clipped from www.youtube.com _ clipped from technology.timesonline.co.uk Extraordinarily lifelike characters are to begin appearing in films and computer games thanks to a new type of animation technology. Emily - the woman in the above animation - was produced using a new modelling technology that enables the most minute details of a facial expression to be captured and recreated. She is considered to be one of the first animations to have overleapt a long-standing barrier

Interesting. clipped from www.openthefuture.com The Metaverse Roadmap Overview, an exploration of imminent 3D technologies, posited a number of different scenarios of what a future “metaverse” could look like. The four scenarios — augmented reality, life-logging, virtual worlds, and mirror worlds — each offered a different manifestation of an immersive 3D world. Of the four, I suspect that augmented reality is most likely to be widespread soon; more

Quite amazing, I’m going to have one…. clipped from news.sky.com A sophisticated toy is being touted as a major advance in the future of the robotic industry. The toy, Pleo, is an animatronic dinosaur which combines realistic movements with artificial intelligence. Its software means that it learns from its environment and acts differently according to how it is treated. The battery-operated toy is a life-sized replica of a real Camarasaurus, as it would have

Totally Cool ! clipped from dvice.com Anyone who’s seen Minority Report would love a piece of the hologram technology that Tom Cruise uses to flip through holographic images in the air like they were CDs in a jukebox. Obscura Digital has something that’s pretty close. The company’s new VisionAire tech can sense where a presenter’s hands are, letting him or her manipulate a 3D hologram. The holograms are multi-touch, too, so you can zoom, spin or shrink images by using b

At the AGI-08 post-conference workshop, J. Storrs Hall presents on his paper “Engineering Utopia.” The likely advent of AGI and the long-established trend of improving computational hardware promise a dual revolution in coming decades: machines which are both more intelligent and more numerous than human beings. This possibility raises substantial concern over the moral nature of such intelligent machines, and of the changes they will cause in society. Will we have the chance to determine their moral ch

At the 2007 EG conference, Kevin Kelly shares a fun stat: The World Wide Web, as we know it, is only 5,000 days old. Now, Kelly asks, how can we predict what’s coming in the next 5,000 days?

clipped from www.popsci.com A new video of the Army’s BigDog ‘bot highlights its eery abilities advanced system of hyper-responsive hydraulic joints and a suite of sensors, accelerometers and gyroscopes, the BigDog’s most stunning achievement is it’s ability to walk, climb and maintain its balance on diverse terrain, even after slipping on ice or receiving a kick to one side. All while carrying several hundreds of pounds of supplies on its “back.” The amount of real-tim

A 19 min poetic video reflecting on the philosophical and spiritual aspects of the Singularity.