses the technology as a learning tool, and by instituting a virtual reality “cave” they’ve allowed engineering students to interact with virtual structures as they “come together, buckle and collapse.” Instead of relying on physical models—which tend to be large, expensive, and slow to build—a student using the MIDEN VR cave can fly around a virtual structure to study mechanical connections.
Project Syria, a virtual reality experience built by a team of students at USC.
“I sometimes call virtual reality an empathy generator,” she says. “It’s astonishing to me. People all of a sudden connect to the characters in a way that they don’t when they’ve read about it in the newspaper or watched it on TV.”
What Peña’s doing — using virtual reality in combination with reporting — is part of a wider landscape of video games being created to explore the news. And they’re called, appropriately enough, “newsgames.”
“There’s an argument to be made that games are perfect at getting at the systemic problems and challenges in the world,” says Ian Bogost, a professor at Georgia Tech.
Take a game that he helped make called Oil God. In the game, the player controls an oil-rich region, waging wars and inciting coupes. The player learns that oil prices are contingent on all sorts of factors rarely mentioned in a story about the price of a gallon of gas.
creating games to bring awareness to social issues for over a decade. The game to create the biggest waves was arguably MTV’s “Darfur is Dying” released online in 2006, in which players took up the role of a family displaced by conflict in Darfur.
The VR industry is at the beginning of what could be the next major technology trend, with the potential to change the way people live, work and communicate.
UCLA neurophysicists have found that space-mapping neurons in the brain react differently to virtual reality than they do to real-world environments. Their findings could be significant for people who use virtual reality for gaming, military, commercial, scientific or other purposes
http://www.livescience.com/49021-virtual-reality-brain-maps.html
a new study in rats shows that the virtual world affects the brain differently than real-world environments, which could offer clues for how the technology could be used to restore navigating ability and memory in humans.