I love running. What I do hate, though, is having to evade people who are slower than me, smog, dogs barking at me – and especially I hate to run always the same routes. I could change the routes, but then again I have bad orienteering skills, and would get lost immediately.

That’s why I got excited about two companies offering a solution for my problem: Cyberith and Virtuix. These companies offer movement simulators for Virtual Reality (VR). Means: You put your goggles on, get on the device, and start to run through any VR you can imagine.

So far, the focus of both companies is on entertainment purposes only. The idea is to allow players of VR games to enter the worlds, without having to leave their living room. With the devices, they can run, walk, strafe and crouch, just like they would in real world. This is already a big step for VR entertainment, as it solves the issue of “moving” with something you hold in your hands, even though it would feel much more natural to move with your feet – and another important step to achieve immersion, the feeling to be completely absorbed in a new reality instead of just another fancy computer simulation.

But the applications of Cyberith and Virtuix Omni are not limited to VR entertainment. They also offer incredible improvements to the overall running experience, as those devices are much more exciting than treadmills. Ultimately, they allow combining things that seemed to be mutually exclusive before: Athletics and video games. If you go physically running in a virtual environment, but end up working out in reality – isn’t that environment suddenly quite physical for your body? And isn’t that much closer to real sports?

Last year a company named "Race Yourself" tried something similar: They wanted to integrate augmented reality into sports, but apparently did not succeed, because they have not been heard of ever since. Their idea was to provide virtual running mates and virtual race tracks, but just as an augmentation to physical reality (hence “augmented” reality), using Google Glass. But with the struggles the product experiences, this seems to have no future at the moment.

But running in completely virtual environments offers the chance to visit central park one morning, and the Australian outback the next day. And the best thing about it: Even I can’t get lost.

Continue reading

Dr. Michio Kaku a world renowned theoretical physicist has proposed that as robots become smarter and more intelligent than us humans that we should begin to think about merging with them by means of nanotechnology in order for us to maintain our status as the world’s superior and dominant players.

How? You may ask. As nanotechnology (our ability to accurately create, control, and run complex parts at the cellular and atomic level) improves, we may create microscopic chips that could be implanted directly into our brains giving us unimaginable brain power that boosts our intelligence.

With enhanced intelligence this now means we have the potential to slowly turn regular people into geniuses able to instantly calculate large numbers, expand their memory capacity, process larger amounts of information, and make even split second decisions more accurate.

The big questions to ask now is who will be the first to get such powers? What could they do with them? And what will that mean to people who cannot have access to this sort of intelligence?

My personal take on this subject is that no one should worry. Developing this particular technology takes time and the chances of an all-in-one multi-enhancement breakthrough happening is fairly small. Therefore, these brain implants will likely come in increments allowing larger groups of people access to small scale enhancements before they become more powerful.  Or I could be wrong…

Nevertheless, the idea of billions of geniuses living together in the same world is extreme, meaning it will probably either be very good or very bad in my opinion.

Would we lose our own humanity by exponentially and artificially increasing our intelligence? Could this mean that we begin to interact with everything based primarily on calculations and statistics?

At which point does better actually mean worse? 

Continue reading