Lifeboat Foundation

Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Mixed Reality (MR), Haptics and Holographics, are all in gradual market diffusion stage as of 2018, after having long been the stuff of science fiction content. Even so, even as of 2018, the misconceptions remains overwhelmingly widespread and strong, that these are for gaming, entertainment, leisure and recreation. None of these technologies or interface methods, however, were ever meant to be for just that alone.

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It’s not like moon-walking astronauts don’t already have plenty of hazards to deal with. There’s less gravity, extreme temperatures, radiation—and the whole place is aggressively dusty. If that weren’t enough, it also turns out that the visual-sensory cues we use to perceive depth and distance don’t work as expected—on the moon, human eyeballs can turn into scam artists.

During the Apollo missions, it was a well-documented phenomenon that astronauts routinely underestimated the size of craters, the slopes of hilltops, and the distance to certain objects. Objects appeared much closer than they were, which created headaches for mission control. Astronauts sometimes overexerted themselves and depleted oxygen supplies in trying to reach objects that were further than expected.

This phenomenon has also become a topic of study for researchers trying to explain why human vision functions differently in space, why so many visual errors occurred, and what, if anything, we can do to prepare the next generation of space travelers.

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Researchers have created a virtual reality simulation of a supermassive black hole. In a recent paper in “Computational Astrophysics and Cosmology” they present their latest visualization. The simulation is based on the black hole in the center of our own Galaxy; Sagittarius A* (Sgr A•. Read this SpringerOpen blog to learn more. https://bit.ly/2S2Xh8p

The black hole at the centre of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*, has been visualised in virtual reality for the first time. The details are described in an article published in the open access journal Computational Astrophysics and Cosmology.

Kids Try Virtual Reality

Control this humanoid robot in VR.

This VR waterslide looks amazing.

Robots help extend VR into the real-world.