Lifeboat Foundation

There are some kernels of brilliance scattered amid the dead spaces of “Creative Control,” a microbudgeted techno-drama.

In a near-future Brooklyn, marketing consultant David (played by Benjamin Dickinson, the film’s director and co-writer) is assigned to create an ad campaign for Augmenta, a new form of augmented-reality glasses that will add a high-tech layer to the viewer’s reality. After deciding to give a pair to a hip artist — in this case, the musician/comedian Reggie Watts, here wittily sending up his own image — David starts noodling with a pair himself.

While he ignores his flighty yoga-instructor girlfriend, Juliette (Nora Zehetner), David starts to create a sexy avatar based on Sophie (Alexia Rasmussen), the fashion-designer girlfriend of his best friend, Wim (Dan Gill), a philandering photographer. David and Sophie start crushing on each other, but it’s nothing to the sparks David feels with her simulated version.

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Have you ever wanted to mess with a video by making its cast say things they never would on camera? You might get that chance. Researchers have built a face detection system that lets you impose your facial expressions on people in videos. The software uses an off-the-shelf webcam to create a 3D model of your face in real time, and distorts it to fit the facial details in the target footage. The result, as you’ll see below, is eerily authentic-looking: you can have a dead-serious Vladimir Putin make funny faces, or Donald Trump blab when he’d otherwise stay silent.

This isn’t about to reach software you can buy, but the implications for video creation are big if it becomes more than a university project. You could use the tool to mess with your friends by having celebrities say audacious things, or have famous figures recite dialogue in movies without needing to painstakingly animate faces frame by frame. In other words: get ready for an era when even the most plausible videos aren’t safe from a little computer trickery.

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When we think of the future of technology, we often imagine gadgets that will make us go faster. But some of the truly exciting developments will be around gadgets that help us with the tricky aspects of our emotional lives. If you like our films take a look at our shop (we ship worldwide): http://www.theschooloflife.com/shop/all/

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The fact that some people remember the past as a series of episodes full of details (episodic memory), while others store in their brains the meaning of events (semantic memory), has a lot to do with the configuration of the connections in the brain, according to a recent study published in the journal Cortex. Neuroscience is deciphering the sophisticated mechanisms of human memory to explain how we file and remember information.

– Memory’s unreliable.

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The unholy, skinless, bloody creatures shambled toward me on all sides. My pistol was pitifully inadequate. For the first time ever, I pulled a VR rig off my head in the middle of a demo.

Not even extreme nausea had caused me to do so before Thursday, when I demoed the HTC Vive game The Brookhaven Experiment at Valve Software’s booth at the 2016 Game Developers Conference. I’d always choked down the bile and forced myself to finish the demo rather than bail, even though this is almost always a bad decision. Call it stupid gamer pride.

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The first games for Oculus Rift are pretty sweet, though some can cause motion sickness.

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Is this another strategy to fight terrorism by seeing from techies and others the various ways terrorists can take every day items to create weapons?

Do you want to be a MacGyver and turn everyday household items into Decepticons? Then DARPA’s new Improv program wants you.

This sounds like a Transformers movie. Or a MacGyver episode. Heck, this could even be a precursor to Skynet and future Terminators. OK, that last one may not apply, but a new DARPA program wants people who can weaponize a toaster.

Continue reading “DARPA Calls For Creative Individuals to Weaponize Common Items” »