Lifeboat Foundation

A new type of camera built by Stanford engineers and funded by the NSF and Intel generates a four dimensional image that is capable of capturing nearly 140 degrees of information.

The 4D camera, built by Donald Dansereau, a postdoctoral fellow in electrical engineering and Gordon Wetzstein, assistant professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, along with colleagues from the University of California, San Diego is the first single-lens, wide field of view, light field camera ever made.

Continue reading “4D Camera to Improve Machine Vision for Robots and Virtual Reality” »

Researchers have successfully given AI a curiosity implant, which motivated it to explore a virtual environment. This could be the bridge between AI and real world application.

Researchers at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, have produced an artificial intelligence (AI) that is naturally curious. They tested it successfully by having it play Super Mario and VizDoom (a rudimentary 3D shooter), as the video below shows.

Continue reading “Researchers Have Created an AI That Is Naturally Curious” »

Stanford engineers have developed a 4D camera with an extra-wide field of view. They believe this camera can be better than current options for close-up robotic vision and augmented reality.

“This work is based on our belief that VR offers new methods for storytelling and engagement.”

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Artificial intelligence software could generate highly realistic fake videos of former president Barack Obama using existing audio and video clips of him, a new study [PDF] finds.

Such work could one day help generate digital models of a person for virtual reality or augmented reality applications, researchers say.

Continue reading “AI Creates Fake Obama” »

Warfare and technology make the perfect partners of destruction. Military innovations from wooden catapults to nuclear bombs have been transforming the way war is waged since prehistoric humans carved arrows from stones some 10,000 years ago.

The visions of futurists don’t always match the experiences of military personnel, but the battlefields of the future will bear little resemblance to the war zones of today.

The future of technology in warfare: From AI robots to VR torture.

Continue reading “Here’s the Future of Warfare Tech. Warning: it’s Not Pretty” »

Royal College of Art graduate Brian Black has designed a concept rover and virtual-reality interface that would allow anyone on earth to contribute to space exploration missions.

Black’s vision would see participants driving the rovers over real planets and moons, and collecting samples for analysis, all via a virtual-reality (VR) headset.

Continue reading “RCA graduate proposal would see ordinary people driving NASA’s space exploration rovers” »

My new article from Vice Motherboard on liberty and privacy. This is one of my most ambitious philosophical works yet: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjx5y5/liberty-mi…th-privacy #Libertarian

If tech is surveilling us constantly, we need the ability to use it to watch the watchers.

Zoltan Istvan is a futurist, transhumanist, author of The Transhumanist Wager, and a Libertarian candidate for California Governor.

Continue reading “Liberty Might Be Better Served by Doing Away with Privacy” »