THIS WAS THE FUTURE

Kurzweil AI| November 1, 2011

The Advanced Virtuality Lab (AVL) at the Interdisciplinary Center Israel, is developing a system for controlling a virtual or physical body using only the mind, Israeli Innovation News reports.

The VERE (Virtual Embodiment and Robotic Re-embodiment) project is one of the first to use an fMRI brain scanner to control a computer application interactively in real time, — an innovation which could help severely disabled patients communicate better, says AVL head Dr. Doron Friedman.

“You could control an avatar just by thinking about it and activating the correct areas in your brain,” he said.

Another focus of the AVL is telepresence. The BEAMING (Being in Augmented Multi-modal Naturally-networked Gatherings) project aims to produce the feeling of a live interaction using mediated technologies such as surround video conference, virtual and augmented reality, virtual sense of touch (haptics), and spatialized audio and robotics.

ABC News | 5 December, 2008

Humans may soon be able to develop long-term relationships with virtual humans that are capable of reading and adapting to our emotions, say French researchers.

Professor Catherine Pelachaud, director of research from the Paris Institute of Technology presented her research this week at a meeting of the ARC Network in Human Communication Science in Sydney.

Professor Pelachaud and colleagues are developing virtual humans, called Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs), that can act autonomously in a virtual environment.

As well as speaking, the agents communicate with facial expressions, head movements, hand gestures and gaze.

Professor Pelachaud and US researcher Professor Justine Cassell developed the first autonomous agents in 1994. Since then the focus has been on making the agents more expressive and more able to read and adapt to the emotions of users.

Professor Pelachaud says people have high expectations of virtual humans and often lose interest quickly in them because they do not appear to be very ‘human’.

Professor Pelachaud hopes to develop agents that maintain the interest of users over a longer term.

In one project, called Semaine, the researchers are developing four agents with different personalities.

“We’ve been working on creating distinctive agents,” she said.

They are testing how real humans respond when confronted by agents who are variously aggressive, gloomy, energetically positive or pragmatic.

Professor Pelachaud says this is providing basic data for developing agents that could be useful in teaching and medical programs, and for virtual assistants in information kiosks or virtual characters in entertainment.

Empathetic agents

In related research, the researchers are developing an agent that they say can empathise with real humans.

For example, a virtual agent on a screen can be taught to detect, via webcam, the emotion of a person looking at the screen.

The agent can then react appropriately.

Professor Pelachaud says this could be useful in applications where a person is seeking information from the agent.

She says if the agent gets it wrong and detects the person becoming upset, it could show empathy through non-verbal signs, and this could help reduce the frustration the person feels.

“Having an agent that shows empathy can enhance the relationship between a user an agent,” she said.

“The user may still not get the information, but at least they won’t feel so negative from the the interaction.”

Interactive story-telling

Professor Pelachaud and colleagues are also researching the use of agents in interactive television and storytelling as part of the CALLAS project.

One prototype demonstrates emotional interaction between the audience and an agent, who acts as a virtual audience member, which is able to relate to the human audience via webcam and microphone.

“The agent, through its participation of watching the movie and its display of emotion, could enhance the emotional experience of the audience,” she says.

Both human and virtual audience members react to a virtual scenario in which a second agent is involved.

In the scenario the second agent is walking around in a kitchen, in which normally inanimate objects do randomly frightening things.

For example, a knife might suddenly fly through the air towards them or the stove might suddenly catch alight.

The human and virtual audience react with fear as these things occur and the agent in the scene responds to their fear.

The research is funded by the French Government and European Union.

WIRED Danger Room | 12 June, 2009

The military has long been interested in unmanned ground vehicles that can haul soldier equipment or scout perimeters. Equally important, the vehicles must be simple and intuitive to operate.

Over at the Flash Blog, Lee Brimelow has an interesting scoop on how an XBox 360 interface was designed for the R-Gator, an unmanned vehicle prototype John Deere and iRobot first unveiled in 2004. Software firm T8DESIGN built the Adobe Integrated Runtime interface for the R-Gator; Brimelow has some images of how it looks on screen.

In addition to hauling gear or supplies, the R-Gator could also be used as a sentry. Brimelow says the vehicle could be equipped with a system called REDOWL, or Robot Enhanced Detection Outpost with Lasers, a sniper detection system that uses acoustic sensors and cameras to zero in on hostile gunfire.

The military has already opted for XBox and PlayStation-style controllers on robots like the PackBot, a small, portable robot that has already seen service in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’ve tried out the Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle, a next-generation version of PackBot, and it’s similarly easy to master the controls. Thousands of these smaller robots are already in the field.

Designing and controlling larger unmanned vehicles, however, is a somewhat trickier proposition. The military has experimented with the General Dynamics “Mobile Detection and Assessment and Response System,” or MDARS, a system that has been in the works since 1989. The U.S. Army has developed a six-wheeled robotic vehicle, Lockheed Martin’s MULE, as part of its Future Combat Systems program, but the future of FCS is uncertain following recent budget cuts. The R-Gator is more of an off-the-shelf solution: it’s based on the M-Gator, a golf-cart sized military utility vehicle.

ABC News | 2 June, 2009

Microsoft has revealed that it has been secretly developing technology that lets people play video games using natural body movements instead of handheld controllers.

The US software giant behind Xbox 360 video game consoles revealed a prototype of a project codenamed “Natal” – a system that combines cameras and voice and face recognition software to recognise people and their actions.

“The gamer in me went out of my mind when I got to be interactive with this,” famed film director Steven Spielberg said during a Microsoft press conference on the eve of the E3 video game trade show in Los Angeles.

“I got a feeling I was in a historic moment. What Microsoft is doing isn’t re-inventing the wheel; this is about no wheel at all.”

Natal lets people play driving games by simply moving hands as if turning a car steering wheel.

In-game characters in boxing, skateboard, soccer and other sports titles mimic the body movements of real-world players.

The system scans faces and voices to determine who is playing.

Xbox 360 consoles equipped with Natal will be able to respond to spoken commands for actions such as playing movies or connecting online with friends for video chats.

An expected completion date for Natal was not disclosed, but Microsoft on Monday (local time) released a software kit for video game makers interested in designing titles to take advantage of Natal’s capabilities.

“What developers do with Natal will change the way we play video games,” said British video game icon Peter Molyneux, chief of Lionhead Studios.

“This is a landmark in computer entertainment. This is true technology that science-fiction has not even written about and this works today.”

Natal will work on all Xbox 360 consoles, according to Don Mattrick, the head of Microsoft’s Xbox and games business.

In series two of Grant Naylor’s Red Dwarf (aka BEST SHOW EVER), shipmates Lister, Rimmer, Cat and Kryten are absorbed into the VR total immersion video game Better Than Life.

Better Than Life taps into the subconscious and allows users to live out their dreams and desires within a virtual setting. From the Red Dwarf Radio Show pt4:

“Better than life was intended to be the zenith of computer game technology. A metal band was placed across the forehead, and underneath it needle thin electrodes punctured the skull and burrowed into the frontal lobes. Tiny computer chips in the electrodes transmitted signals directly to the brain. No screens. No joysticks. You were really there. Wherever you wanted to be. It was only a month after its released that people realised it was addictive…It was the ultimate hallucinogen with only one real major drawback, it killed you. Once you entered Better Than Life, once you put on the headband and the needles wormed into your mind, it was almost impossible to get out. This was partly because you weren’t even aware that you were in Better Than Life in the first place. The game protected itself. Hid itself from your memory. Your conscious mind was totally subverted while your body withered and died…the only way out of the game was to want to leave it. But no one ever wanted to leave.”

User’s imaginations develop semi-plausible explanations to justify certain events. For example, instead of making a large, expensive car appear out of thin, the user’s imagination would create a scenario where they won the lottery, or created a successful business, so they could buy the car. While it is possible for friends to forcibly remove the headset that contains the game, the result is instant death from shock.

In an episode of Batman Of The Future, a similar VR game is played underground and becomes a new drug for dejected teenagers. Highly addictive and highly expensive, the game leaves user’s feeling inadequate about their “real” lives. Desperate gamers lie, cheat, and steal to support their habits and are exploited by the evil villain ‘Spellbound’.

Plausible?

There are already rehabilitation centers and support groups for addicted gamers as well. Yahoo has two clubs devoted to EverQuest or EverCrack as some call it: Spouses Against EverQuest and EverQuest Widows.The latter, which boasts over 1,000 members, has all the markings of a virtual Al-Anon meeting.

Earlier this year, a 19year old Thai man stabbed a taxi driver to death in an attempt to steal his cab and money to support his habit for ‘Grand Theft Auto’. When questioned he told police “I needed money to play the game every day. My parents give me only 100 baht a day, which is not enough”, he is also quoted as saying “killing seemed easy in the game”. (See here)

The lure of gaming has been predicted to result in a mass exodus from ‘reality’ into ‘virtual reality’. Edward Castronova, Associate Professor in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University author of ‘Exodus To The Virtual World’ suggests that “some people will be colonists – “the virtual frontier opens up and off they go and disappear” – others will just use virtual worlds to get together with distant family and friends. But there will be a group of people that spends all their lives there, and that the big question is the size of this group.”(see here)

Behavioural experts are treating virtual worlds as models for real world study. In 2005, a plague called ‘Corrupted Blood’ was introduced to the World of Warcraft game as a challenge for higher-level players. The virulent and contagious disease was accidentally carried out of its virtual containment area causing mass genocide in the densely populated capitals. Researchers from Princeton University used this as a model to study pandemic and were able to pinpoint factors for spreading including the ‘stupid factor’ where “Someone thinks, ‘I’ll just get close and get a quick look and it won’t affect me,’” Nina Fefferman from the Princeton University.

On technology
So there is potentiality and human desire for virtual living, but is the technology there? Funny you ask! Drexel University students have developed a mind control interface to play video games with.

The device (which looks eerily like the controller in better than life) is a headband equipped with sensors that measure brain activity. By shining near-infrared light into the skull and measuring the intensity of light reflected back, oxygen levels corresponding to brain activity can be recorded. The device, originally developed by Drexel’s biomedical engineers to monitor the brain of patients under anesthesia, serves as a controller for the Drexel-developed video game Lazybrains. Not quite ‘better than life’ this technology is intended for medical applications, especially teaching kids with ADHD tactics for concentration. Sony has already patented the technology to send sensory data directly into the human brain, so movies or games could be equipped with smell, taste, and even touch capacities. Microsoft has also patented the use of the brain as a computer, a brain-computer interface system.

So the prospect of virtual living seems all the more possible. But if we can live online where we can look how we want, get what we want, and feel how we want, why in the heck would we waste our time with the real world?

In Greg Egan’s book Permutation City, people are downloaded or copied into computers at the point of death as a kind of electronic afterlife. Their bodies are abandoned and copies can interact with humans in the corporeal world at real time. Or perhaps we abandon the real world and live exclusively online, we manufacture and commit to a new ‘reality’.

“If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain…The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”

Maybe the Matrix is an ideal solution for escaping a deteriorating world. We can program our Matrix to omit famine, disease, pain. We don’t have to worry about resource scarcity, global warming, or natural disasters. We can live artificially. If human experience is the totality human perceptions, then we eliminate objective reality. Matter is obsolete. We live contently in Plato’s cave.

…

Just some concluding comments on disembodiment from Eugene Thacker. Katherine Hayles also writes extensively on this topic (re: ‘How we became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics’). Can human consciousness be translated into an informational pattern, able to flow freely between organic and electric substrates?

One salient feature of such transformations includes the concept of “uploading,” in which the parallels between neural pattern activity in the human mind and the capacity of advanced neural networking computing will enable humans to transfer their minds into more durable (read: immortal) hardware systems (Moravec 1988, 109-10). All of this is made possible via a view of the body that places special emphasis on informational pattern. Once the brain can be analyzed as a set of informational channels, then it follows that that pattern can be replicated in hardware and software systems. As Ray Kurzweil states:

“Up until now, our mortality was tied to the longevity of our hardware. When the hardware crashed, that was it. For many of our forebears, the hardware gradually deteriorated before it disintegrated…. As we cross the divide to instantiate ourselves into our computational technology, our identity will be based on our evolving mind file. We will be soft- ware, not hardware…. the essence of our identity will switch to the permanence of our software. (Kurzweil 1999, 128-29)”

Hayles shows that the posthuman is founded on a strategic definition of “information.” This modern notion of information-most notably in the extropian concept of uploading-does not exclude the body or the biological/material domain from mind or consciousness, but rather takes the material world as information. This powerful ideology not only informs research in cognitive science but in the life sciences as well. Hayles’s critical point is that informatics is a selective process, and those things that are filtered or transformed in that process-such as a notion of the phenomenological, experiential body, or “embodiment”-simply become by-products of an informatic economy.

From Eugene Thacker ‘Data Made Flesh’

TP