Microsoft shook the gaming community this week when it announced “Project Natal”. Natal is a revolutionary device which will transform the way people interact in virtual environments. Instead of using a controller to manipulate the video game, Natal turns your body into one. Sony had something similar to this called the eye toy, but Natal makes the eye toy look obsolete. That’s because Natal transcends beyond that, with its high resolution camera Natal can pick up facial expressions. It also has the ability to understand what you are saying, with its speech recognition software. But what does it all mean for gaming? And are there any applications beside videogames that this technology can be an applied to?






During the press conference Microsoft showed a bunch of tech demos where the camera was applied to obvious applications such as sport games, fighting games and puzzle games. But the true wonder of this technology comes when you combine all of Natal’s strengths such as body, face and speech detection into a single entity. That is the magic of ‘Milo”. Milo is a 12 year old boy made by Peter Molyneux's and his team. Milo is boy living in a virtual environment that can recognize the player by sight, call that player by name, and have a true interactive conversation with whoever is using it all via natal. The boy can see, hear and understand what you are doing. Microsoft claimed that this was infect a real demo and works a lot like it was shown. Watch the video below.




What does this mean for the future of video games? Well as you saw from Milo, it will be a future with smart A.I. that will not only interact with you but also understand how you feel. Combining all these technologies that Natal offers can lead to an A.I. that seems to understand a person and as a result act appropriately. Milo is obviously not a self-aware being but rather just smoke and mirrors in order make you feel like there is a real person behind him. We are not yet at the point to actually have A.I as smart as a human but we are getting there one step at the time. And our current step is “Milo”. Nevertheless Milo is an astonishing application of Natal. And as the result of this technology we will be even more captivated by the wonderful stories experienced in games. This is awesome but are there any other applications for this technology?

The obvious alternative to video games is fitness! The wii fit was a tremendous success around the world, because it got people out of the couch and on their feet. It will be the same story with Natal. Games that help people do cardio, yoga and dance will be tremendously popular with all demographics.

Are there any medical and therapeutic applications for this technology? The answer to that is “YES”. If in fact the camera does what Microsoft claims regarding to it being able to pick up emotions based on your facial reactions then it can be used to help people with Asperger syndrome. Asperger syndrome is an autism spectrum disorder and people with it therefore show significant difficulties in social interactions. Usually these difficulties in social interactions are a result of not being able to understand the other person’s facial expressions. By interacting with applications like Milo, children will be able to practice facial expressions with the A.I and work towards improving social skills. Other therapeutic applications can just as easily be applicable with Natal.

This part covers the metaphysical consequences of the new technological revolution. On the one hand scientist start to use metaphysical concepts to describe the impact of their research, on the other hand, a surprisingly large number of scientific projects is inspired by religious aspirations and more and more theologians from any religious or spiritual belief are getting interested in these aspirations of new technology, making the discussion inextricable complex.

Organic computing takes a step closer: Computer processors may soon have one fundamental aspect in common with their owners – a structure composed largely of carbon, rather than silicon.

Part 2: Preparing for the Singularity
In this part advocates and opponents of a transhuman future are weighed against each other; prognoses are done when we can expect the transhuman revolution and how people are preparing for it already now.

Part 1 gives an overview of recent technological developments (biogenetics, artificial intelligence, robotics, implants, nanotechnology,AI) and prognoses made by leading scientists about the impact of these developments in the near future.

After announcing last April a method for growing exceptionally long, straight, numerous and well-aligned carbon cylinders only a few atoms thick, a Duke University-led team of chemists has now modified that process to create exclusively semiconducting versions of these single-walled carbon nanotubes.(Read Full Story)

Inventor James Tour a professor of chemistry at Rice University won the Foresight Institute Feynman Prize for developing a car that is just four nanometers across and slightly wider than a strand of DNA. Tour’s nanocar car has a pivoting suspension, rotating axles attached to wheels, and even an engine!

The nanocar is able to move by using light or heat. When the surface that the cars are on is heated it excites the molecules that make up the car and as a reaction the nanocar moves forward until ultimately it hit’s an object. The light method works on the principle of Photoactivation.

Tour hopes that within the next 30 years his technology could construct quantum-dot memory which string together metal atoms in patterns that could then store data.

“Until now, engineers have built things by taking larger objects and cutting them down to make smaller ones,” Tour said. “In the future, things will be built not from the top down, but the bottom up -- as in nature.”

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Roughly every 18 months transistors get smaller but at the same time also increase in processing power. It was Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore in particular who predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors that can fit on a processor would roughly double every two years or so. Today this growth occurs every 18 months. But this exponential growth is not indefinite; there will be a time when the laws of quantum physics prevent any further shrinkage using conventional methods. And this is where atomic-scale computing comes into play with an essentially different solution to the problem.

“Nanotechnology is about taking something and shrinking it to its smallest possible scale. It’s a top-down approach,” says Christian Joachim of the (CNRS).

Using devices such as the scanning-tunnelling microscopes and atomic-force microscopes both devices which can measure and move individual atoms Joachim’s team has managed to design a simple logic gate with 30 atoms that perform the same task as 14 transistors. More?

Researchers at Rice University have demonstrated a new data storage medium made out of a layer of graphite only 10 atoms thick.The technology could potentially provide many times the capacity of current flash memory and withstand temperatures of 200 degrees Celsius and radiation that would make solid-state disk memory disintegrate...Continue

Suppose you want to build a computer that operates like the brain of a mammal. How hard could it be? After all, there are supercomputers that can decode the human genome, play chess and calculate prime numbers out to 13 million digits...Continue

People naturally group information by topic and remember relationships between important things, like a person and the company where she works. But enabling computers to grasp these same concepts has been the subject of long-standing research. Recently, this has focused on the Semantic Web, but a European endeavor called the Nepomuk Project will soon see the effort take new steps onto the PC in the form of a "semantic desktop."...Continue

Quantum entanglement, which Einstein dubbed "spooky action at a distance", would be the perfect way to communicate data – if technical hurdles could be overcome...Continue

Artificial 'injectable bone' that flows like toothpaste, and hardens in the body, has been invented by British scientists...Continue

For the past three years, a startup called M2Z Networks has been figuring out a way to blanket the nation with a free wireless broadband network to ensure all Americans have access to basic high-speed Internet connections...Continue

IBM has seen the future of computing and it may not involve silicon. Instead the company has been looking at graphene, the single atom-thick sheets of carbon that has materials scientists entranced by its dazzling array of amazing properties...Continue

Earlier this week, the humble computer mouse celebrated its 40th birthday. While surprisingly little has changed since Doug Engelbart, an engineer at Stanford Research Institute, in Palo Alto, CA, first demonstrated the mouse to a skeptical crowd in San Francisco, we may have already seen a few glimpses of the future of computer interfaces. If so, over the next few years, the future of the computer interface will likely revolve around touch...Continue

Scientists are developing new ways to selectively boost gene expression in the brain, in the hope of treating psychiatric and neurological disease. A growing pool of evidence shows that compounds that target this mechanism can improve learning and memory in rodents. But existing drugs, which were not developed for this purpose, are relatively weak and unselective, and their long-term safety is not yet clear...Full