News of the week selected by Impactscool – May 18th

Our hands in virtual reality

Virtual reality becomes more immersive thanks to the prototype of a new control system by Sony. Using a particular set of sensors capable of detecting the position of the fingers in space and combining it with machine learning, the researchers of the Japanese tech giant have allowed the system to accurately detect the position of the fingers of a hand in space and then replicate it in virtual reality.

The development of contact lenses for augmented reality continues

We already told you about it in the past, Mojo Vision, a Silicon Valley startup is creating what could become the future standard of digital technology. These are contact lenses with an integrated microscopic screen, 70,000 pixels in half a millimeter, capable of showing additional information superimposed on reality directly to the wearer’s eyes. Through a new agreement with other investors, the startup raised another 51 million dollars, in addition to the 108 collected previously, for the development of this technology that could revolutionize the digital world. In 1980, the spread of personal computers established the first digital paradigm, and from there every 15 years, there was a profound technological change: the internet in the 90s, smartphones in the mid-2000s and contact lenses for augmented reality could be the next step.

Creating true artificial intelligence will require more than ordinary computers

Artificial intelligence is everywhere, in apps, in the systems that manage our orders on online stores, in the cars we drive, but calling them intelligence can lead to misunderstandings. We are still light years away from any form of intelligence, understood as autonomous, artificial consciousness and decision-making ability. To distinguish it, this is called general artificial intelligence and, according to Christof Koch President and chief researcher of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, we do not yet have the technology necessary to create it. The main problem, says Koch, is that conventional computers can run specialized algorithms, but that creating a conscious AI requires something else: hardware that works completely differently, and perhaps quantum computers could give us this ability.

Electrodes for seeing directly with the brain

Do you know when you squint and see so many bright dots? Those dots are not real but they are an “error” of our visual system, in this case due to the fact that we have squashed our eyes. They are called phosphenes and for more than two centuries it has also been possible to create them through electrical stimulation of the brain. A group of researchers from Baylor College of Medicine have succeeded, by stimulating with electrodes the brains of some patients who had lost their sight as adults (as well as other visually impaired), to “draw” letters with phosphenes, effectively bypassing the eyes and ocular nerve. This technique is still in its infancy and the difficulties necessary to improve and optimize it are still many but the researchers hope in the future to be able to develop real visual prostheses capable of restoring, at least in part, the sight to the blind.