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Prices will start from 1,899 yuan ($268.25) for the headset that will be powered by Alibaba's Qwen AI model and app. Unlike other headsets made by the likes of Meta, the Quark glasses look like regular eyewear, with a black plastic frame. Alibaba said the glasses would be deeply integrated with its apps, including Alipay and its shopping site Taobao, with wearers able to use them for tasks such as on-the-go translation and instant price recognition.

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Today, we’re introducing WorldGen: a state-of-the-art end-to-end system for generating interactive and navigable 3D worlds from a single text prompt. WorldGen is built on a combination of procedural reasoning, diffusion-based 3D generation, and object-aware scene decomposition. The result is geometrically consistent, visually rich, and render-efficient 3D worlds for gaming, simulation, and immersive social environments.

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In the last hundred years, humanity’s capacity for knowledge transmission progressed from the written word and the static-laden echoes of early radio technology to global information systems so vast and complex that no single person on Earth can claim a complete understanding of them. Inevitably, the social technologies built into both our biology and our society are no longer entirely capable of addressing our new epistemological landscape. But is a slow retreat into the machine necessarily the only path we can take to keep up?

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If you’ve encountered any science fiction, you’ve experienced the technological sublime—the feeling of awe, braided with dread, that can emerge in response to the engulfing possibilities of technology’s progress. Maybe you’ve gaped at the sprawling cyber-cityscapes of “Blade Runner,” or at the impossibly tall, leaflike alien ships in “Arrival.” In the cascading green code of “The Matrix,” you might have sensed a promise of revelation—or perhaps Ava, the uncannily beautiful android played by Alicia Vikander in “Ex Machina,” has induced some idea of what it might mean to be more than human. In all of these cases, technology feels big, strange, relentless, but also mind-expanding and appealing—a bracing wave that will sweep you up.

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You don’t have to look far to find reports of people who have used VR headsets and then felt ‘off’ after removing them. While motion sickness is surely the most well-known post-VR symptom, a subset of people say they have experienced feelings of being ‘stuck in VR’ after taking off their headsets. It’s tempting to brush off such reports as someone having seen The Matrix (1999) one too many times, but it turns out there is a clear scientific basis for the sensation.

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So what the hell is embodiment and why am I boring you talking about it rather than just talking about all the cool shooting, and explosions, and smart design in the game? Well, it’s going to help us understand why certain design decisions in Synapse are so effective. So stick with me here for just a minute.

Embodiment is a term I use to describe the feeling of being physically present within a VR experience. Like you’re actually standing there in the world that’s around you.

And now your reasonable response is, “but don’t we already use the word immersion for that?”

Well colloquially people certainly do, but I want to make an important distinction between ‘immersion’ and ‘embodiment’.

‘Immersion’, for the purposes of our discussion, is when something has your complete attention. We all agree that a movie can be immersive, right? When the story or action is so engrossing it’s almost like nothing outside of the theater even exists at that moment. But has even the most immersive movie you’ve ever seen made you think you were physically inside the movie? Certainly not.

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