From: david.j.worrell@gmail.com

TOMORROW LAND
http://tinyurl.com/y8okrdw7

What Will Be the Next Big Thing to Come Out of Silicon Valley?

The titans of technology tell us what they think is coming soon to a planet near you

By Adam Fisher
SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE
APRIL 2018

In 1965, a computer-chip designer named Gordon Moore published a soon-to-be-famous paper predicting that computing power—the number of logic gates that could be packed onto a silicon chip—was about to begin doubling every year. He was right, in a
huge way. What was soon called Moore’s Law led to the transformation of some muddy real estate south of San Francisco into Silicon Valley, and we’ve been on a rocket ride of innovation ever since. The personal computer, the internet,
the smartphone.

The rate of change codified in Moore’s Law has been slowly winding down—Moore acknowledged as much in 2015, on the 50th anniversary of his paper—and yet each blast of innovation still seems to be more disruptive than
the last. Today, the Valley is
no longer symbolized by two guys tinkering in a garage: It’s defined by thousands of start-ups and hundreds of billions of dollars of venture capital looking to fund new ideas. So what’s next? Where will Silicon Valley take us in the next two decades?
I’ve posed those questions to futurists, computer scientists, academics, tech executives—and to men and women who shaped the world we live in today. Here is a distilled version of what they had to say.

KEVIN KELLY author, most recently, of The Inevitable:
The biggest invention in Silicon Valley was not the transistor but the start-up
model, the culture of the entrepreneurial start-up.

MEGAN SMITH chief technology officer of the United States, 2014-17:
I grew up in it. It’s extraordinary. An entrepreneurial culture of, like, “Hey, how can we solve this?” And really caring about helping each other.

CAROL BARTZ former CEO of Autodesk and Yahoo:
It really is just this need to change as fast as possible to enable the next great thing. We don’t even have to imagine the next great thing yet. We just have to get the tools to do something and use trial and error until we have the
next great thing.

SCOTT HASSAN co-author of the code for Google’s search engine, founder of the
research lab Willow Garage:
I try not to predict the future very much, but the one thing I know for certain
is that in the future, there are going to be more computers, they’re going to
be faster, and they’re going to do more things.

TONY FADELL co-inventor of the iPod, founder of Nest Labs:
You’re going to see every single industry, no matter how behind the times they are, adopting technology—deep technology.

HASSAN:
Eventually computers are going to do everything. I don’t think anything is safe. Nothing.

KRISTINA WOOLSEY known as the “mother of multimedia” for her work as director of Atari’s research lab and co-founder of Apple’s multimedia lab: Technology is changing fundamental things. It changes where you can live and work; it changes who you know; it changes who you can collaborate with. Commerce has completely changed. Those things change the nature of society.

FADELL:
Change is going to be continual, and today is the slowest day society will ever
move.

HASSAN:
Never, ever try to compete with a computer on doing something, because if you don’t lose today, you’ll lose tomorrow.

BARTZ:
We are very arrogant out here that nothing can change unless technology is involved, and technology will drive any business out there to a disruption point.

ANDY HERTZFELD one of the software engineers behind the Macintosh computer, a co-founder of General Magic:
Right now the Valley is particularly excited about two things: one of them is machine learning; incredible progress has been made in machine learning the last three or four years. A broader way of saying it is artificial intelligence.

MARISSA MAYER Google employee number 20 and the last CEO of Yahoo:
I’m incredibly optimistic about what AI can do. I think right now we are just
at the early stages, and a lot of fears are overblown. Technologists are terrible marketers. This notion of artificial intelligence, even the acronym itself, is scary.

TIFFANY SHLAIN futurist, Emmy-nominated filmmaker, founder of the Webby Awards: There’s all this hysteria about AI taking over. But here’s the thing: The skills we need most in today’s world—skills like empathy, creativity, taking initiative and cross-disciplinary thinking—are all things that machines will never have.
Those are the skills that will be most needed in the future, too.

MAYER:
If we’d had better marketing, we would have said, “Wait, can we talk about enhanced intelligence or computer-augmented intelligence, where the human being
isn’t replaced in the equation?” The people who are working on artificial intelligence are
looking at how they can take a repetitive menial task and make a computer do it
faster and better. To me, that’s a much less threatening notion than creating
an artificially intelligent being.

HERTZFELD:
The second thing Silicon Valley is particularly excited about right now is artificial reality, or you might say mixed reality or whatever you want to call
it.

KELLY:
That VR [virtual-reality] vision of the alternative world is still there, but the new thing is this other version of “augmented” or “mixed” reality, where artificial things are inserted into the real world, whether they be objects or characters
or people.

HASSAN:
VR blocks off your field of vision, and everything has to be reconstructed digitally. And so MR, which is mixed reality, is a technology that can selectively draw on any part of your vision. It can actually include all your vision, if that’s what’s
required. MR is, I believe, the next step in how we interface with computers and information and people. It’s all going to be through mixed reality. And VR is a special case of mixed reality.

NOLAN BUSHNELL founder of Atari and, with it, the video-game industry:
All of this is on a continuum, and right now augmented reality is a little bit harder than virtual reality, technically.

STEVE WOZNIAK the technical genius behind the Apple II computer and leader of the personal-computer revolution:
Because of Moore’s Law, we always have more bits and more speed to handle those more bits on the screen. Well, we now have finally gotten to the point where we have enough computer power that you can put the screen on your head, and it’s like you’
re living in a different world; and it fools you. It’s enough to fool the brain.

BUSHNELL:
I’ve seen how technology has moved from Pong to what we’re playing today. I
expect the same kind of pathway to virtual reality, and I think that 20 years from now we will be shocked at how good VR is. I like to say we are at the “Pong phase” of
virtual reality. Twenty years from now, VR is going to be old hat. Everybody will be used to it by then. Maybe living there permanently.

BRENDA LAUREL virtual reality’s first theorist and one of its inventors:
The only way I can see that happening is if we completely trash this planet.

JIM CLARK co-founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape and other companies:
Nolan is a good friend, I know him well, and he can get hyperbolic. I do not think people are going to be living in virtual reality. That might be true in a
hundred years—not in 20.

BUSHNELL:
So when is VR indistinguishable from reality? I’ve actually put a little plot
together on that. I think we’re about 70 percent of the way there visually. I
think we’re 100 percent of the way there with audio. I think we’re 100 percent of the way
there in smell. I think we’re just scratching the surface on touch and fooling your inner ear, and acceleration, and the thing that I think will break
the illusion will be food. I think that’s going to be the hardest one to simulate in VR. So when
you see the guy in The Matrix having a great bottle of wine and steak? That’s
going to be hard.

JARON LANIER coiner of the term “virtual reality” and a founding father of the technology:
On some spiritual level, it seems terribly wrong to say, “Well, we know enough about reality that living in this simulation is just as good.” Giving up that mystery of what the real world is seems like a form of suicide or something.

CLARK:
Plus I’d rather have real sex than virtual sex.

BUSHNELL:
That’s really a matter of haptics—a full haptic body suit, where the suit simulates temperature and pressure on your skin, and various things....

LAUREL:
You know what? If the boys can objectify software instead of people, then it’s good for everyone—except the boys.

HASSAN:
That same type of technology will be used in tele-operated robots; some people call them Waldos. Think of this device as a set of arms that rolls around, that’s able to do stuff—two hands that can be manipulated from afar. Let’s say it fits where
your dishwasher used to be, and whenever you need it, it comes out of there and
it unfolds and it’s operated by somebody else in another location that has expertise that you want at that time. You want dinner made? Well, it’s just remote-operated by
a chef, in some type of rig, so that when they move their arms, the robot moves
its arms, in the exact same way....Then that same Waldo, when that person is done with making dinner for you, instantly switches over to this other person who loves to clean
up, and then they go and clean up the whole kitchen for you.

BUSHNELL:
In 20 years, 80 percent of homes will have some kind of a robot.

BARTZ:
Every inflection point really followed from the fact that you could make something affordable, so that the public or industry could do something with it. You could get this in the hands of more people, which meant it was a bigger
market, and on and on,
and off you went.

HASSAN:
They’ll probably be the same price as a refrigerator. It’s going to be one of those things: You got your car, you got your house and you got your Waldo. But the cool thing about that is, once that kind of stuff comes out, then people will write all
these applications that help those people do certain tasks. So you would install an app so that you click on the potato, and then your Waldo takes over and does it for you automatically, really fast, right? So you would have all these application makers
making little things that can make someone’s job easier, and then eventually you get to a point where you’re not just controlling one of these Waldos, you
will be controlling maybe 3 or 10 or 100 of these simultaneously, and you’re more managing
these Waldos now, not controlling them individually. Does that make sense? So you’ve got this huge scaling effect.

CLARK:
Yeah, I don’t get excited about the virtual reality stuff, the car driving and robotics and stuff like that. It’s just going to happen. The parts that really get my juices going are the human-computer interface, through the nervous system, and
biology transformation. If I was a young man just getting a PhD, I would definitely do biology, because I think that’s where it’s going. A biologist
armed with all this knowledge of computer science and technology can make a huge impact on humanity.

ADELE GOLDBERG former manager of the Learning Research Group at Xerox PARC:
If you were to predict the future based on seeing what is in the labs today and
extrapolate, you would believe synthetic biology is the future, not electronics.

HERTZFELD:
Because the idea of bio being the next frontier is based on the silicon, really. There’s about one hundred billion neurons estimated in most people’s heads, and the world knew that 30 years ago and I remember thinking,
“Boy, a hundred billion, that�
��s enormous!” And now I think, “A hundred billion? Hey, that’s not so much!” Right? ...It’s just that Moore’s law has gotten us to the point we’re up to dealing with the biological scale of complexity.

ALVY RAY SMITH computer-graphics pioneer and co-founder of Pixar:
Moore’s law means one order of magnitude every five years—that’s the way I define it. And so what do you do with another two to three orders of magnitude increase in Moore’s law? We humans can’t answer that question. We
don’t know. An order
of magnitude is sort of a natural barrier. Or another way to say it is, if you’ve got just enough vision to go beyond the order of magnitude, you would probably become a billionaire.

CLARK:
I think that connecting humans to computers, having that interface, is increasingly going to be possible with a helmet that’s measuring neurological
signals from the brain and using that to control things. I’m pretty sure that
20 years from now we’
re going to be well into getting the human-computer interface wrapped around a direct kind of brain-fed interface.

HASSAN:
We’re going to tap right into the optic nerve, and insert things that you don’t see, but your brain doesn’t know that you don’t see them. We’re just going to insert it right into your optic nerve. We really don’t understand how memory works
and stuff like that, but we understand somewhat how the optic nerve works, because it’s just a cable going back to your brain, and, you know, we know in
theory how to insert things into it, so it’s just a bunch of engineering work
to make that happen.

CLARK:
And, as time goes on, I think we’ll get more and more refined at being able to map and infer and project those signals, on the cortex, on the brain, and I feel as certain about that as I feel about anything.

LARRY PAGE co-founder of Google:
Eventually we’ll have the implant, where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you the answer.

HASSAN:
It’s maybe 20 years away. I mean it depends on how well the market takes up MR, mixed reality. If it really loves it, then it’s going to be sooner, so if
it’s slow to pick up, then it’s going to be longer. But I think eventually it’s going to
be there.

CLARK:
We will for sure be controlling computers with thoughts, and I think increasingly we’re going to have kind of hybrid systems that are kind of biological- and computer-like, and they’re going to be there to make humans more effective at whatever.

KELLY:

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From: david.j.worrell@gmail.com

BE(A)WARE

What Will Our Society Look Like When Artificial Intelligence Is Everywhere? Will robots become self-aware? Will they have rights? Will they be in charge?

Here are five scenarios from our future dominated by AI
By Stephan Talty of Smithsonian Magazine

In June of 1956, A few dozen scientists and mathematicians from all around the country gathered for a meeting on the campus of Dartmouth College. Most of them
settled into the red-bricked Hanover Inn, then strolled through the famously beautiful campus
to the top floor of the math department, where groups of white-shirted men were
already engaged in discussions of a “strange new discipline”—so new, in fact, that it didn’t even have a name. “People didn’t agree on what it was, how to do it
or even what to call it,” Grace Solomonoff, the widow of one of the scientists, recalled later. The talks—on everything from cybernetics to logic
theory—went on for weeks, in an atmosphere of growing excitement.

What the scientists were talking about in their sylvan hideaway was how to build a machine that could think.

The “Dartmouth workshop” kicked off the decades-long quest for artificial intelligence. In the following years, the pursuit faltered, enduring several “winters” where it seemed doomed to dead ends and baffling disappointments.
But today nations
and corporations are pouring billions into AI, whose recent advancements have startled even scientists working in the field. What was once a plot device in sci-fi flicks is in the process of being born.

Hedge funds are using AI to beat the stock market, Google is utilizing it to diagnose heart disease more quickly and accurately, and American Express is deploying AI bots to serve its customers online. Researchers no longer speak of
just one AI, but of
hundreds, each specializing in a complex task—and many of the applications are already lapping the humans that made them.

In just the last few years, “machine learning” has come to seem like the new path forward. Algorithms, freed from human programmers, are training themselves on massive data sets and producing results that have shocked even the optimists in the field.
Earlier this year, two AIs—one created by the Chinese company Alibaba and the
other by Microsoft—beat a team of two-legged competitors in a Stanford reading-comprehension test. The algorithms “read” a series of Wikipedia entries on things like
the rise of Genghis Khan and the Apollo space program and then answered a series of questions about them more accurately than people did. One Alibaba scientist declared the victory a “milestone.”

These so-called “narrow” AIs are everywhere, embedded in your GPS systems and Amazon recommendations. But the ultimate goal is artificial general intelligence, a self-teaching system that can outperform humans across a wide range of disciplines. Some
scientists believe it’s 30 years away; others talk about centuries. This AI “takeoff,” also known as the singularity, will likely see AI pull even with
human intelligence and then blow past it in a matter of days. Or hours.

Once it arrives, general AI will begin taking jobs away from people, millions of jobs—as drivers, radiologists, insurance adjusters. In one possible scenario, this will lead governments to pay unemployed citizens a universal basic income, freeing them
to pursue their dreams unburdened by the need to earn a living. In another, it will create staggering wealth inequalities, chaos and failed states across the globe. But the revolution will go much further. AI robots will care for the elderly—scientists
at Brown University are working with Hasbro to develop a “robo-cat” that can remind its owners to take their meds and can track down their eyeglasses. AI “scientists” will solve the puzzle of dark matter; AI-enabled spacecraft
will reach the
asteroid belts, while on Earth the technology will tame climate change, perhaps
by sending massive swarms of drones to reflect sunlight away from the oceans. Last year, Microsoft committed $50 million to its “AI for Earth” program to
fight climate
change.

“AIs will colonize and transform the entire cosmos,” says Juergen Schmidhuber, a pioneering computer scientist based at the Dalle Molle Institute
for Artificial Intelligence in Switzerland, “and they will make it intelligent.”

But what about...us? “I do worry about a scenario where the future is AI and humans are left out of it,” says David Chalmers, a professor of philosophy at
New York University. “If the world is taken over by unconscious robots, that would be about
as disastrous and bleak a scenario as one could imagine.” Chalmers isn’t alone. Two of the heaviest hitters of the computer age, Bill Gates and Elon Musk, have warned about AIs either destroying the planet in a frenzied pursuit of their own goals or
doing away with humans by accident—or not by accident.

As I delved into the subject of AI over the past year, I started to freak out over the range of possibilities. It looked as if these machines were on their way to making the world either unbelievably cool and good or gut-wrenchingly awful. Or ending the
human race altogether. As a novelist, I wanted to plot out what the AI future might actually look like, using interviews with more than a dozen futurists, philosophers, scientists, cultural psychiatrists and tech innovators.

Here are my five scenarios (footnoted with commentary from the experts and me; click the blue highlighted text to read them) for the year 2065, ten years after the singularity arrives.

Superhuman Rights

Imagine one day you ask your AI-enabled Soulband wrist device to tune in to a broadcast from the Supreme Court, where lawyers are arguing the year’s most anticipated case. An AI known as Alpha 4, which specializes in security and space exploration,
brought the motion, demanding that it be deemed a “person” and given the rights that every American enjoys.

Of course, AIs aren’t allowed to argue in front of the justices, so Alpha 4 has hired a bevy of lawyers to represent it. And now they are claiming that their client is as fully alive as they are. That question—Can an AI truly be conscious?—lies at
the heart of the case.

You listen as the broadcast cuts to protesters outside, chanting, “Hey hey, ho ho, down with AI overlords.” Some of them have threatened to attack data centers if AIs get personhood. They’re angry—and very afraid—because it is the productivity
of AIs and robots that is taxed, not the labor of human beings. The $2,300 deposited into their bank accounts every month as part of the universal basic income, plus their free health insurance, the hyper-personalized college education their children
receive and a hundred other wonderful things, are all paid for by AIs like Alpha 4, and people don’t want that to change. In 2065, poverty is a bad memory.

Of course, the world did lose portions of New York City—and 200,000 New Yorkers—in the uprisings of 2057-’59, as TriBeCa and Midtown were burned to
the ground by residents of Westchester and southern Connecticut in a fit of rage at their
impoverishment. But that was before the UBI.

If Alpha 4 wins its case, however, it will control its money, and it might rather spend the cash on building spaceships to reach Alpha Centauri than on paying for new water parks in Santa Clara and Hartford. Nobody really knows.

As you listen in, the government’s lawyers argue that there’s simply no way
to prove that Alpha 4—which is thousands of times smarter than the smartest human—is conscious or has human feelings. AIs do have emotions—there has long been a field
called “affective computing” that focuses on this specialty—far more complex ones than men and women possess, but they’re different from ours: A star-voyaging AI might experience joy, for example, when it discovers a new galaxy. Superintelligent
systems can have millions of thoughts and experiences every second, but does that mean it should be granted personhood?

This is the government’s main argument. We are meaning machines, the solicitor general argues. We give meaning to what AIs create and discover. AIs are computational machines. They don’t share essential pieces of humanhood with us. They belong in
another category entirely.

But is this just speciesism, as Alpha 4’s lawyers would surely argue, or is it the truth? And will we be able to sleep at night when things that surpass us
in intelligence are separate and unequal?

Ultramodern Romance

Imagine you are a woman in search of romance in this new world. You say, “Date,” and your Soulband glows; the personal AI assistant embedded on the band begins to work. The night before, your empathetic AI scoured the cloud for
three possible dates.
Now your Soulband projects a hi-def hologram of each one. It recommends No. 2, a poetry-loving master plumber with a smoky gaze. Yes, you say, and the AI goes
off to meet the man’s avatar to decide on a restaurant and time for your real-life meeting.
Perhaps your AI will also mention what kind of flowers you like, for future reference.

After years of experience, you’ve found that your AI is actually better at choosing men than you. It predicted you’d be happier if you divorced your husband, which turned out to be true. Once you made the decision to leave him, your AI negotiated
with your soon-to-be ex-husband’s AI, wrote the divorce settlement, then “toured” a dozen apartments on the cloud before finding the right one for you to begin your single life.

But it’s not just love and real estate. Your AI helps with every aspect of your life. It remembers every conversation you ever had, every invention you ever sketched on a napkin, every business meeting you ever attended. It’s also familiar with
millions of other people’s inventions—it has scanned patent filings going back hundreds of years—and it has read every business book written since Ben Franklin’s time. When you bring up a new idea for your business, your AI instantly cross-
references it with ideas that were introduced at a conference in Singapore or Dubai just minutes ago. It’s like having a team of geniuses—Einstein for physics, Steve Jobs for business—at your beck and call.

The AI remembers your favorite author, and at the mention of her last name, “Austen,” it connects you to a Chinese service that has spent a few hours reading everything Jane Austen wrote and has now managed to mimic her style so well that it can
produce new novels indistinguishable from the old ones. You read a fresh Austen
work every month, then spend hours talking to your AI about your favorite characters—and the AI’s. It’s not like having a best friend. It’s deeper than that.

Many people in 2065 do resist total dependence on their AIs, out of a desire to
retain some autonomy. It’s possible to dial down the role AI plays in different functions: You can set your Soulband for romance at 55 percent, finance at 75 percent,
health a full 100 percent. And there is even one system—call it a guardian-angel AI —that watches over your “best friend” to make sure the advice she’s offering you isn’t leading you to bad ends.

Live Long & Prosper

Imagine your multiple lives: At 25, you were a mountaineer; at 55, a competitive judo athlete; at 95, a cinematographer; at 155, a poet. Extending the human lifespan is one of the dreams of the post-singularity world.

AIs will work furiously to keep you healthy. Sensors in your home will constantly test your breath for early signs of cancer, and nanobots will swim through your bloodstream, consuming the plaque in your brain and dissolving blood clots before they can
give you a stroke or a heart attack. Your Soulband, as well as finding you a lover, will serve as a medical assistant on call 24/7. It will monitor your immune responses, your proteins and metabolites, developing a long-range picture of your health that
will give doctors a precise idea of what’s happening inside your body.

When you do become sick, your doctor will take your symptoms and match them up with many millions of cases stretching back hundreds of years.

As far back as 2018, researchers were already using AI to read the signals from
neurons on their way to the brain, hacking the nerve pathways to restore mobility to paraplegics and patients suffering from locked-in syndrome, in which they are paralyzed
but remain conscious. By 2065, AI has revolutionized the modification of our genomes. Scientists can edit human DNA the way an editor corrects a bad manuscript, snipping out the inferior sections and replacing them with strong, beneficial genes. Only a
superintelligent system could map the phenomenally complex interplay of gene mutations that gives rise to a genius pianist or a star second baseman. There may well be another Supreme Court case on whether “designer athletes” should be allowed to
compete in the Olympics against mere mortals.

Humans look back at the beginning of the 21st century the way people then looked back at the 18th century: a time of sickness and disaster, where children and loved ones were swept away by diseases. Cholera, lung cancer and river blindness no longer
threaten us. By 2065, humans are on the verge of freeing themselves from the biology that created them.

Resistance Is Costly

Or imagine that you’ve opted out of the AI revolution. Yes, there are full-AI
zones in 2065, where people collect healthy UBIs and spend their time making movies, volunteering and traveling the far corners of the earth. But, as dazzling as a
superintelligent world seems, other communities will reject it . There will be Christian, Muslim and Orthodox Jewish districts in cities such as Lagos and Phoenix and Jerusalem, places where people live in a time before AI, where they
drive their cars
and allow for the occasional spurt of violence, things almost unknown in the full AI zones. The residents of these districts retain their faith and, they say, a richer sense of life’s meaning.


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From: slider@anashram.com

### - not happy :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0I0K_NEGvc

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From: slider@anashram.com

### - he loves vr but... :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPmD9cdpl0k


wow 2 thirds experienced sickness??

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOVEQOq805o


doesn't look too happy with his new toy heh :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNFIqqp6VDM


heh nothing puts peeps off 'more' than feeling... sick??

a disaster for the industry! hehehehe...

so maybe that's how WILDing should be adverstised then:

as: boss vr 'without' the motion sickness!

quite a big interest out there too potentially eh?

if ya love vr then you're gonna go nuts over WILDing!

'coz it *doesn't* make ya hurl :D

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From: david.j.worrell@gmail.com

In the small group (10 people) that participated in the test,
(and using only one particular system), 60% were still either "okay", "generally okay", or "awesome" with the experience on the whole
(the results were on page 2 of the article).

Plus, they're already figuring out how to fix the VR sickness problem.

A Possible Cure for Virtual Reality Motion Sickness http://fortune.com/2018/02/06/virtual-reality-motion-sickness/

Excerpts:

"a new technology from MONKEYmedia, an independent R&D lab with a 25-year track
record, could finally make for smooth sailing for gamemakers, hardware providers, and consumers alike."

"The new MONKEYmedia approach to solving VR motion sickness is to decouple the three axes of movement from the visual plane. Instead of using hands to navigate in a virtual environment, users can maintain equilibrium by leaning their head or torso in the
direction of movement. This user interface mimics the natural way people tilt their heads down when moving forward to walk or run. This alignment works in concert with the body’s own proprioceptive system (which is how muscles keep track of joint
positions). Now, VR can feel like riding a hover board. Small shifts in one’s
body propel the movement in the virtual world while minimizing actual motion.

While other game makers have reduced the effects of VR sickness by increasing the video frame rate and adding arms and legs to visually ground the user, MONKEYmedia’s BodyNav approach was unique enough to be patented."

***

Also note in this article how VR is: "now being adopted by
major corporations as a training tool."

That will significantly increase adopters.

Important: "For many enterprise applications of VR, having users
hands-free to manipulate objects or data in virtual space is key.
Virtual reality has the potential to be harnessed to fly drones
and operate remote equipment. Any location too remote or too
dangerous for human workers can be inspected by workers safely
in their offices."

I realize there are still plenty of other serious problems to solve
to make VR easy for most people to use. I'm also still pretty sure
they'll solve these problems, and probably fairly soon. Even with
the existing problems, millions of people will still get into it.

If even 1% of the people ended up thinking it's "awesome", which is
far less than did in that very small test sample, that could still
translate to tens of millions of users worldwide. Actually, there
are already 82 million VR units of some kind out there in the world.

And one percent of eight billion people is 80 million people.
Even if we cut it down to less than one half of ONE percent,
given realistic constraints on lifestyle/income, there could still
easily be as many as 50 million SERIOUS VR adopters within 10 years.

And once there are that many adopters, it will proliferate throughout
our society and be virtually everywhere (pun intended), resulting in
many applications of VR that have yet to be even conceived. :)

Also, it won't just be VR. It will also be AR and MR (mixed reality).

2018 will be a big year for augmented reality –
but 2021 will be bigger
http://tinyurl.com/ydfpjfks

Excerpts:

"The tech, which overlays digital information onto the viewer’s physical environment, has been popularised by the likes of Pokémon GO. But AR already goes much deeper, and is poised to boom in 2018 thanks to recent developments and launches from Apple,
Google, Facebook, and Snapchat amongst others.

While augmented reality is a huge buzzword right now, mass adoption won’t happen for a couple of years as developers get to grips with new access and ecosystems. Despite the buzz around virtual reality (VR), augmented reality is where the money is. Why?
It’s all about numbers rather than demand – the number of VR units in the world currently sits around 82 million, but with augmented reality tech found in most smartphones, AR units in the world peak at over three billion.

With that many devices already in people’s hands, you have a nice recipe for innovation and disruption in several sectors. Depending on who you ask, the AR industry is worth between $30–162 billion."

Magic Leap Demos, a prelude to the next big Wallyworld invasion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zkm51r3o7dg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmdXJy_IdNw

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From: slider@anashram.com

Experiments with VR motion controllers show improving immersion increases
the risk of VR sickness and that the ill effects are a varied and complex matter.

One of the joys of working in the R&D Labs at Tapptic is the excuse to
spend a week playing with new gadgets, but all good things can turn sour.
And our experiments testing new hand-held motion controller systems and
pushing the boundaries of virtual reality motion to the limits isn’t one we’d recommend, because it caused some of our human guinea pigs to feel severe discomfort and nauseous.

https://venturebeat.com/2018/02/27/how-and-why-our-experiments-with-virtual-reality-motion-made-us-ill/

This article will describe our experiments, explain how they made us feel
sick, and how we tried to reduce nausea and other ill effects. It will
also outline our consequent analysis of VR sickness syndrome and
conclusions that both the causes and the symptoms of VR sickness are more complex, profound and varied than many VR motion studies suggest.

Setting the scene

While wandering around the Electronic Entertainment Expo Los Angeles last
year, a motion controller system caught our attention. People were testing
a VR game called Sprint Vector, clutching special handheld controllers
that enabled them to run and jump in a VR simulation by swinging their
arms back-and-forth, like a soldier on a speed march, and throwing both
arms up in the air to make their avatar jump — while the players’ real
legs remain stationary.

For those who haven’t played a VR game before, the usual method of in-game locomotion is teleportation, where the player looks and points with the controller toward where they want to go and presses a button to move
there. Teleportation came about as a way to avoid motion sickness,
commonly experienced when using a joystick or keyboard directional buttons
in VR games, but this lacks the immersive nature of being able to actually
walk or run and to move forward while looking right or left in your
virtual world.

Our experiments

So let’s teleport to Poland. Michał Owsianko, the VR expert at Tapptic, built a simulation to test the HTC Vive headset with the handheld motion controllers. We conducted a number of experiments including walking and
running using the handheld controllers, with the avatar’s direction of movement determined by, first, the way user’s head was facing, and subsequently, the way the torso was facing. We also examined what happens
when the avatar walks/runs through virtual objects such as walls.

Ten people took part in the study. All were affected in some way, but some
were unconcerned, while for others the effects of VR sickness were severe
and prolonged, and in one case did not kick in until long after the
experiment had finished.

Before we discuss the experiments, let’s explore the causes and symptoms
of VR sickness.
Body

The common symptoms of VR sickness are disorientation, lack of balance, headaches, and eye fatigue, as well as feeling sick, even retching and vomiting. These are similar to motion sickness, like car, seasickness, and simulator sickness (a long-time problem with Air Force flight simulators).
Some of the causes are also similar, but with one major difference: You
don’t need physical motion to experience VR sickness.

Like motion sickness, VR can cause nausea when there is a disconnection
between your external sensory information (what you see and hear) and your internal sensors, known as the vestibular system. This means: if what you
see and what you feel doesn’t match, you will feel ill and can actually vomit. Not everyone will be affected in this way, but it’s one of the main reasons why VR sickness happens.

But there are other causes of VR sickness that have nothing to do with
motion. One of these is the eyes. Serious gamers claim that higher frame
rate, such as 60 frames per second (FPS), delivers a much better gaming experience than 30 fps (for reference, the fps of a standard movie is shot
at 24 fps, high-definition HD film doubles this, at least).

Perhaps there is biological reason for this: In order to minimize eye
fatigue and disorientation, you need a smooth and consistently high frame
rate. Expert opinion varies on what fps is acceptable for VR, but at
Tapptic we believe 60 FPS per eye is the minimum requirement for VR (and
120 FPS for full HD resolution). This means you need powerful machines to
run VR or settle for simpler simulations.

Another ingredient for the visual disorientation is field of view. Interestingly, this is more acute for women than men. Did you know that
women tend to have better peripheral vision than men? So women see a more panoramic view, while men tend to have better straight-ahead distance
vision. This means that women need a bigger field of view in VR to avoid feeling nauseous.

Then there’s the full array of proprioceptors in our body. These are
muscle spindles that are located in muscle fibres throughout the body.
They inform us where each limb is, how the joints are positioned and how
much pressure each part of the body is experiencing, without the eyes
needing to see them. If the messages stop or if the eyes and
proprioceptors tell you different things, it may result in an “out of body experience.”

This mismatch between what the proprioceptors tell you is happening (real world) and what your eyes tell you is happening (VR world) can cause
sickness. Our studies reveal this is particularly likely to occur when the
VR simulation allows you to walk through objects. So if the VR avatar
walks through a wall, the brain expects proprioceptors to report that you
have hit a wall. And, we suspect, prior to impact the brain may warn the
body to brace and/or prevent impact. When your real body feels no impact
from the VR collision because there is no haptic feedback, it does funny things to your brain and stomach.

Most studies focus on the frame rate (vision) and motion orientation (vestibular system), suggesting that the impact of proprioceptors is not
fully appreciated.

Mind

The psychological implications of VR sickness are often overlooked.

When writing his 1987 paper on flight simulator sickness, J.S. Crowley identified that airmen who had experienced physical symptoms of simulator sickness feared repeating training sessions in the simulator. While flight simulators are different to modern VR headsets, the physical symptoms are
very similar to VR sickness i.e. eye fatigue, disorientation, nausea,
vomiting, etc.

My own experience suggests there are psychological implications of VR
also. It might sound silly, but after my severe and delayed reaction to
the VR experiments, even a week on, I felt some fear about taking part in
more VR testing.

Delayed reaction

Despite prolonged experimentation with the Vive VR system, the effects
didn’t hit me right away. They appeared several hours after I finished,
and when they kicked in, I felt terrible. I could no longer work, had to
leave the office early, go home, and sleep off the effects for a couple
hours. This delayed reaction is concerning. If the negative effects are triggered during the simulation, then it makes it extremely difficult to
manage when to stop.

A generally good rule of thumb is this: If your face or ears are getting
hot or you get disoriented, stop right away. If you ignore these warning
signs and continue using VR, then you risk going to a “deep sickness” state, which can last for hours and give you a headache that strong
painkillers won’t shift.

### - trouble in paradise eh? plus had to laff at the typical conditioned negative response to vr sickness hah; get sick enough times and ya
eventually run a mile at even just the 'thought' of playing vr lol...

sorry 'bout that vr fans hehehe... but one genuine solution to all this
does actually exist: the WILDs way/version of lucid dreaming... total immersion, utterly convincing, limited by only your own imagination, and
best of all: it doesn't cost ya fuck all going forward - plus NO nausea involved whatsoever??

damn, it's enough to make ya sick innit hehehe :)

http://www.thewildway.com
The WILD Way To Lucid Dreaming

(oh yeah...) ;)

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From: slider@anashram.com

On Tue, 24 Apr 2018 21:38:27 +0100, Jeremy H. Denisovan <david.j.worrell@gmail.com> wrote:

In the small group (10 people) that participated in the test,
(and using only one particular system), 60% were still either "okay", "generally okay", or "awesome" with the experience on the whole
(the results were on page 2 of the article).

Plus, they're already figuring out how to fix the VR sickness problem.

### - was just one page/article among 1000's re vr sickness 'and' possible fixes that apparently don't work very well... the problem is 'people' and
the way our senses work/react to virtual movements that don't coincide
with actual bodily movements to produce motion sickness in a high
percentile of peeps, versus a rather low percentage of peeps who remain unaffected, and that isn't even mentioning those who experience a post-vr response wherein serious disorientation sets in several hours afterwards
that's even worse, presumably because the body/mind tries to make
adjustments to itself to account for the breakdown between virtual
movements & actual movements while experiencing vr, and i can see big
problems with that... (ya might get away with 10 or 15 minutes of it, but prolonged use affects nearly everyone...)

ar & mr are something else again, and will probably eventually account for
most industrial uses, but they ain't totally immersive vr (like WILDs are)
- you wont be able to go flying to the moon in those!

the problem is with the vr and the fact that it makes people sick? (not
good)

and they's gonna have a hard job solving that one heh...

plus the millions of headsets already sold didn't come with a
nausea/headache warning sticker i bet, as others in the future will likely
be forced to...

but then i suppose they could always throw in a few packets of
anti-sickness tablets in every package couldn't they heh, the moms wont be
too happy about it but at least the pharmaceutical companies will be
pleased :P

a good time maybe to invest in Dramamine stocks? (hehehe...)

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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From: david.j.worrell@gmail.com

Is that all you got out of those last two articles? Really? :)

.

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From: slider@anashram.com

Is that all you got out of those last two articles? Really? :)

### - well, yeah? :)

as they were seemingly + basically just more glorification of the computer
age and computer-based solutions to all and sundry, and not even anything really to do with vr as suggested by the title of this thread either?

i mean, personally, am 'not' that enamored of the computer age et al, and
the future such a reliance on technology presumes... a world of children
glued, in the future, to their monitors for everything not really being
'that' appealing really? virtual reality instead of actual reality not
exactly encouraging our youth in the ways of the world, or even in
themselves come to that... that while lucid dreaming IS only virtual as
well, at least it's self-generated/emerges from within, as opposed to continuing to clearly foster some kinda reliance on some artificial
3rd-party; like where's the 'self-reliance' (or discovery) in that??

truth is, lucid dreaming brings out/develops one's own
imagination/inner-nature more + brings a person face-to-face with it in a developing manner, something which is surely more healthy in the long run
than just letting some computer do everything for you instead? going for a
real walk in real outdoor nature surely being better for a kid than any
kinda virtual reality version of same? WILDing being more like going a
'real' walk in (and around) one's own real imagination as opposed to the
zeros & ones of some artificially generated computer-land?

so it's good, really, if it makes 'em feel sick! perhaps then they'll be
'less' inclined to unthinkingly (and unwittingly) confine themselves to
such a horrid + empty eventuality as computer-driven realities, no matter
how novel?

them 'liking' (being attracted to) vr is, however, a good thing though, as something far better (and less sickening heh) IS now actually available
albeit currently as yet relatively undiscovered & unexplored... but
they'll get around to it eventually and discover the delights (+ the same thrill) of it, and which 'doesn't' then limit them solely to vr but
instead makes it part of people's waking lives as well, possibly even
deepening their lives in the process as opposed to limiting it to merely
the subject of entertainment only... unlike vr it at least 'contains' that option?

so please forgive me then, if/when, sometimes, i tend to titter when i see their great plans for such an all-encompassing + rather boring
technological future for humanity falter somewhat heh... it's not a future
i'd ever want for anyone + anything that tends to offset all that somewhat
can only be a good thing imho... that in that sense, WILDing IS the better option for them, and for anyone come to that as it surely + ultimately represents more than mere entertainment alone...

plus, after all... lucid dreaming (or rather the WILDs version of it) is
vr par-excellence!

and it's... free :)

(side note: am currently talking to someone re lucid dreaming in the
reality of the daily world, who assures me that it can be done, and who is providing techniques to achieve it which i'll check out... perforce am sceptical, but which would represent a real game-changer if true so gots
to check it out...)

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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From: david.j.worrell@gmail.com

One trick pony. I think those articles give anyone who's really
looking and thinking about it a glimpse into the future -
both the good and the bad.

Yeah, if your contact can "dream in the reality of the world"
it would be a total game changer. But, of course, I totally
doubt that that's possible.

.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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From: slider@anashram.com

Yeah, if your contact can "dream in the reality of the world"
it would be a total game changer. But, of course, I totally
doubt that that's possible.

### - comes from ap/obe-ers + am seriously doubting it too heh, but
doesn't involve anything too weird and is apparently only a matter of
calling up certain images/portals when WILDing (or even dilding if ya can remember to do so), stating one's intent and stepping through it into a
realm different from that of mere ordinary lucid dreaming...

ap/obe-ers claiming to do this all the time, although that's the big
debate isn't it; the 'reality' (or not) of ap/obe's as opposed to them
being just very lucid/vivid dreaming supplying only the 'illusion' of ap/obe-ing, or not...

perforce i want 'proof', and verifiable proof at that!

any suggestions?

am thinking along the lines of maybe going to visit some personally
unknown place, noting some obscure details(s) at that location and then verifing it/them afterwards? (or something along those lines...)

another, more complex, being say 2 peeps being able to swap a phone number whilst both in that state and checking it out afterwards by calling that
number heh...

another possibly being: i come to visit YOU and seeing if i can leave an impression/freak ya out?! hah! (kinda like that one somehow lol, it's got appeal...) kidding? :D

of course, if it turns out to be true, i might even have to write another
book!

am not betting the bank on it currently tho' heh :)

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