Not just a game: Virtual reality is already seeping into the real world. Until recently, virtual reality (VR) technology has almost exclusively been used to explore the fantasy realms of the gaming world. But a few new developments strongly indicate that VR has outgrown games and is on the verge of becoming a practical, real-life tool for experiences, enterprise and education. Let's recap some recent developments in this quickly-expanding field. We've already imagined potential non-gaming uses for VR and pondered how far the technology can go, but in some areas there's no imagining or pondering required: All you have to do is follow the steady stream of virtual reality headlines. Entertainment Not long ago it seemed like a novelty to eventually watch events in VR, but that's already becoming a reality. California-based NextVR is on the leading edge of broadcasting live events in virtual reality.
Live event broadcasting (which NextVR isn't alone on) isn't the only part of the entertainment world that VR is dipping its toes in. E-commerce Enriching experiences. Bottleneck Strategies - Alex Steffen. Why We Need to Pick Up Alvin Toffler’s Torch. In many large ways, it’s almost as if we have collectively stopped planning for the future. Instead, we all just sort of bounce along in the present, caught in the headlights of a tomorrow pushed by a few large corporations and shaped by the inescapable logic of hyper-efficiency — a future heading straight for us.
It’s not just future shock; we now have future blindness. “I don’t know of many people anymore whose day-to-day pursuit is the academic study of the future,” said Amy Webb, a futurist who founded the Future Today Institute. Photo It didn’t have to come to this. In 1972, the federal government even blessed the emerging field of futurism with a new research agency, the congressional Office of Technology Assessment, which reviewed proposed legislation for its long-term effects.
“Congressmen and their staffs are searching for ways to make government more anticipatory,” Edward Cornish, president of the World Future Society, said in 1978. Or, as Mr. Continue reading the main story. Our lives in 2025: What the world will be like in 10 years' time. Our world is being transformed by rapid advances in sciences and technology that are touching every aspect of our lives. So what changes could these developments bring about for life as we know it? We only have to look around us to see just how much can change in a relatively short space of time. Our lives have been shaped by developments which most of us couldn’t have imagined a decade ago. For example, handheld devices such as smartphones and tablets now allow us to have live video conversations with our friends, translate instantaneously between multiple languages, watch full length videos and monitor diverse aspects of our health from blood pressure to oxygen flow and stress levels. 3D printing is now being used to create everything from blood cells to entire houses, while new aircraft such as the A380 can carry over 800 passengers on a single flight.
Human 2.0 Human augmentation will accelerate in the next decade. " THE FUTURE IS AS FIXED AND DETERMIINATE AS THE PAST" - H.G. Wells Makes This Amazing Statement and Believes It Is Scientifically Possible to Forecast Broadly What Will Happen in Centuries to Come When Men Shall Stand Upon the Earth as on a Footstool and. Www.nickbostrom.com/papers/future.pdf. Starting a futures discussion – some docs « The future – a rough guide. I’m giving a talk to some masters students in London tomorrow and was asked to suggest something for them to read in advance. I wasn’t quite sure where they were starting from, or where we might want to take the discussion in a single 90 minute session, so in the end I provided a selection.
These are not samplings from the Dark Mountain, or cornucopian blatherings, more entries into some kind of conversation about how we think about the future, and why. Aside from that The criteria were fairly simple arbitrary: not by me not too long interesting easily available exemplifying different approaches/points of view on my hard drive already It occurs to me they might be of use to a few other people, so here is the list, with web links. 20 Ways the Future has Let Us Down One of those, where’s my flying car? A Primer on Futures Studies, Foresight and the Use of Scenarios Dr Joseph Voros, Swinburne University of Technology LINK (pdf) The Future of Humanity Nick Bostrom H. Harvard Business Review 2007 LINK. Hacking the President’s DNA - Andrew Hessel, Marc Goodman and Steven Kotler. The U.S. government is surreptitiously collecting the DNA of world leaders, and is reportedly protecting that of Barack Obama.
Decoded, these genetic blueprints could provide compromising information. In the not-too-distant future, they may provide something more as well—the basis for the creation of personalized bioweapons that could take down a president and leave no trace. Miles Donovan This is how the future arrived. It began innocuously, in the early 2000s, when businesses started to realize that highly skilled jobs formerly performed in-house, by a single employee, could more efficiently be crowd-sourced to a larger group of people via the Internet.
Initially, we crowd-sourced the design of T‑shirts (Threadless.com) and the writing of encyclopedias (Wikipedia.com), but before long the trend started making inroads into the harder sciences. Soon enough, these sites were flooded with requests that went far beyond cancer. Some party drug—all she got, it seemed, was the flu. New super-Earth discovered in our stellar neighborhood. Due to the masterful efforts of an international team of astronomers, a new super-Earth planet has been discovered within the habitable zone of a star just 42 light years from Earth. Part of a six planetary system, the super-Earth known as HD 40307g has several promising attributes in terms of its ability to support life and because of its relative proximity it may soon be possible to observe the planet optically.
HD 40307 is a quiet K-type dwarf star, a bit smaller and cooler than the Sun, which appears in Earth's southern skies to reside about eight degrees SSE of Canopus, the brightest star in the constellation of Carina. The apparent magnitude of HD 40307 is about 7.1, which means that it is visible in a pair of binoculars. HD 40307 was known from European Southern Observatory measurements of its radial velocity to have three close-orbiting super-Earths, with orbital periods of 4.3, 9.6, and 20.4 days. Source: University of Hertfordshire. The Next 20 Years of Sustainable Business | Green Money Journal. The Next 20 Years of Sustainable Business by Aron Cramer, President and CEO, BSR (Business for Social Responsibility) Twenty years after the Earth Summit in Rio, and in this BSR’s 20th anniversary year, we are both looking back and looking ahead. And as we reflect on the past 20 years, it seems that everything has changed…and nothing has changed.
There are reasons to celebrate great achievements, but even more reasons to redouble efforts to achieve the tangible successes that are necessary to put the world on a genuinely sustainable path. Just recently there has been an unprecedented turnout by business and civil society at Rio+20, while at the same time the American Meteorological Society reports that freak heat waves in the US and fatal floods in Russia were likely caused by climate change. There are indeed many great accomplishments that have been achieved since 1992. And yet, there are many, many areas in which, twenty years after the initial Earth Summit, progress is insufficient.