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Here we see the first classroom example of virtual reality(Oculus Rift and Leap Motion) being used for educational purposes. Named "World of Comenius," the demo gives the player or user the view of a fully modeled human body, with bones and organs, and the ability to interact by picking it apart using their hands. Here you won't see children with their necks bent with their faces down in books, but instead looking forward and around using their hands to explore the human anatomy. And they're not bored or having problems keeping attention to the task at hand. They seem rather excited, and smiling, and working together, communicating. All focused at the task at hand, even if they're not given a specific task. Here is a video that shows a better view of what it looks like in action I can imagine a teacher going around the classroom asking them to find a specific bone or organ, and then checking if they found the right one. Would be a great interact

Rendering 2D animation in 3D is the process where a recorded video or animation(motion capture) has frames or parts of it removed to resemble that of a hand drawn 2D animation. The main objective is to preserve perspective in 3D space while simulating a 2D classic animation. A classic 2D animation has far less frames to simulate motion, while video or 3d rendering has much more frames. Standard video ranges from 25 frames per second to 30, even up to 48, or 60fps which is optimal for in game video game engine rendering. 2D animation usually uses only 15-17 frames per second, while not at a constant , but averaged over the illusion of fast motion(less frames) and slower motion(more frames). While the cartoony "pen and paper"-style and look can and has been achieved in games, either by filters, textures or "cell-shading", their animations are often in a higher framerate than actual 2D animation. Some examples does imitate 2D animation, but they are rarely if ever re

If you are a creative person and find yourself in the position that you are not able to create the things that you want, either because how your life is going right now or perhaps your energy is spent most days at an eight hour shift at a job that does not contribute to the things you want to do, you will find a place that will. But sometimes the couch where you often fall asleep to wake up to go right back to work just isn't enough. So today I decided I needed to think. Though I am left alone most of the time and have everything I need to be productive in my work, my home office filled with half worked projects and unfulfilled ideas just doesn't inspire me. There are simply too many distractions in the mess I surround myself with. So I went here. Though I was still in my office, I had transported myself through space and time to the closest survivable distance of a far off star not much unlike our own sun. I was of course wearing the Oculus Rift Devkit 2 in order to make

About two weeks ago, on my way home from a particularly hard day at work, I found out a package had arrived for me. My chest was tingling. I was finally about to experience something that so far, not many people had. Time seemed to slow down in the car on the way home. Thoughts were racing. I could feel an excitement I hadn't felt since childhood. Rewind back to March 23rd. I had just received my paycheck. I thought for a few moments holding my credit card in my hand, telling myself: "Come on. Don't wait. This is it. You know it is." Subsequently, I made the best financial decision of my entire life. I entered my credit card number and I was soon to be one of the few lucky owners of an Oculus Rift Development Kit 2. The following day, the big breaking news online was: "FACEBOOK AQUIRES OCULUS VR". As many I was not entirely sure what it meant and many questions arose. Would I get my Oculus Rift? Is it going to be delayed? Cancelled? What are facebook

Presence. It may just be our eyes that are being transported to new worlds with the Oculus Rift, but it seems to do the trick. The "trick" being immersing ourselves in virtual experiences. And still we seek to transport our entire bodies with motion tracking technology, whether to feel the environments with well-positioned fans, or even haptic feedback to make the worlds tangible. So eager we are to leave the real world, but aren't we forgetting something? Yes, there are magical worlds to visit and awe-inspiring things to see. New perspectives previously only reserved for the few. Like seeing earth from the surface of the moon for the first time, where no lines are drawn on the globe like the ones in our classrooms, maps and on the news, in reality a tiny, "pale blue dot"(Carl Sagan) hanging in the void. Cognitive shifts in awareness that makes people reconstruct their entire way of thinking like real life astronauts have reported to experience, sometimes even l

Love. What people will do to prove their love to others. We give jewelry, we travel to exotic places, we built monuments. All this to prove that our love is real, to give it a tangible presentation, in order to leave no doubt. These acts of love, often has a large cost. Weddings may be the best known, as they often set people back financially for decades, aquiring large sums in debt. But we still do it. When we transfer most of our communication to the virtual three-dimensional world, what happens to love? In the virtual world we are only limited by memory, which is already close to unlimited. When we're all rich enough and capable to create the most incredible of dreams for our significant others, will our definition of love change again? Will the currency (LOVE) lose value or become even stronger? Already we have seen this. Proposals built into video games, love declarations on websites, videos and images. What will be the virtual version of Taj Mahal and who will build it?

The Singularity is explained often by Ray Kurzweil, inventor, writer, futurist(and more), as a prediction of what outcome our exponentially growing advancement in technologies like computers, genetics, nanotechnology, robotics and artificial intelligence will bring. He explains that within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to the Singularity- a technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. If somewhere in all this, a self-aware, conscious, living entity would emerge inside a super intelligent machine, there are already some examples in science fiction, that predicts this would eventually result in war between the human race and a machine intelligence... Or the merging of our two races as we would have spent a lot of time towards the Singularity to make ourselves more and more compatible with them, even down to the biological level. Where our nerves now are capable to directly communica

My imagination is very first person based. Most of my written and animation work is done from a first person perspective. That's a hard perspective to convey. One must often resort to illusions and tricks in order to convince the reader or viewer to feel as if they were in that same position.Or at least be very descriptive at the risk of boring the crowd.  But I always feel unaccomplished when I do. I always have that thought, if only I could truly show that vision, convey that sensation so they would understand my work completely. So that they don't misinterpret or miss the point about the whole thing. So I have to explain it step by step, why this or that happened, when it should be clear from the get go. This is why I think virtual reality is the canvas I've been waiting for. I can put you exactly where I need you to be, and show you the story I want to tell. To truly immerse you in my creation. You might have a subconscious fear of going to an art gallery, seeing

"We are the gods now" The human race is especially good at giving personality to the things around us. One can ask whether that has something to do with our upbringing, as children where we gave our toys names and decided who the good guy and the bad guy was. Though they often are inanimate objects. Are we constantly directing our own hero's journey, or is it something else? If we look at ourselves in adulthood and consider our history and different religions, we discover the signs of same way of thought. Our primitive fear which serves as our brain's survival mechanism which was once more defensive, has evolved into the opposite where our reaction to fear often is offensive. We demand action, and seek an immediate explanation for what we do not understand. And we conjure up our own ideas if answers aren't given. The weather phenomenon lightning and the thunder that follows could have inspired an entire religion, where Thor swings his hammer while

There is no such thing Before I begin, I must insist you realize this fact: There is no such thing as originality. If you've ever tried to be "original", you will recognize what I mean when I say you came to a complete blank. You might once have thought you had something original, only to find that someone were already doing it even better than you had imagined in the first place. Originality is only a word people like to use to describe things that are so different, they cannot recognize its origin. Find the origin So whatever you decide to do, know where the activity originates. If you want to transcend in any particular field, to be genuinely inspired I strongly recommend you go back to the starting point. To the first ideas and creations in your particular field. Whether it is music or the arts. The first string instruments, the first composers, the first to draw pictures on walls, the first innovators of technology. Read some history on the matter. Focus on wha

What if you had the power to see through walls? Like this tank driver in Norway. What if you could control robots with only your mind? What if you had super-human strength? Some might say these aren't superpowers, just recent advancements in technology. I would say you are already using super powers every day, that we didn't even have 25 years ago. You communicate telepathically using your wireless cellphone every single day and you have access to most of human history instantly on a single tiny device that's in your pocket. Have you even considered what things would have been like if the internet or computers had not improved exponentially the last couple of decades? There would be no tweets. No facebook updates. No instagram photos. Closest thing to tweets would be a black marker on a bathroom wall. You would find that even your biggest library, was never sufficient. You would have to find a payphone in an emergency. Pictures of

About a month ago I made this video where I try to show what kind of experiences we can have with virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift and Sony's Project Morpheus. I use some examples from movies and I also show what games are currently in development. The scenes are from movies like "Love"(2011), which I found to be incredible, for something that was supposed to be a short film for a music album release. Also featured are scenes from the movie "Gravity", which has been described as a movie "made of the Oculus Rift" with it's incredible depiction of space walking in orbit around our planet Tellus, aka Earth. Another set of scenes are from the cult film "Blade Runner" and "The Fifth Element", both science fiction worlds fans will mention as places they would love to see. I see now that I could have featured scenes from "Avatar" as well, but I'm sure someone is working on something in that direction an

A lot has happened in the last three weeks. I've ordered a Oculus Rift Devkit 2, for one, after finally convincing myself that it would be a great investment. But like a shooting star coming down from the sky, the following day, a certain company, Facebook, decided to invest a little bit more than me. Like, a 2 Billion Dollars worth investment. Thus acquiring the entire Oculus Rift team, whom previously were dependent on the support and crowd funding from their kickstarter. How do I feel about that? Well, with my superior powers of actually reading articles, rather than rage at the sight of their titles, I must say I feel pretty darned good. I'm not one of the guys who found these news as a bad thing. Mostly because I make myself aware of the facts, before I make judgements. I can't recall the amount of times my pupils lodged themselves in the upper corners of my eyes after reading countless raging comments stating that Facebook is going to make Farmville for the Ocul

In the virtual world, anything is possible. Let's explore that statement. It has been predicted that we will in just a few decades be able to upload our consciousness to computers(Ray Kurzweil, Futurist, Inventor). To give up our physical bodies in exchange for immortality. No more diseases or physical pain. Death will no longer be the end of the line, but instead just a problem to be solved. But what will our digital eternal life be like? Would it be an improvement to the real thing? Will we actually feel alive or be defined as living if in a machine? Yes, it seems for every question, another pops up. So I'm going to write down a list of questions I find most interesting and elaborate on them. Will we prefer the virtual world, if any, or would we try to get back into the real world and live again as robots? As Bill Gates has mentioned before, robots will in fact take most of our jobs eventually, perhaps in our lifetimes. I'm saying we might come back as those

Today the Oculus Rift Devkit 2 was announced by Oculus VR, and I will be ordering one soon. The new devkit is based off the Chrystal Cove prototype revealed at CES 2014 earlier this year. It features a higher resolution(960x1080 per eye on a Low Persistence OLED Display), a higher refreshrate(up to 75hz), and positional tracking which accurately tracks your real world head movements. I find myself wondering how far back in line I will be by waiting a few days to order it. Hopefully there will be enough to feed the masses that inevitably will be ordering. We also saw the reveal of Sony's own virtual reality headset which will also work with the PS4 recently. The Oculus Rift headset does not support consoles, only PC. The virtual reality revolution is coming along just great it seems. Hundreds, if not thousands of developers are creating custom made experiences for this new medium, right now. These developers will define what works, and what doesn't. They will create brand ne

http://the-gadgeteer.com/2014/01/20/amc-movie-theater-calls-fbi-to-arrest-a-google-glass-user/ Along with all new technology comes not only new great things, but also new problems. As a Google Glass user, Tiberiu Ungureanu recently experienced, was arrested for allegedly trying to pirate a film using the popular Google Glasses, which has a video and audio recording function. After about an hour of watching the movie Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit with his wife, they were interrupted. " About an hour into the movie (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit), a guy comes near my seat, shoves a badge that had some sort of a shield on it, yanks the Google Glass off my face and says “follow me outside immediately”. It was quite embarrassing and outside of the theater there were about 5-10 cops and mall cops. Since I didn’t catch his name in the dark of the theater, I asked to see his badge again and I asked what was the problem and I asked for my Glass back. The response was “you see all these cops y