Lifeboat Foundation

In recent years, engineers have been trying to develop more effective sensors and tools to monitor indoor environments. Serving as the foundation of these tools, indoor positioning systems automatically determine the position of objects with high accuracy and low latency, enabling emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications, such as robots, autonomous driving, VR/AR, etc.

A team of researchers recently created CurveLight, an accurate and efficient light positioning system. Their technology, described in a paper presented at ACM’s SenSys 2021 Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, could be used to enhance the performance of autonomous vehicles, robots and other advanced technologies.

“In CurveLight, the signal transmitter includes an infrared LED, covered by a hemispherical and rotatable shade,” Zhimeng Yin, one of the researchers who developed the system at City University of Hong Kong, told TechXplore. “The receiver detects the light signals with a photosensitive diode. When the shade is rotating, the transmitter generates a unique sequence of light signals for each point in the covered space.”

Almost all animals must make decisions on the move. Here, employing an approach that integrates theory and high-throughput experiments (using state-of-the-art virtual reality), we reveal that there exist fundamental geometrical principles that result from the inherent interplay between movement and organisms’ internal representation of space. Specifically, we find that animals spontaneously reduce the world into a series of sequential binary decisions, a response that facilitates effective decision-making and is robust both to the number of options available and to context, such as whether options are static (e.g., refuges) or mobile (e.g., other animals). We present evidence that these same principles, hitherto overlooked, apply across scales of biological organization, from individual to collective decision-making.

Animal movement data have been deposited in GitHub (https://github.

Spatial has raised $25 million as it pivots away from augmented reality and virtual reality collaboration to nonfungible token (NFT) art exhibitions and metaverse events.

Spatial started out by providing AR/VR meeting places that people could access with AR glasses, VR headsets, and smartphones. But it found with the NFT art boom that it could provide a way for people to easily view digital art in virtual galleries, said Jake Steinerman, head of community at Spatial, in an interview with GamesBeat.

“We changing our direction,” said Steinerman.

As the metaverse trend increasingly gains momentum, the virtual reality (VR) market is expected to show signs of increased growth in 2021 and beyond.

Global research and advisory firm Omdia finds that 12.5 million headsets will be sold in 2021, while spend on VR content will reach $2 billion.

Overall, the research firm estimates the consumer VR market will be worth $16 billion by 2026, up from $6.4 billion in 2021. This signals a 148% increasecompared to 2021, it notes.

But there should be a system in metaverse where users can operate machines using internet.

Following an initial announcement eight months ago, Meta has released its latest avatar system for all Unity VR developers, including support for App Lab titles and limited support for non-Oculus platforms like SteamVR.

Update (December 13th, 2021): Meta today announced that its latest avatar system is finally available to all Unity developers. Formerly called Oculus Avatars 2.0—and now called Meta Avatars—the system brings a huge upgrade to avatar style and expressiveness compared to the company’s prior avatar systems.

Continue reading “Meta’s Latest Avatar System is Finally Available to Unity VR Developers” »

According to Gates, tech such as VR goggles and motion-capture gloves would be needed to accurately capture a user’s body language and expressions.

Facebook on Thursday announced that it is opening up Horizon Worlds, its virtual reality world of avatars, to anyone 18 and older in the U.S. and Canada.

Horizon Worlds launched in beta last year to select Oculus VR users, who answered invitations to join the virtual world. With the announcement on Thursday, users will no longer need to be invited.

The broader launch of Horizon Worlds is an important step for Facebook, which officially changed its name to Meta in October. The company adopted the new moniker, based on the sci-fi term metaverse, to describe its vision for working and playing in a virtual world.

Virtual environments have also shown promise for activists resisting digital authoritarianism. On Minecraft, Reporters Without Borders has sponsored an Uncensored Library where users could see content by dissident writers that had been censored in countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia and Vietnam. It’s possible that the metaverse may bring new promise for freedom and transparency across borders.

But the metaverse’s consequences may be even more radical.

If it becomes as all-encompassing as some predict, the metaverse may foster virtual communities, networks and economies that transcend borders and national identities. Individuals might one day identify primarily with metaverse-based decentralized autonomous organizations with their own quasi-foreign policies. Such a transition could mandate the reconceptualization of geopolitical affairs from the ground up.