DISRUPTOMATIC

Technology disrupting media.

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Australian-Chinese research team claims world's thinnest hologram | ZDNet

The creation expedites the possibility of 3D holography being integrated into everyday electronics.

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Welcome to the future.

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Sir David Attenborough to ‘Hold the World’ in VR

Veteran wildlife broadcaster Sir David Attenborough’s latest project will see him showing off exhibits from London’s Natural History Museum as a “three-dimensional hologram”.

He’s fronting a project from the museum and broadcaster Sky’s in-house VR studio called Hold The World. “Sir David will be transformed into a hologram and will guide participants to virtually ‘handle’ fossils, using his passion for the natural world to bring the objects to life,” explained Sky.

Sky VR Studio worked with creative firms Factory 42, Dream Reality Interactive and Talesmith on the project, so it’s quite the collaboration.

“Virtual reality is all about experiencing things you could only ever dream of in real life,” said Sky’s MD for content Gary Davey. We’ll have to wait a while before we get the chance to handle those fossils though: Hold the World goes into production later this year.

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Rick and Morty go VR with Virtual Rick-ality game

Adult Swim show Rick and Morty is the latest TV property getting an extension in the virtual reality world. Its first VR game, Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality (oof!) comes out on 20 April for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive headsets.

It’s been developed by Owlchemy Labs, which made its name (not to mention $3m of sales) with the excellent Job Simulator VR game. The short teaser trailer above suggests that the show’s humour has carried over pretty well into the VR game, just as it already did for mobile game Pocket Mortys.

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MindMaze Mask headset wants to digitise your emotions

That sounds frightening, but the technology here is pretty interesting. MindMaze is a startup (already accorded $1bn-valuation ‘unicorn’ status) that’s working on a device to translate your emotions into virtual worlds.

How? It’s a virtual-reality headset that uses electrodes to track your facial muscles, and thus map your real-world expressions onto the face of your digital avatar. You smile, they smile. You grimace, they grimace. You boggle in shock at the thought of electrodes on your face reading your emotions, they... Well, you get the point.

“The device senses a limited range of emotions at the moment including smiling, frowning, winking, smirking and raising your eyebrows,” claimed TechCrunch.

There’s potential here for richer communication between people within VR worlds and multiplayer games, but you can also see storytelling possibilities. For example, imagine an experience based around a bunch of MindMaze mask-equipped actors...

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Lemmings live again... in your living room via HoloLens AR

1991′s Lemmings remains one of the most inventive, characterful games of all-time. All the more impressive given that its furry characters were literally just a few pixels. Few people back then would have predicted that the lemmings would still be wandering in living rooms come 2017.

Yet here they are, thanks to a new version of the game called HoloLems, which has been released for Microsoft’s still-devs-only HoloLens AR headset:

The twist here is that they really are wandering across your living room, projected onto the real world by Microsoft’s device.

“Put on the Hololens headset and be challenged to safely guide a group of holographic lemmings through a number of real world obstacles (your furniture, your sleeping cat!) to a designated exit,” explains the Microsoft store listing.

Voice controls add another layer of 2017 fun to the whole affair. Globacore is the firm behind the game: I’ll be interested to see if they develop it further.

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Gorillaz mix up their realities with new AR/VR app

Maybe 2017 isn’t the worst of all worst years after all: Gorillaz are back with a new album! Look, help me out here, I have to cling to some shred of hope in humanity. Or should that be humanzity* given that the album is called Humanz?

Anyway, the animated band also have something fresh on the app stores: a free app for iOS and Android that promises a mixture of AR, VR and 360 video.

It lets fans explore the characters’ rooms in their fictional house, while promising an album listening party for those who gather in 500 specific locations around the world: a bit like a Pokémon Go stampede, except for new music rather than a rare Charmander.

Deutsche Telekom is on board as a commercial partner, and there’s the promise of more content to come. Which will be important: music apps often get launched and then forgotten about, but in the Spotify era, marketing campaigns for albums are getting longer and longer – and fresh new content for a companion app is a good way to keep fans streaming.

Grab the app here if you Dare.

*No. No it shouldn’t.

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The Guardian launches First Impressions VR experience

British news organisation The Guardian has, like a number of its peers, been experimenting with VR storytelling and journalism. Its 6x9 project provided a virtual experience of solitary confinement, while Arctic 360 provided a tour of the Arctic “without doing damage”.

Now the Graun’s third experience has gone live: First Impressions. Its aim: to help people understand how babies see the world in their first few months after being born.

“Drawing on the latest academic research, viewers can relive the dramatic visual development that happens over this time,” it explained. “At first only muted colours are visible, then as the experience unfolds the world is coloured in - first reds and greens, then yellows and blues. Depth of focus increases, slowly the room becomes 3D and parents, other children, objects and even the family dog come into focus.”

All three experiences can be checked out in the Guardian VR Android app, which works with Daydream VR headsets.

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Nanite Fulcrum is a ‘3D holographic novel’ for Oculus Rift

There is some super-interesting territory to be explored in the crossover between motion comics and virtual reality. One project diving right in is Nanite Fulcrum, which its creator is pitching as a “3D holographic novel” for the Oculus Rift.

A what what say what? “Page through a new kind of impossible comic book you can ONLY experience in VR.  Sling bullets with fistfuls of lightning spiders or discover incredible bonuses hidden between the panels,” explains its listing on the Oculus store. “Part comic, part mini-game, Nanite Fulcrum: issue Øne is the start of a new kind of epic new sci-fi adventure.”

It’s also free, which should encourage a bunch of Rift owners to try it. We love the idea.

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The Smurfs are heading to Microsoft HoloLens

Endless hordes of men and only one woman. No, not a tech-industry AR/VR conference speaker lineup..

The Smurfs are finally getting round to explaining why Smurfette’s fellow villagers are such a sausagefest. And the film that does it, Smurfs: The Lost Village, is also getting an AR spin-off for Microsoft’s HoloLens headset.

“This game transports you to different Smurf locations (layered over the real world via augmented reality) and challenges you to find items to complete a mission while engaging not only the Smurfs, but Gargamel, the little blue guys' bald, hunchbacked nemesis,” explained Mashable.

The game is the work of AOL’s Partner Studio, OMD and Sony Pictures. For now, the HoloLens is available in a developer version only though: at least those developers will be popular with their kids for a few days...

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Björk was one of the first musicians to explore virtual reality, and her Notget VR video is her most beautiful yet. Art served by technology, not the other way around.

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Panasonic’s bendable, twistable battery for wearables.

Yum it up.

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Samsung's Gear smartwatches now work with your iPhone

Better late than never.

As CES 2017 winds down, Samsung is making good on a promise it made at CES 2016: It’s releasing an iOS app for its Gear smartwatches so they’ll work with the iPhone.

Samsung said almost exactly year ago that it would bring iOS compatibility to its latest smartwatch, the Gear S2, and it’s since debuted a newer, thicker model, the Gear S3. Both watches will work with the new app, simply called Gear S.

SEE ALSO: CES 2017: Winners and losers

When it initially announced the move, Samsung said it would happen before the end of 2016. The smartwatch market has cooled since then, however — the market has been in decline for months, with market research firm IDC reporting in October that overall smartwatch sales down by over 50 percent.  Read more…More about Smartwatches, Iphone, Gear S3, Samsung, and Tech http://bit.ly/2joyf6i

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UC Berkeley’s “neural dust” are sensors that can live inside your body

And they don’t even need batteries.

Unique for its use of ultrasound—which can penetrate the human body fully, unlike radio waves—the neural dust is implanted in the muscles and peripheral nerves. It can both power and read measurements.

Created by engineers at UC Berkeley, the devices may also be able to stimulate nerves and muscles—making them potential electroceuticals for treating disorders, like epilepsy; stimulating the immune system; or lowering inflammation. 

On a more “mainstream” level, they can also be used like the Fitbit—monitoring your nerves, muscles and organs in real-time.

The full study’s been published in Neuron Journal, and you can learn more here.

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These tattoos can control your phone

We give you DuoSkin, brought to you by MIT Media Lab and Microsoft Research. Don’t worry, they’re temporary, so you won’t look dated when we’ve advanced to controlling augmented spaces with our minds.

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VR is helping paralysed patients learn to walk again

Gizmodo:

While in a virtual reality environment, and when hooked up to the exoskeletons, the patients could see virtual representations of the own bodies, and even receive tactile feedback.

The results were extraordinary. The researchers observed dramatic improvements in the patients’ sensory capacities below the areas in which their spinal cord injuries occurred, including pain localization and find/crude touch. They also exhibited improved voluntary muscle control below the injury. Prior to this study, no one had shown that BMI-based training, in conjunction with physical activity, could induce this sort of neurological recovery.

This study shows the potential for long-term training to trigger partial neurological recovery among paraplegics. The researchers aren’t entirely sure why the system works, but they suspect the weekly training re-engages the spinal cord nerves that survived injury.

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GoPro’s 360° camera is coming out this month

On August 17th, GoPro’s releasing a six-camera rig called Omni that lets users shoot, edit and upload spherical videos.

And boy is it gonna cost you.

This marks GoPro’s most significant 360° project to date—the Omni is light (so travel friendly) and connects to a “central brain” that gathers footage and presents it in an idiot-proof way.

Will this take 360° filming—and basic VR filmmaking—mainstream? Because we can’t wait to climb Trump Tower from the safety of our own couches.

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We may not need warp drive after all.

Artist’s rendition of a toroidal space colony that could accommodate 10,000 people. Credit: NASA

Here’s a breakdown of different strategies for resolving the space/time divide... without having to rely so much on time. Sometimes bigger is better:

It has been said that if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. This proverb characterizes the strategy of building an interstellar ship so large that you don’t worry so much about the travel time.

Effectively, the ship is a space colony. It contains a large population—current estimates are that a minimum of tens of thousands of colonists are needed for a healthy gene pool—and all that is needed for people to live comfortably, but it follows a trajectory out of the solar system.