Imagine you have moved to a new city and bought a condo advertised as “metaverse enabled.” Upon closing, along with the physical keys to your condo, you receive a unique cryptographic key to the community. You move into your neighborhood both physically and digitally. With the crypto key, you link your own personal metaverse profile to the condo. This merges your personal metaverse, including a digital catalog of all the objects in your home, to a digital map of the new space integrating all the sensors and devices that control the objects through the metaverse. [Read more…] about Beyond bulky VR headsets: Voice recognition, eye tracking, and natural gestures in the era of the metaverse and the “Medi-verse”
Technology as a bridge in time: Shaping the future of brain health via today’s innovations–including those that “fail”
Remember Google Glass? Google invested millions of dollars and came to market in 2014 with the first generation of wearable augmented reality (AR) technology. You could wear their cool headsets with or without glasses and use them to read and send email all while going about other tasks.
Even before it was available to the public, Glass created a huge amount of buzz. In 2013, everyone wanted to get in on beta testing.
Almost every keynote speaker I saw that year would come out wearing a Google Glass headset—and then invariably admit the battery had run out weeks ago and they were just wearing it to look cool. I have to admit, I did the same.
Maybe that’s because it made me nostalgic for a product we had designed about ten years earlier, in 2005. Our Visually Integrated Sensor Unit, or VISUnit, was an early version of an AR headset. [Read more…] about Technology as a bridge in time: Shaping the future of brain health via today’s innovations–including those that “fail”
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Taking your brain vitals: Stories from a techno-optimist inventing the future of human performance
For as long as I can remember, my father loved acting. Into his sixties and early seventies, he was quite active in the theater. He played Tartuffe in Molière’s Tartuffe, Nick Bottom in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the Old Man in Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile. When he won the role of Scrooge in a local production of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, I was so excited for him that I bought tickets way before opening night. But he was having trouble remembering his lines. Eventually, the director had to let him go.
To find out what was going on, my mom and dad went to his primary care physician, who referred him to a neurologist. After waiting a month for that appointment, the neurologist told Dad to see a neuropsychologist, who was booked another three months out. When that appointment arrived, the neuropsychologist gave him a variety of cognitive tests, including written, verbal, and computer based. After another month, the neurologist called us back in and told my father, “You have mild cognitive impairment.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” I thought. “That’s why we went to see his doctor six months ago.” The neurologist then discussed my father’s other health issues with us, which included cardiovascular disease, sleep apnea, type 2 diabetes, and by that point, depression. I then had an inspiration. “Dad, when was the last time you used your CPAP machine?” He admitted sheepishly, “I don’t use it. I don’t like it.” [Read more…] about Taking your brain vitals: Stories from a techno-optimist inventing the future of human performance
