[From MIT’s Technology Review] Virtual Reality Startups Look Back to the Future Thirty years after the first wave of virtual reality, new startups are determined to take it mainstream. By Simon Parkin on March 7, 2014 It’s been almost 30 years since the computer scientist Jaron Lanier formed VPL Research, the first company to sell the high-tech goggles and gloves that once defined humanity’s concept of where technology might soon take our species. In the late-1980s, a person could pull on a $100,000 head-mounted display and electronic gauntlet and fool their brain into thinking they had stepped inside the simulated…

[From Fast Company Labs] [Image: From GottaBeMobile.com] This Cambridge Researcher Just Embarrassed Siri A new spoken dialogue system called VocalIQ could revolutionize computers’ understanding of human speech By Michael Grothaus 2014-02-27 Siri held lots of promise when Apple introduced it in iOS 6. However, in the two years since Siri’s release, the virtual assistant has improved little–offering clever ways to do simple tasks via voice command, but no more. That’s because Siri, and other virtual assistants like it, have built-in problems that doom it to be a simple system forever. But one Cambridge researcher thinks there’s a better way to…

[From Psychology Today’s Love and Sex in the Digital Age blog] Are Two Actual People Still Required For a Relationship? Does a “relationship” still need actual people to provide sex and love? Published on February 19, 2014 by Robert Weiss, LCSW, CSAT-S in Love and Sex in the Digital Age Recapping Her If you don’t know, the much lauded Spike Jonze film Her is the tale of Theodore, a very lonely man in the final stages of a sad, ugly divorce. Feeling down, he decides to treat himself to the new OS1, advertised as the world’s first artificially intelligent operating…

[From Eurogamer, where the story includes a different image and the 1:20 minute video] Explore the Seinfeld apartment in Oculus Rift Worlds are colliding By Jeffrey Matulef Published Monday, 3 March 2014 If you’ve ever wanted to explore one of the most iconic sets in television history, now you can with Jerry’s Place VR, a fan-made mod that details the home base from Seinfeld.…

[From Fast Company, where the story includes a photo gallery and the referenced 2:20 minute video] Interactive Virtual Reality In 3-D, The Newest Learning Tool Watch what happens when the Oculus Rift headset and the Leap Motion 3-D gesture controller are combined to help kids learn the periodic table. By Ariel Schwartz February 27, 2014 Remember the days when students would come to class armed with only a notebook and a textbook? In some places, that time is long gone, as laptops and iPads make their way into schools. Now a creative technology studio has come up with a platform…

[From Wired, where the story includes two videos; for more information, see coverage by CNET] A Crazy Oculus Rift Hack Lets Men and Women Swap Bodies By Kyle VanHemert 02.25.14 The great promise of the Oculus Rift headset the chance to inhabit fantastic new worlds. A group of researchers in Barcelona are already using it for something even more radical: inhabiting new bodies. BeAnotherLab, an interdisciplinary group of students at the University Pompeu Fabra, in Barcelona, has relied on an early version of Oculus Rift as part of an on-going research project called “The Machine To Be Another.…

[From Computerworld, where the story includes a 2:58 minute video about Project Tango] Google’s 3D tech could be boon to Glass, robots and virtual reality Just disclosed Project Tango 3D smartphone effort may be scratching the surface for Google By Sharon Gaudin February 21, 2014 Computerworld – News that Google is working on 3D smartphones has analysts speculating that the company will one day add the tech to a slew of its products, such as Google Maps, Google Glass, Google robots and even virtual reality tools. “Google is much more than what it seems,” said Scott Strawn, an analyst at…

[From Wired’s Autopia blog, where the post includes another picture; see a recent related story here] Supersonic Jet Ditches Windows for Massive Live-Streaming Screens By Alexander George 02.18.14 Spike Aerospace is in the midst of building the first supersonic private jet. And when the $80 million S-512 takes off in December 2018, it won’t have something you’d find on every other passenger aircraft: windows. The Boston-based aerospace firm is taking advantage of recent advances in video recording, live-streaming, and display technology with an interior that replaces the windows with massive, high-def screens. The S-512’s exterior will be lined with tiny…

[From Motherboard, where the story includes more pictures and a video] The Robot That Makes Virtual Sex Feel Real Written by Brian Merchant February 14, 2014 In the future, some people will choose to spend Valentine’s Day alone, having virtual sex with a 3D avatar with the help of a fully responsive robotic assistant. And by the future, I mean maybe next year. Intrepid horndog hackers can do it right now. Tenga is a Japanese manufacturer of disposable male sex toys—they make cylindrical “masturbation aids” that somehow don’t seem as repulsive as the Fleshlight (perhaps mostly because they’re not called…

[From AP via Salon] [Image: In this Jan. 7, 2014 file photo, show attendees play a video game wearing Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets at the Intel booth at the International Consumer Electronics Show(CES), in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)] Q&A: A documentarian working in virtual reality By Derrik J. Lang Feb. 19, 2014 LOS ANGELES (AP) — Forget 3-D glasses. Oscar-nominated documentarian Danfung Dennis believes the next evolution in filmmaking will be to surround viewers with images in 360 degrees — directly on their noggins. Dennis, whose gripping 2012 film “Hell and Back Again” told of a…

[From GCN; follow the links for more information and images] [Image: An interface for helm control of a ship. Note the position of his hands, floating above the controls a la Minority Report rather than touching them directly. From The Verge.] Virtual reality headset helps Navy simulate future workspaces By Kathleen Hickey Feb 18, 2014 The Office of Naval Research’s Project BlueShark is an effort to create a high-tech, futuristic environment to demonstrate what the Navy’s workspaces might look like and what emerging innovative technologies might provide in the next decade. BlueShark was developed by the University of Southern California’s…

[A change of pace – the ultimate form of (tele)presence; this is from The New York Times] [Image: Art by Olimpia Zagnoli] Is the Universe a Simulation? Feb. 14, 2014 By Edward Frenkel In Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita,” the protagonist, a writer, burns a manuscript in a moment of despair, only to find out later from the Devil that “manuscripts don’t burn.” While you might appreciate this romantic sentiment, there is of course no reason to think that it is true. Nikolai Gogol apparently burned the second volume of “Dead Souls,” and it has been lost forever.…