Lifeboat Foundation

Are gamers paving the way to the future?

The future is now — or so it seems. @perrikaryal is a gamer, Twitch streamer, psychology graduate and a genius with the ability to control games…with her mind! She has mastered the art of doing this with games like Elden Ring, Halo and TrackMania all without using a controller. To do this she uses an EEG (electroencephalogram) that picks up her brain activity, which then translates into pushing buttons on a virtual controller.

Continue reading “Playing Video Games With Mind Control” »

Like “Avengers” director Joe Russo, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that fully AI-generated movies and TV shows will be possible within our lifetimes.

A host of AI unveilings over the past few months, in particular OpenAI’s ultra-realistic-sounding text-to-speech engine, have given glimpses into this brave new frontier. But Meta’s announcement today put our AI-generated content future into especially sharp relief — for me at least.

Meta his morning debuted Emu Video, an evolution of the tech giant’s image generation tool, Emu. Given a caption (e.g. “A dog running across a grassy knoll”), image or a photo paired with a description, Emu Video can generate a four-second-long animated clip.

Plans are underway to bring the life story of Elon Musk to the big screen.

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A24, a renowned New York-based film production company, has secured the rights to produce a movie about the billionaire tech entrepreneur.

Continue reading “A24 secures rights to Elon Musk biopic with Darren Aronofsky as director” »

‘It took 500 artists five years to make a world-class animated movie,’ Katzenberg said at a Bloomberg conference. ‘I don’t think it will take 10 percent of that[with AI].’

“Othello is now solved.” With that summation, a researcher at a Japanese computer company confirmed yet another milestone in supercomputing achievement.

Othello, a 140-year-old game rooted in the Shakespearean drama of the same name that depicts conflict between the Moor of Venice and Desdemona, does not seem complex at first glance. It is played on a board with black and white disks strategically positioned in squares along eight rows and eight columns.

The challenge, according to bioinformatician Hiroki Takizawa, is to conceive a game plan “with no mistake made by either player.”

Doritos introduced crunch cancellation software to “help gamers keep the crunch to themselves.”

Ever caught yourself mindlessly snacking on potato crisps while watching a movie? Sometimes, the crackling sound of chips is so loud that one has to turn on subtitles to understand what the little people on the screen are saying.

Doritos, the brand of flavorful tortilla chips, says that gamers face the same problem. According to their recent research, 85% of US gamers across the globe reach out for a bag of Doritos during their gaming session. The study also revealed that 30% of gamers in the US said that the sound of other people’s crunching impacts their performance, and they would welcome a solution that eliminates crunching sounds while gaming.

Gaming is a $193 billion industry — nearly double the size of the film and music industries combined — and there are around three billion gamers worldwide. While online gaming can improve wellbeing and foster social relations, privacy and awareness issues could potentially offset these benefits and cause real harm to gamers.

The new study, by scientists at Aalto University’s Department of Computer Science, reveals potentially questionable data collection practices in online games, along with misconceptions and concerns about privacy among players. The study also offers risk mitigation strategies for players and design recommendations for game developers to improve privacy in online games.

‘We had two supporting lines of inquiry in this study: what players think about games, and what games are really up to with respect to privacy,’ says Janne Lindqvist, associate professor of computer science at Aalto. ‘It was really surprising to us how nuanced the considerations of gamers were. For example, participants said that, to protect their privacy, they would avoid using voice chat in games unless it was absolutely necessary. Our game analysis revealed that some games try to nudge people to reveal their online identities by offering things like virtual rewards.’

The acquisition, which was first announced in January 2022, is the largest in Microsoft’s history and one of the biggest in the tech industry.

Microsoft has finally sealed the deal to buy Activision Blizzard, the gaming giant behind popular franchises such as Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Overwatch, for a whopping $68.7 billion. The acquisition, first announced in January 2022, is the largest in Microsoft’s history and one of the biggest in the tech industry.

Ending a long regulatory battle

Continue reading “Microsoft completes $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard” »

What happens in the brain when we feel threatened? Answers to this question could lead to new treatments for people with anxiety and panic disorders and PTSD. Caltech neuroscientist Dean Mobbs (http://www.hss.caltech.edu/people/dean-mobbs) studies how the brain processes different types of danger. In this video, Mobbs talks about fear, horror, and hope. Participants in his studies play virtual-predator video games inspired by horror movies while fMRI machines track the activity in their brains as they encounter threats. Mobbs and his research group recently showed that two regions of the brain are involved in processing fear: one for distant threats that allow some time to strategize, and one for immediate danger that requires a fight, flight, or freeze response. (Read more: https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/you-dont-think-your-way-o…tack-81542)

Mobbs conducts research in the Caltech Brain Imaging Center (http://cbic.caltech.edu), which is part of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech (http://neuroscience.caltech.edu). Founded with a $115 million gift to Break Through: The Caltech Campaign (https://breakthrough.caltech.edu/) from visionary philanthropists Tianqiao Chen and Chrissy Luo, the Chen Institute at Caltech supports researchers who are deepening our understanding of the brain.

Continue reading “The Caltech Effect: This Is Your Brain on Fear” »