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We're a long way from the Start Menu now First, it scrapped the classic Start Menu and gave us Tiles. Now Microsoft has confirmed it really is working on yet another radical user interface update – one that will allow you to use your desktop Windows 10 PC with virtual reality headsets. The feature, due to arrive next year, is dubbed the Windows Holographic Shell. It is designed to work on any normal PC, not just high-end graphics rigs; the emphasis is on the fact that anyone with a half decent machine can use the new UI. The Holographic Shell...

In “Our Town” the Pulitzer Prize-winning play authored by Thornton Wilder, one of the characters, Rebecca Gibbs, tells her older brother George about the sick friend of hers, Jane Crofut, who received a strangely-addressed letter from her minister: Jane Crofut The Crofut Farm; Grover’s Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; The Earth; The Solar System; The Universe; The Mind of God. Nearly 80 years after “Our Town” was first performed at McCarter Theater in Princeton, New Jersey, Elon Musk appeared this month at Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. The...

Demand for virtual reality is expected to surge in the years ahead. Research firm IDC expects that more than 110 million VR headsets will be sold in 2020, up from 9.6 million headsets in 2016. Investors looking to add exposure to the trend have a number of stocks to choose from, including both NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) and Facebook (NASDAQ:FB). But while those companies may offer attractive upside, their shares certainly aren't cheap, trading for about 40- and 69-times trailing earnings, respectively. Those investors looking for more of a bargain might consider AMD (NASDAQ: AMD). The computing giant seems likely to play...

Virtual reality is a piece of tech that although drastically updated and re-introduced to the masses in 2016, probably won’t take-off properly for another year or two. It faces a few issues that will take time to overcome, namely cost and experiences. Virtual reality at the level of Oculus Rift and HTC Vive is expensive, but that cost will come down as the kit gets cheaper to make and more people buy it. The lack of engaging experiences is simply down to the tech being so new and developers getting to grips with how best to use it. The video...

Practice makes perfect.The old adage applies to many aspects of our life in a variety of ways. Practicing your backhand, learning a dance move, or rehearsing your speech. But where it may matter the most is for medical professionals who perform lifesaving interventions or procedures for patients in emergency departments or in the operating room. The reality is that there are some lifesaving procedures in emergency medicine that you rarely perform–but must always be ready to perform in a split second. One such a procedure–known as cricothyrotomy–which involves making an incision into a specific area of patient’s neck and inserting...

Since the Oculus Rift presents a completely enclosed headset with an entirely virtualized environment, the conditions required to make this perfectly emulate the outside real world are more stringent than with Microsoft’s system, where you’re literally seeing your surroundings at the same time an overlay is projected on top. Surreal Vision’s goal at Oculus is to perfectly continuously capture and reconstruct the outside world in the virtual environment, to the extent that a user wouldn’t be able to distinguish between the two experiences. Achieving that would mean telepresence on an entirely new scale; you could attend a meeting on Mars...

Universal Music Group artists have a new way to make money from their music videos following a three-way pact between the label, in-video advertising company Mirriad and global ad agency Havas. With the deal, Mirriad will use its digital product placement technology to offer Havas clients, which include LVMH, Dish Network and Coca-Cola, opportunities to advertise inside UMG-family music videos. The companies announced the partnership, a first in the fledgling in-video advertising market, on Monday morning. Mirriad scans existing videos for surfaces, like bare brick walls, empty billboards and plain drinking mugs, and is able integrate branded assets such as...

(CNSNews.com) – The National Science Foundation has awarded a $356,337 grant to the University of Iowa to use virtual technology to study social influences on risky cycling and pedestrian behavior. “This project will create a simulation facility that will advance a capability to study the social interactions of two children, or a child and parent, as the two people walk or bicycle across a traffic-filled roadway,” the grant announcement said. It will “expand existing infrastructure” at the university “to build a new simulator that matches a recently installed simulator at the same institution, which will permit each of two experimental...

At least the bride was definitely going to show up. In November 2009, a Japanese man stood before a congregation to marry the woman he loved, Nene Anegasaki. In doing so, he became the first man to marry a computer game character – Nene is one of three "virtual girlfriends" in the Nintendo DS game Love Plus. The marriage might not be recognised by the state, but to the groom, who goes by his on-screen name Sal9000, the relationship is very real. In the months leading up to the wedding the couple went everywhere together, they chatted intimately, held hands...

Explanation: What would it be like to fly over the asteroid Vesta? Animators from the German Aerospace Center recently took actual images and height data from NASA's Dawn mission currently visiting Vesta to generate such a virtual movie. The above video begins with a sequence above Divalia Fossa, an unusual pair of troughs running parallel over heavily cratered terrain. Next, the virtual spaceship explores Vesta's 60-km Marcia Crater, showing numerous vivid details. Last, Dawn images were digitally recast with exaggerated height to better reveal Vesta's 5-km high mountain Aricia Tholus. Currently, Dawn is rising away from Vesta after being close...

The Washington Examiner reports that House Democrats appear poised to adopt a rule that would pass the Senate health care bill without actually voting on it. Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) is preparing to pass the health care overhaul through the House of Representatives without a vote, as was originally reported by the National Journal’s Congress Daily. Mark Tapscott observes that such a maneuver would be the penultimate refutation of the people’s will. In the Slaughter Solution, the rule would declare that the House “deems” the Senate version of Obamacare to have been passed by the House. House members would still...

Later this year, parent company Linden Lab will create a standalone "continent" for adult content, and members who don't purchase private "land" will be asked to migrate there if they wish to partake in adult-related activities. Second Life is an 18+ environment already, but stricter age verification policies will be put in place. You'll need a "verified" account, either through credit card information or through Linden Labs' filtering system, to get into the adult "continent." Members will be asked to start flagging content as adults-only as part of a new content rating system, which will start to roll out in...

A couple have divorced after the husband was caught having a “virtual affair” with a female character in an online game. David Pollard and Amy Taylor met in an online chat room in 2003 and married after discovering a shared love of the internet game Second Life. In the game, players create characters known as avatars, which then interact with others in a virtual world. To his wife's horror, Mr Pollard's interaction included virtual infidelity with a female character playing the role of a prostitute. Ms Taylor said yesterday that her husband had been guilty of the “ultimate betrayal”, even...

For many people, a 'second life' can become just as real as the first one. Take the Japanese woman who killed her virtual husband after he divorced her in a game called Maple Story, and now finds herself under arrest in the real world. Maple Story is a free to play South Korean MMORPG which has been tailored for an international audience via country or region specific play portals. The 2D side-scrolling game is hugely popular, with some claiming as many as 50 million subscriber accounts around the world.

TROY, N.Y. - Edd Hifeng barely merits a second glance in "Second Life." A steel-gray robot with lanky limbs and linebacker shoulders, he looks like a typical avatar in the popular virtual world. But Edd is different. His actions are animated not by a person at a keyboard but by a computer. Edd is a creation of artificial intelligence, or AI, by researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who endowed him with a limited ability to converse and reason. It turns out "Second Life" is more than a place where pixelated avatars chat, interact and fly about. It's also a frontier...

Gay Men Navigate In A Similar Way To Women, Virtual Reality Researchers Find ScienceDaily (Jan. 3, 2008) — Gay men navigate in a similar way to women, according to a new study from researchers at Queen Mary, University of London.   Dr Qazi Rahman, from Queen Mary’s School of Biological and Chemical Sciences used virtual reality scenarios to investigate if spatial learning and memory in humans can be linked to sexual orientation.Differences in spatial learning and memory (our ability to record and recall information about our environment) are common between men and women. It has been shown that men...

The sun shines on an empty Iraqi street. A Blackhawk helicopter circles overhead. The aromas of spices from a market fill the air. Suddenly, insurgents hiding on a roof launch a rocket-propelled grenade. The ground shakes violently and plumes of black smoke cloud your vision. Those images, produced when a person puts on a headset, are at the heart of Virtual Iraq, a simulation created to treat Iraq war veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. By repeatedly encountering sights, sounds, smells and rumblings that evoke painful memories, experts say, veterans with the disorder can begin to reprocess traumatic events and...

Associated Press Staff Sgt. Jeff Ebert's entire body flinches as a roadside bomb explodes near his vehicle. Smoke obscures his view. Gunfire rattles around him. This isn't on a road in Iraq but inside a room at Madigan Army Medical Center, where psychologists plan to begin using virtual reality - think immersive video games - to treat post-traumatic stress disorder by recreating the conditions of war. Virtual-reality therapy provides doctors with a tool that uses visual, auditory and thermal cues to set the stage for treatment of veterans with the disorder, which causes nightmares and flashbacks. It can be so...

Sweden will open the first 'diplomatic representation' in the virtual reality of web-based Second Life, a fantasy world inhabited by computer-generated residents, on May 30, the Swedish Institute said Friday. "The Second House of Sweden, the world's first virtual embassy in Second Life will be inaugurated on May 30," the institute said in a statement. Related Articles Swedish taxman sets sights on Second Life 31st January 2007 Sweden to set up embassy in Second Life 26th January 2007 Article Options Send to a friend Printable version Submit to Digg.com Sweden's Foreign Minister Carl Bildt and Director General of the Swedish...

A pair of motorised roller skates that cancel out a person's steps could let users naturally explore virtual reality landscapes in confined spaces. The "Powered Shoes" were developed by Hiroo Iwata, Hiroshi Tomioka and Hiroaki Yano at the University of Tsukuba in central Japan. The shoes will be demonstrated at the SIGGRAPH 2006 conference on computer graphics and interactive technologies, which takes place in Boston, US, between 30 July and 3 August. Each shoe is mounted on top of a set of three motorised rollers and is connected by cable to a computer on the user's back. This computer controls...