Daily Archives: March 21, 2017

ByAdriene Hill

March 21, 2017 | 7:01 AM

Between the megamouth shark, the bison diorama, andgangs of excited school kids, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County has added a virtual reality exhibit called theBlu.

For an extra $10, on top of the $12 general admission fee, visitors can strap on a headset and explore the virtual ocean. A blue whale swims overhead. A school of silvery fish darts by. Visitors use virtual flashlights to explore the abyss.

"I definitely think it appeals to younger audiences," said Jennifer Morgan, senior project manager and exhibit developer at the museum. The organization is experimenting with the technology as a way to get more people in the door and interested in the broader collection.

The appeal, said Morgan, isn't just limited to tech-savvy teens. She said many older adults have also checked it out. "It's the first time they've ever done anything like this and they seem to be thrilled," she said.

That exposure is something the virtual reality industry as a whole is chasing.

In spite of VR's promise as the-next-big-thing-in-tech, it still isnt that mainstream.

"We think that out of home venues such as museums are a terrific space for the public to have their first experience in virtual reality," said Neville Spiteri, CEO of Wevr, the company behind theBlu.

Wevr loaned the museum the computers and headsets. Spiteri wouldn't disclose the rest of the financial arrangement.

But, the company's broadergoal is to make fans of the technology. "Perhaps at some point, you'll be inspired to buy your own headset," said Spiteri. And, yes, subscribe to the VR content Wevr produces.

For users already comfortable with virtual reality, other museums are experimenting in a different direction. Institutions like the Smithsonian are creating VR tours that allows users to explore their galleries in 3-D and 360-degrees.

"Having something like VR enables us to go to where people are," said Sara Snyder, the head of the Media and Technology Office at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

She's not worried that VR visits will replace the real thing. Snyder said the same anxiety existed back when museums started posting pictures of artwork online. "In fact, its had the opposite effect," she said. "The more digital images we publish online, the greater our attendance is."

People learn something exists, said Snyder, maybe something they didnt know about before, and want to see the original in real life.

And that feeling of "real life" is something VR isn't yet able to replicate.

"The experience is so clearly partial," said museum futurist Elizabeth Merritt from the American Alliance of Museums. "Its a hint, its a glimpse. Its like seeing a little bit of stocking, which only makes you want to see more."

In many VR tours, we miss the sounds of museums. The echoes of footsteps. The whispers of conversation.

And, said Merritt, the smells: "You go into a natural history museum, and you may not know it, youre smelling little bits of naphtha from the specimens that have been in mothballs." Fine art museums have what she called a "cleaner and brighter smell," with "its own tang."

There may be a day when virtual reality is so immersive, the digital experience rivals the experience of real life that I can't tell the difference between being at my desk or at the Louvre.

But no time soon.

Theres still a lot of tech that has to be created, including good quality smell-o-vision.

Read the original post:

Museums embrace virtual reality - Marketplace.org

GIF

When you strap on all of the gear required for a modern, immersive, virtual reality experience, youre all but completely blind to the real world. But interacting with real world objects can often enhance a virtual experience, so Disneys researchers came up with a way to let users catch a real ball without leaving a VR world.

Simply catching and throwing a tennis ball doesnt exactly sound like a thrilling use of virtual reality, not when you can strap into a roller coaster or battle aliens on a far-away world. But imagine the feeling of grabbing an aliens tentacle when you engage in hand-to-hand combat. Thats the ultimate goal of research like this, adding a tactile feeling to whats being experienced in a virtual reality simulation.

So how can you make someone who is blind to the real world catch a ball they cannot see? What Matthew Pan and Gnter Niemeyer of Disney Research Los Angeles came up with was a predictive system that tracked the motion of a thrown ball in real-time. Using that data, their software is able to show a VR user a virtual recreation of the real ball, its trajectory as it soars through the air, and a target they should reach out to in order to make the catch.

The success of a VR user catching a real-life ball is dependent on the systems tracking accuracy, and the softwares ability to translate this data into the virtual world. But the results confirm that virtual reality doesnt have to be someone just standing in a big empty room flailing their arms around. Robots, and other moving objects, could be used as real-world proxies for whats happening in a virtual experience, giving users something to actually reach out and touch or, potentially, something to more realistically battle.

You could also imagine an evening spent at a virtual reality batting cage where youre swinging at real pitches, with the satisfying feeling of the bat connecting with the ball. But according to your other senses, youre actually at the World Series, swinging for the fences in hopes of making the crowd go wild.

[Disney Research]

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Watch This Guy Catch a Virtual Reality Ball That Turns Out to Be Real - Gizmodo

FOR REAL Police officers search for an armed suspect in Rochester, New York, 2012.

By Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum Photos.

Americans rely on the gun, the power to kill or injure, to preserve the social order in the most fraught and dire moments. Police know their weapon is by their side if the situation they encounter spins too far out of control and they find themselves threatened. Of course, the overwhelming majority of police interactions never go near this danger zone. A huge number of calls that come into 911 are complaints not of violent threats but of simple disorder: unruly people on the street, noise complaints of apartment parties where the music is too loud, interpersonal conflict that teeters on the edge of violence. While law enforcement likes to urge vigilanceIf you see something, say somethingsometimes, particularly in rapidly gentrifying areas, this ends up being a constant headache. So Im working last week and get dispatched to a call of Suspicious Activity, reads a post on Reddits police message board, ProtectAndServe.

Yall wanna know what the suspicious activity was? Someone walking around in the dark with a flashlight and crowbar? Nope. Someone walking into a bank with a full face mask on? Nope. It was two black males who were jump-starting a car at 9:30 in the morning. That was it. Nothing else. Someone called it in.

In the course of the last few years, Ive had dozens and dozens of conversations with cops, and what always strikes me is that, for all the training and procedures that accompany being a member of a police force, each police officer has a shocking amount of latitude in any given situation. When I read the above passage, I felt relief that the cop who answered the call to find two guys jump-starting their car had the good sense not to harass them. But who knows what another cop wouldve done?

That autonomy at the street level is both an essential part of policing and the source of what so many people in Ferguson and Baltimore and Cleveland and countless other places find so maddening and humiliating (and dangerous). From the cops perspective, anything can happen in any interactionthey need the latitude to manage and control whatever they encounter. But for, say, two young black men trying to jump a car that wont startno doubt frustrated and late for workthe arrival of a police officer is the arrival of a government agent who may be in a beneficent mood or a vengeful one. In the moment of his appearance, they go from sovereign to second-class citizens.

To better understand how cops learn how to wield this authority, I arranged a trip to Morris County, New Jersey, and the Public Safety Training Academy, to spend the morning in a state-of-the-art virtual-reality simulator, which the office uses to train new recruits and current officers. I wanted to experience firsthand how police are taught to navigate the irreducible uncertainty of being out on the street.

I stood in the center of a dark, circular room almost entirely surrounded by screens. I was outfitted with a receptor on my chest that could receive gunshots fired by actors playing roles on the screens in front of me. If I was hit, I would feel a shock. I had a 9mm handgun that had been converted to fire an infrared signal at the simulator screens but retained its original action and noise.

At the controls behind me stood Paul Carifi Jr., a bald and jacked 49-year-old white man with the compact intensity of a human bulldog. Carifi has been overseeing training for years. I could not conjure in my mind anyone who was more of a cops cop. Later I would learn that hes also a Republican member of the Parsippany Township Council.

On the computer system he can pull up any one of 85 different scenarios and then manipulate it in real time as I interact with the virtual scene all around me. There are actors on a video screen who speak to me and appear to respond to my commands. (Though, really, its Carifi who is doing the responding, making dynamic selections from a menu available on the computer.) Each scenario begins with a call from dispatch giving me some cursory information about what Im being summoned to. Then, a few moments later, Im confronting the scene alone.

So you want to maintain control, some semblance of order, Carifi told me before I started. You want [your suspects] to stay in one spot. You want their hands out where you can see their hands. You dont want people moving around, sticking their hands in their pockets, in their jackets, because now you dont know what theyre grabbing for . . . You want to be able to maintain a calmness, so when youre talking to people youre not getting them upset, getting them riled up. And if they are, you want to calm them down.

Lt. Sekou Millington of the Oakland, California, police department confronts a scenarioand aims his taser, 2015.

By Jim Wilson/The New York Times/Redux.

The first scene I happen upon is a white man, probably in his late 50s, standing in the back of a pickup truck, throwing junk from his flatbed into an empty lot. Hes not hurting anyone. Theres no one else around, but what hes doing is a clear violation of the law, and I have to get him to stop. I dont know what law hes violating, and I have a sneaking suspicion that a rookie cop might not, either. I summon my best commanding voice and ask the man on-screen before me what hes doing.

He says, Great. I knew someone was gonna call you guys.

Yeah, uh, what are you up to here?

Why you gotta give me a hard time?

Well, this is not a dumping ground. I dont actually know if thats true. But would a real cop in my position whod just showed up know the ins and outs of dumping laws?

This is my friends lotI can dump here.

Again: Maybe true! Who knows? I press on. Uh, no, Im going to have to ask you to pack up your stuff and go.

My friend owns this property.

You got any proof?

Shut up, you dumb-ass.

I freeze for a moment. Obviously, I cant let this dude call me a dumb-ass and tell me to shut up. But what exactly is my recourse? I mean, I suppose I could try to slap some cuffs on him for disorderly conduct or resisting arrest. Instead I say, Uh.

Relax, man, its only a little fucking concrete. It aint gonna kill ya. He holds a cinder block in his hands.

O.K., can you drop that, please, for me? I attempt to affect a voice of authority, even though Im asking a question. Which I probably shouldnt do. And then, just to make sure he understands which precise implement Im asking him to drop, I add, That concrete block.

You want me to put the block down?

Yeah. Yes, sir.

Put the block down. Yeah, Ill put the block down. At which point he raises the cinder block above his head as if to throw it at me. I respond by drawing my weapon and aiming at him, and the simulation ends.

Carifi asks me if I was right to draw my weapon, and the obvious, embarrassing answer is: No, of course not. The man is far enough away that he cant really hit me with a cinder block. This delights Carifi. Were only one scene in, and already the self-righteous liberal pundit has drawn his weapon on an unarmed man holding a cinder block.

I probably didnt need to go to my gun, I say, somewhat sheepishly.

You dont. You see that especially with some of our newer trainees. They want to go to the gun right away. For Carifi, and the good folks of New Jersey law enforcement and beyond, this is already mission accomplished. Police officers dislike being second-guessed by politicians, activists, and journalists who have never had to do a police officers job, and in this context, the exercise is designed to beat some humility into loudmouthed pundits like me. See: not so easy, right?

We continued through a cycle of scenarios: a pimp yelling at and verbally threatening a sex worker who seemed strung out. The pimp tells me to scram, and when I hold my ground he takes off. I stay behind to help the sex worker, who briefly threatens to stab me with a hypodermic needle, but I dont take the bait this time. My weapon stays holstered and she ultimately puts the syringe down. Later, I confront a group of kids who look stoned out of their gourds blasting metal in a car in the parking lot of a mall; a couple whose neighbors have called in a noise complaint over music pounding from a garage; and a chaotic scene at a suburban home in a subdivision, in which a mans ex-girlfriend has parked her S.U.V. in front of his driveway. Shes yelling at him and refusing to let him and his new girlfriend leave.

I do my best through all of them but keep going back to ask how much training I would want to have to feel prepared to intervene confidently and appropriately in some of the situations I encounter in the simulator. I imagine cops have to mediate between exes having loud confrontations all the time, and I also imagine that someone with, say, years of conflict-resolution and psychological training would have a pretty clear road map for how to best resolve a situation like that without having to make an arrest, use pepper spray, or, God forbid, unholster a weapon.

Theres an old saying, retired N.Y.P.D. cop turned author Steve Osborne once told me, that in police work a cops mouth is his greatest weapon. To go into a chaotic situation where everybody is yelling and screamingsometimes theres alcohol, theres drugs involvedto be able to talk everybody down: when you see a real experienced cop do that, its a magical thing.

True as that may be, the fact is that most cops are going to encounter these scenarios with little more training than I hadand I talk for a living. The typical cadet training involves 60 hours spent on how to use a gun, 51 hours on defensive tactics, and just eight hours on how to calm difficult situations without force.

It made me think of the stories Id heard from soldiers about the high-water mark of counterinsurgency in Iraq, when General David Petraeus, to much acclaim, took over the mission and attempted to orient Americas occupying soldiers toward cultivating local political alliances and building the new states governing capacity. Readers of U.S. news outlets were treated to an endless stream of photos of camo-clad soldiers sitting on rugs with Iraqi men drinking tea and listening to them air their grievances. Some of the soldiers Ive spoken to enjoyed this work, believed in it deeply, and felt that they excelled at it. Others felt the whole thing was ridiculous. But the brute fact remains: soldiers arent judges or mayors or bureaucrats who have the experience, language skills, or basic relationships of kin and country to be able to navigate the extremely fraught local politics of a place theyve never set foot in until their deployment.

Sure, there were many incredibly talented, humane, creative American troops who managed to improvise, listen, and learn, and play some kind of constructive role in the area to which they were assigned. But there was a fundamental mismatch between what the military as an institution is created and trained to do and what this military in this moment was being asked to do. The military exists to use violence and destroy enemies. That is its essence. There are many things it can do that arent that (build dams, deliver relief, develop technology), but to ask 20-year-olds in the midst of a war zone to play cultural ambassador underneath 50 pounds of gear in 110-degree heat while not speaking the language is, well, a stretch.

And as I navigated scenario after scenario in the training room, I understood that many cops must feel themselves to be in a similar situation. We ask police to be social workers, addiction counselors, mental-health workers, and community mediators. We wouldnt hand a social worker a gun and have him or her go out into the streets to apprehend criminals. But we do the opposite every day.

Author Chris Hayes enveloped by the simulator at the Public Safety Training Academy, in Morris County, New Jersey.

Courtesy of Chris Hayes/MSNBC.

So what happens when police officers are called upon to handle a volatile person in the midst of terrible psychological torment? It occurs all the time in America, and there are many police officers who, whether through good luck or accrued wisdom or basic empathy, handle it with grace. But there are many who dont. Or who handle it in ways that are even worse. In March 2015, when a maintenance worker in an apartment complex in the Atlanta suburbs saw 27-year-old air-force veteran Anthony Hill naked, alternately banging on neighbors doors and crawling on the ground, he responded the way many, maybe most, of us would have: he called the cops. What else do you do? This was precisely the type of disorder we look to the cops to resolve.

The police arrived, and within 10 minutes Hill had been shot dead. He was unarmed and, his family says, suffering from P.T.S.D. after a deployment to Afghanistan. He also had bipolar disorder. The officer who shot him claimed Hill had charged him, and he was convinced Hill was on some drug that wouldve rendered a Taser useless. That officer was charged with murder. He pleaded not guilty.

But take a second and ask yourself why this was something for the police to handle to begin with. If a mental-health unit with paramedics, nurses, or even doctors had been sent to help Anthony, instead of an officer with a gun, he would still be alive today, a local activist named Asia Parks told the news site Think Progress. Mental illness should not be the reason a person is condemned to death or prison. According to statistics compiled by The Washington Post, in 2015 a full quarter of those shot and killed by police were people suffering from mental illness.

None of my virtual scenarios on the screens in New Jersey involved people who seemed to be suffering from mental illness, although I was hardly in a position to make that determination. How would I know unless I had been trained to spot it? There was one simulation that stuck out the most, probably because it ended with me getting shot.

I had showed up in response to a complaint that a man was revving the engine of his motorcycle in his backyard. I stood in the driveway, looking into the garage, where the man and his wife alternated between arguing with each other and cursing at me. (When I had arrived to ask about the noise, the man responded, Are you kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me! Again?!) I tried to control the situation, but after maybe 30 seconds of this kind of back-and-forth, the man and the woman started arguing more strenuously. Then the man grabbed a shotgun off a rack in the garage and shot me. I was hit before I had even reached for my gun. I managed to get to my sidearm and fire wildly, but it was pretty clear by that point that I was (virtually) dead.

Carifi approached me and asked me how many people were in the scenario. I said two, the man and woman arguing. But I had managed to entirely miss a third man, whod entered the scene and been the one to pick up the shotgun. Worse: Carifi noted that the screen had marked where I had returned fire, a constellation of misses that hadnt come close to the man actually trying to kill me. Your shots were all over the place. The scenario ended at this point because he got off multiple shots with his shotgun. Most likely, youre . . .

Toast, I said.

In trouble, Carifi replied diplomatically.

Now, on this particular scenario, he went on, this might happen 100,000 times: the people will listen to you, and it will end calmly. But its that one out of every 100,000, 200,000 calls that this happens.

And theres the nub of it. Lets imagine watching two men argue loudly in the middle of a street. Its tense and uncomfortable. You might call the cops in hopes of making sure it doesnt escalate. This isnt an everyday occurrence (though I imagine it depends on where you live), but its routine enough that it presents no great crisis. Ive witnessed such a scene in numerous countries, particularly in Italy, where loud, demonstrative arguments on the street happen as a matter of course. In that context, no one much bats an eye, or, unless punches start being thrown, calls the cops. People argue loudly sometimes! That is not the case in the U.S., where loud public argumentsindeed, any displays of disorderlinessoften carry more than a wisp of genuine danger, because you never know if the hothead who cut you off in traffic, or the drunk in the booth next to you at the bar, might be packing. In his years as a New York City cop and a supervisor, Steve Osborne told me, I was involved in literally thousands of arrests. And everything goes smooth, everything goes smooth, it goes smooth. For me, it was when I least expected it. I had little to no warning. You go to ring the guys doorbell. There was some Wall Street guyI went to go lock him up. He answered the door with a gun and a vest on. Stopped two guys in the street just to question them. The guy pulls out a gun for me, and the next thing I know Im in a fight for my life. So you always have to be prepared.

Policing in an environment awash in guns is fundamentally different from policing in one that isnt. In each interaction in the simulator, I wondered when the gun would appear, when Id find myself reaching for my holster. Obviously, that fear of the ever-present gun is exaggerated by the training environment and the desire to expose me to as much action as possible, but in a conversation with former cops afterward, they all said the threat of the gun weighs heavily.

This threat, the threat of the sudden bullet, extends to every single aspect of policing. Danish and Japanese police, Im sure, are summoned to noise complaints all the time, but they arrive at the site of the complaint without harboring the nagging fear that the interaction will end in gunfire. There simply arent very many guns in Japan or Denmark. And as rare as it is in the U.S. for someone during a noise complaint to randomly grab a shotgun and start firing, as happened in my simulation, its a possibility one must train for.

The Second Amendment, its most strenuous defenders like to tell us, is the ultimate check against tyranny. (This despite the fact that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world.) The argument is that an armed populace keeps oppression at bay, but its practical effect has been the opposite. If the people are always armed enough to threaten the states control, then the states monopoly on violence is forever in question and the state therefore acts more often than not as if it were putting down an insurrection as opposed to enforcing the law. American society has witnessed a kind of arms race between its citizens and law enforcement resulting in a police force that in many places patrols and occupies rather than polices, that quite straightforwardly views itself as waging warsubduing an armed populace with ever-greater arms.

Eric Garner died a 10-minute walk from the ferry terminal. In the park across the street, men gamble at a game called quarters. Outside of the Bay Beauty Supply, there is a small Plexiglas memorial with flowers in it. The man selling incense and oils outside of the store says he made the memorial. He says he had been on that street hustling, like Garner, for more than 30 years. He says he knew Eric and saw him in the neighborhood the day before he died.

On the way over, the cab driver says the cops are much better after the riot. He says there are bad apples everywhere, but that the neighborhood is like any other. Its quiet, with the occasional bass thump from passing cars. People say hello; women push babies in strollers; a father drives back from McDonalds with his two children. A bartender says: Make us look good. Were not monsters. Were not evil. Families live in those homes.

Baltimore is so beautiful. The houses are gorgeous, the streets are wide, and there are ample green spaces. One problem is that the neighborhoods havent been kept up, the streets arent cared for, and the green spaces are scarcely usable. Its sad because it seems like the entire neighborhood could turn around in an instant if there were even a little bit of money spent in the community of the forgotten. There were people outside talking, but it was a pretty quiet scene.

Tamir Rice was killed less than two seconds after police officers approached him on a cold day in a beautiful park behind an elementary school. On this day, it is a place that is full of children playing, but there are no adults in sight. It seems like a pretty safe space.

The Triple S Mart is a popular store with cars in and out of the parking lot. It had just rained and they have the memorial covered with a tarp. Some people driving through town stop and say they had never noticed the memorial before. Two people approach from across the street and ask to introduce the artist of the mural. They say they are interested in museum and gallery exhibitions and grant funding for their projects. The truth is, these places are not always as dangerous as they seem.

Walter Scott was killed in an empty field in an unremarkable suburb north of Charleston. It is nerve-racking to walk into that field, because it is difficult to tell if it is private or public property. It feels terrible to walk in the same line of fire as Scott did in order to make the photographs. The photo shoot was not a long one.

Akai Gurley died in a dark stairwell inside a project building on Linden Boulevard. Directly across the street, cops stand on the corner under high-intensity lights. While Graves took the first photograph, four consecutive gunshots rang out, loud but out of view. Seconds later, five teenagers ran past. The cops stationed on the corner crossed the wide lanes of traffic in an instant to the project side of the block. At the end of the photo shoot, there were at least 50 cops on the block, and half of Linden Boulevard was closed.

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Eric Garner died a 10-minute walk from the ferry terminal. In the park across the street, men gamble at a game called quarters. Outside of the Bay Beauty Supply, there is a small Plexiglas memorial with flowers in it. The man selling incense and oils outside of the store says he made the memorial. He says he had been on that street hustling, like Garner, for more than 30 years. He says he knew Eric and saw him in the neighborhood the day before he died.

Photograph by Kris Graves.

On the way over, the cab driver says the cops are much better after the riot. He says there are bad apples everywhere, but that the neighborhood is like any other. Its quiet, with the occasional bass thump from passing cars. People say hello; women push babies in strollers; a father drives back from McDonalds with his two children. A bartender says: Make us look good. Were not monsters. Were not evil. Families live in those homes.

Photograph by Kris Graves.

Baltimore is so beautiful. The houses are gorgeous, the streets are wide, and there are ample green spaces. One problem is that the neighborhoods havent been kept up, the streets arent cared for, and the green spaces are scarcely usable. Its sad because it seems like the entire neighborhood could turn around in an instant if there were even a little bit of money spent in the community of the forgotten. There were people outside talking, but it was a pretty quiet scene.

Photograph by Kris Graves.

Tamir Rice was killed less than two seconds after police officers approached him on a cold day in a beautiful park behind an elementary school. On this day, it is a place that is full of children playing, but there are no adults in sight. It seems like a pretty safe space.

Photograph by Kris Graves.

Philando Castile was killed in front of his family, very close to the northern entrance of the Minnesota State Fair, before it opened for the season. On the day of this photo shoot, there must have been more than 100,000 people in attendance. The road where he died is large and empty, and you can see far in each directiona normal turnpike by any measure.

Photograph by Kris Graves.

The Triple S Mart is a popular store with cars in and out of the parking lot. It had just rained and they have the memorial covered with a tarp. Some people driving through town stop and say they had never noticed the memorial before. Two people approach from across the street and ask to introduce the artist of the mural. They say they are interested in museum and gallery exhibitions and grant funding for their projects. The truth is, these places are not always as dangerous as they seem.

Photograph by Kris Graves.

Walter Scott was killed in an empty field in an unremarkable suburb north of Charleston. It is nerve-racking to walk into that field, because it is difficult to tell if it is private or public property. It feels terrible to walk in the same line of fire as Scott did in order to make the photographs. The photo shoot was not a long one.

Photograph by Kris Graves.

Akai Gurley died in a dark stairwell inside a project building on Linden Boulevard. Directly across the street, cops stand on the corner under high-intensity lights. While Graves took the first photograph, four consecutive gunshots rang out, loud but out of view. Seconds later, five teenagers ran past. The cops stationed on the corner crossed the wide lanes of traffic in an instant to the project side of the block. At the end of the photo shoot, there were at least 50 cops on the block, and half of Linden Boulevard was closed.

Photograph by Kris Graves.

Original post:

Could Virtual-Reality Training Be the Key to Fewer Police Shootings? - Vanity Fair

Washington D.C. welcomes the opening of the East Coasts first virtual reality escape room, Oblivion. The thrilling 60 minute brain teaser marries the adventurous concept of of escape gaming and the technological marvels of virtual reality.

May it be of historic or political significance, throughout its history Washington D.C. has been home to quite a few firsts. However, not many would have guessed that the nations capital is going to be in the headlines when it comes to escape rooms.

In terms of history escape gaming is still a relatively newborn concept, since the first rooms have only opened little more than a decade ago. The idea behind escape rooms is cleverly simplistic: create a room full of puzzles and brain teasers, lock in a group of people (usually friends, families or co-workers), and give them 60 minutes to solve said puzzles in order to escape, or win. Teamplay, a ticking a clock, some excitement, and you have all the main elements of a proper entertainment.

Into Oblivion

Escape rooms usually have a theme, may it be a Sherlock Holmes murder mystery or a doomsday bunker, the setting is half the fun. This is where the idea of virtual reality comes into play, as Alex, the owner of Insomnia Escape Room DC puts it, I had this idea for a while, putting together escape gaming and VR. He adds, I have quite a lot of experience in IT, and our escape rooms has been here for two years now, and I though, somehow marrying the two could be fun.

Insomnia Escape Room has established itself as one of D.C.s prominent escape rooms, they entertain hundreds of people every month. With Oblivion the creators went an extra mile to create a unique atmosphere, something that is futuristic enough for VR, so haunted houses were out of the question in this case. They needed something techy.

Enter Oblivion and its immersive story, which centers around a scientist by the name of Michael Hall, who is credited with inventing the worlds first artificial intelligence, ELIZA. In Oblivions lore artificial intelligence proved so successful that people began to use it in critical processes and everyday operations. However, suddenly ELIZA stopped responding to its masters. A built-in automatic security protocol, preventing anyone except the creator to control the A.I. was put in place. The problem is that Michael disappeared and can not be found. Society fell into a complete panic, and this where the brave escape room players enter, as they are the ones sent to figure out what exactly went wrong with ELIZA.

The future of escape rooms?

Many feel that the real the ideas of escape gaming came at the right time. The tactile nature of pulling levers, fiddling with switches and searching for clues came as a welcome alternative to the somewhat disconnected nature of online gaming. Families finally had something fun to do together, not to mention the immense opportunities of corporate team building activities. After all, employees working together in a fun non stressful environment is the dream of all HR department heads!

Enter virtual reality, and we might have a match made in heaven. In the past three years VR headsets have outgrown their shiny tech gadget status and started making real headway in the entertainment industry. With more advanced headsets coming out every year, we could be talking about a $162 billion industry by 2020. With such trends already in motion, we would not be surprised to see Oblivion as the first of many VR escape rooms to come.

The preceding post was written and sponsored byInsomnia Escape Room DC.

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Escape Room Gaming Meets Virtual Reality - ARL now

It feels like the entire universe is within a sphere that is maybe within a couple metres radius, says topologist Henry Segerman at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. He is describing,not an LSD trip, but his experience of exploring a curved universe in which the ordinary rules of geometry do not apply.

Segerman and his collaborators have released software allowing anyone with a virtual-reality (VR) headset to wander through this warped world, which they previewed last month in two papers on the arXiv.org preprint server1, 2.

To explore the mathematical possibilities of alternative geometries, mathematicians imagine such non-Euclidean spaces, where parallel lines can intersect or veer apart. Now, with the help of relatively affordable VR devices, researchers are making curved spaces a counter-intuitive concept with implications for Einsteins theory underlying gravity and also for seismology more accessible. They may even uncover new mathematics in the process.

You can think about it, but you dont get a very visceral sense of this until you actually experience it, says Elisabetta Matsumoto, a physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

Traditional, Euclidean geometry rests on the assumption that parallel lines stay at the same distance from each other forever, neither touching nor drifting apart. In non-Euclidean geometries, this parallels postulate is dropped. Two main possibilities then arise: one is spherical geometry, in which parallel lines can eventually touch, in the way that Earths meridians cross at the poles; the other is hyperbolic geometry, in which they diverge.

Both Matsumoto and Segerman are part of Hyperbolic VR, a collaboration that is bringing hyperbolic spaces to the masses. Their team, which includes a collective of mathematician-artists in San Francisco, California, called eleVR, will unveil their efforts at an arts and maths conference this summer.

In the 1980s, mathematician Bill Thurston revolutionized the study of 3D geometries, in part by imagining himself wandering around them. Mathematicians have since developed animations and even flight simulators that show an inside view of non-Euclidean spaces.

But compared with those visualizations, which were displayed on a computer screen, VR has the advantage that it reproduces the way in which light rays hit each eye. In Euclidean space, staring at a point at infinity means that the lines of sight of the two eyes track parallel lines. But in a hyperbolic world, those two paths would veer apart, says Segerman, forcing a different response from the viewer. Here, if you look at a point at infinity, you have to cross your eyes slightly. To our Euclidean brain, that makes everything feel kind of close, he says.

But the smallness is deceptive. One of the oddest facts about hyperbolic space is its sheer vastness. Whereas in Euclidean space the surface area within a given radius grows as fast as the square of the radius, and the volume grows as fast as its cube, in hyperbolic space areas and volumes grow much (exponentially) faster relative to the radius. One consequence is that a user roaming a planet in the hyperbolic world finds much more to visit within walking distance.

So far, there is not much to do in the eleVR world, apart from exploring tilings made of geometric shapes such as pentagons and dodecahedra. But the team plans to build hyperbolic houses and streets, as well as interactive experiences such as playing a non-Euclidean version of basketball. The researchers hope that their open-source software will become popular with science museums and the growing legion of consumer VR enthusiasts.

David Dumas

Hai Tran plays ping-pong in a virtual hyperbolic space, while colleagues David Dumas (left) and Brandon Reichman (centre) look on.

Others are bringing hyperbolic space to VR, too. Daan Michiels, a mathematician at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, developed a virtual hyperbolic universe as a student project in 2014. And David Dumas, a topologist at the University of Illinois in Chicago, and his students created a racquetball game in a virtual hyperbolic space, in which a ball sent in any direction eventually comes back to the starting point.

Virtual reality could soon join a long tradition of visualization and experimental tools that have helped mathematicians make discoveries. Visualizing fractals, for instance, led to discoveries about the underlying mathematics. Figuring how to make use of [virtual reality] as a research tool is just starting now, says Dumas.

Matsumoto says that the team would also like to create VR experiences for even more exotic geometries. In some such spaces, parallel lines might stay at a constant distance from each other if they go in one direction, but converge or diverge in another direction. And walking around a circle might lead to a place thats up or down relative to the starting point, like going up or down a spiral staircase.

Visualizing such geometries could be especially useful as a mathematical tool, she says, because very few people have thought of visualizing them at all.

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Mathematicians create warped worlds in virtual reality - Nature.com

Visitors to the Whitney Biennial must be at least eighteen years old to put on a headset and watch Real Violence, an extremely bloody virtual-reality project by Jordan Wolfson.CreditPHOTOGRAPH BY BILL ORCUTT

Jordan Wolfsons virtual-reality installation at the new Whitney Biennial, Real Violence, is the rare art work that comes with a trigger warning as well as an age restriction. No one under seventeen is allowed; minors will have to get their dose of carnage by sneaking into Logan instead. Real Violence requires a spoiler alert, too. If you like your shock undampened, turn back now. I prefer to know what Im in for when depictions of extreme brutality are concerned, so I read enough about the video to feel premptively queasy as I lined up for a headset on Friday afternoon. Early reviews called the work disturbing, horrifying, repellent, nausea- and P.T.S.D.-inducing, but also a gratuitous trick, tin-eared and cheap. Word of it moved like a rumor through the rooms of the Whitney. Were going to look at Jordans thing, a guy in his thirties said to his friend, who stuck out his tongue and slid his finger across his throat.

Heres what goes down. Viewers are directed to a counter, handed noise-cancelling headphones and virtual-reality goggles, and instructed to grip the railing below them. The video begins with a view of clear sky glimpsed between buildings on a wide Manhattan street, as if youre lying supine on the ground. You can almost smell spring. Then a cut, and there, kneeling on a stretch of sidewalk, is a young man in jeans and a red hoodie, an obscure, plaintive expression on his face as he holds your gaze. A man in a gray T-shirt stands over him: the artist. He takes a baseball bat and whacks his victim in the skull, then drops the bat, drags the man by his legs to the center of the sidewalk, and proceeds to bash his face in with a series of stomps and kicks. Blood gushes. The victim grunts and is silent. In the street, indifferent traffic is lined up bumper to bumper. Pedestrians mill around in the far background. The bat has rolled into the gutter; the batterer retrieves it and carries on. The camera cuts to a dizzying view from above; it feels like hovering upside down in a dream. Throughout, a mans voice sings the two Hebrew blessings that Jews recite over the candles during Hanukkah. Abruptly, the sound cuts, then the image.

The whole thing lasts two minutes and twenty-five seconds, if you make it that long. Oh! Oh! a man in a beanie and duster coat shouted, flinching. He walked away shaking his head. At the opposite end of the table, a woman who had declined a headset stood next to her boyfriend, anxiously watching him watch the video on behalf of them both. A couple of boys who had just squeaked over the age limit took off their headphones, looked at one another, and broke into laughter. An older man, bald and flushed, pulled off his headset, blinking the vulnerable blink of the nearsighted. His glasses had gotten stuck inside. A museum employee darted around, wiping the gear with disinfectant.

A blond girl, twentyish, turned from the table to find her friend, who was standing at a distance, as if waiting for a passenger disembarking from a ship after a dangerous voyage. Elizabeth! the blond girl said. You wouldve hated that!

Im so glad I didnt watch it! Elizabeth said, visibly relieved.

An uptown woman who looked to be in her sixties, dressed in black and carrying a navy-blue Longchamp bag, was speaking sternly to the young museum employee stationed by the installations exit. Its nothing that I dont know, she said. She did, however, want to know what the point of the installation was supposed to be. Was the violence real, as advertised? The museum employee told her that she and her colleagues had not been given more information than what was contained in the wall text, which didnt address the question. It doesnt look like anybody could survive that, even if it was thirty seconds, the woman said.

The violence in Real Violence is not real, insofar as it is carried out on an animatronic doll enhanced in post-production. But the troubling veneer of realness is its aim. In an interview with ARTnews, Wolfson said that he had first tried working with a stuntman but found that the result looked too fake. He, the beater-upper, had to restrain himself from doing true harm. Using a doll allowed him to do as much damage as he could.

Knowing that such violence, real as it is, doesnt have an effect on a real person does change the power of the art work, utterlyat least it did for me. My body, rigid with anxious anticipation, relaxed as soon as the fake blood began to pour. I imagined Wolfson stomping murderously on the doll, then sitting calmly before a computer screen to give it a human face. I watched Real Violence three times: first slightly blurry, without my glasses; then again, in focus; and a third time to catch the details that I might have missed during the first two.

Is this what people feel at target practice, firing cleanly at a paper mark in the shape of a man? Is this what gamers feel playing a first-person shooter, assassinating their onscreen rivals? Both of those activities make some use of narrative, that powerful tool that Wolfson forsakes. At the shooting range, or behind the video-game console, you are the protagonist in a contest for your own survival. Who are we supposed to be in Real Violencethe brutalized, the brutalizer, or a bystander, witnessing everything while doing nothing?

The first, instinctive reaction is the empathetic one: disgust, repulsion, anger at being made to watch an atrocity. But Wolfson complicates the violent scene he stages by neutralizing it. He and his victim are both white, both men, both around the same age and of a similar build. The two are apparently evenly matched in strength and social status. The only clue that we are given to direct our sympathies is their initial positioning, the submissive way that the victim kneels, staring at the viewer. (Like an ISIS captive without a hood, I thought.) One has power, the other none, but, by my third viewing, my narrative brain had invented a counterpoint scenario. Could the victim be the original brutalizer? The Hebrew prayers could indicate that some grotesque act of anti-Semitism was taking place, but the reverse could be equallytrue. Hanukkah is a holiday that celebrates the success of an uprising against an oppressor; maybe this was an Inglourious Basterds scenario, an act of vengeance for atrocities committed by the man now laid low. (Wolfson, as the museums wall text notes, is Jewish.) Fiction is a morally plastic force; point of view can determine much. If Wolfsons video were a documentary, there would be no excuse for what it shows. If it were a scripted movie, with Wolfson slotted into the heros role, wed cheer for him from the first crushing skull crack.

All that said, there is something ultimately kitschy about the videoa slick, hollow quality to its orchestrated luridness. Real Violence didnt seem as mysterious or unnerving to me as another work by Wolfson, last years provocatively titled Colored Sculpture, in which a giant redheaded doll that looks like a demonically possessed Howdy Doody is repeatedly hoisted and dropped to the ground by a set of clanking chains. In that piece, the artificiality was the point: watch the video on YouTube and see for yourself how quickly the mind vacillates between eerie sympathy for the tortured toy and fear of it. Both are equally pointless reactionsthe thing cant feelbut they stick. V.R. hasnt yet taken the place of that kind of crude realness, at least not at the Whitney. Putting on Wolfsons headset didnt feel so much like switching one world for another as switching off the world altogether, substituting smooth, crystalline clarity for a video medium that we are more familiar with: the handheld shakiness of a smartphone camera capturing something urgent or horrible as it unfolds.

Wolfsons contextless work does, after all, have a context: America, with all its indisputably real violence carried out daily on victims of flesh and blood. In the Biennials next room hangs a painting by Henry Taylor depicting the death of Philando Castile, who was killed last July by a police officer. The visual source is one that we all have access to: the video of the encounter that Diamond Reynolds, Castiles girlfriend, live-streamed on Facebook. Taylor has painted Castile slumped back in his car, his eyes open, as the officers hand fires through the window. The style is loose, the colors stark: Castiles white shirt, brown skin; the officers pink hand. It is the picture of a memory burned into the mind by a video that will never get any easier to watch.

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Confronting the Shocking Virtual-Reality Artwork at the Whitney ... - The New Yorker