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Let your mind wander
Technology
ONE PER CENT
Let your mind wander Virtual reality tourism has arrived. Hal Hodson heads into the jungle
24 | NewScientist | 23 April 2016
striking places without leaving authorities do let tourists visit, your living room. but unless they take the expensive CTO and founder David helicopter they must hike through Finsterwalder made the Jaguar the jungle for three days. “They Paw Temple reconstruction just want to let tourists go there, but two weeks ago. After flying to they don’t want to have roads,” Guatemala City, then catching a says Finsterwalder. “With roads local flight to the small town of you will have loggers, and this is Flores, he and a team from the the last part of Guatemala where Global Heritage Foundation took the rainforest is really complete.” a 30-minute helicopter ride into Instead of bringing people to the jungle. Armed with a highsuch places, his small start-up is definition still camera and a tape bringing the places to people. The measure, they stayed long enough to take a few hundred photos and “The Mayan ruins are three days walk from the nearest record key measurements. road – so I’m exploring They then stitched it all together them from San Jose” into a virtual reality for anyone to explore. Most people who visit the Mayan ruins are just one of the real site are archaeologists – destinations on the company’s Finsterwalder’s original books. I also explore the ruins occupation. The Guatemalan of Castle Hohenrechberg in southern Germany and gaze up at the ceiling of 10th-century Cluny Abbey in Saône-et-Loire, France. Then I poke around in a room of the abandoned Beelitz-Heilstätten hospital, where Adolf Hitler recovered after being wounded at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. I can’t touch the places I visit, but I can teleport around them with the click of a button. Pointing a controller to where I want to go, I zip through the environment. Stone walls blur past as I zoom to the top of Hohenrechberg. There’s a broken beer bottle on the floor and I can see the brand. “The photorealism hooked me,” says media researcher Xárene Eskandar at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “You can look in holes, behind doors and under chairs.” I watch other people step into Finsterwalder’s worlds. “Oh my God, oh my God, this is so cool,” says a woman. She gasps in wonder as she looks up. “I feel –Closer than ever– like I’m really in here.” n
Licence to mod Think you can improve on the design of your gadgets? Now you can put your skills to the test with RetroFab, a system that lets you customise the controls on devices from TV remotes to toasters. Developed by Autodesk Research in Toronto, Canada, it scans the device and suggests alternative button layouts that you can tweak before 3D printing the results. The new controls can then be fitted over the ones they replace. The developers suggest that RetroFab could be applied to making appliances child-proof.
“It’s a treat to be invited to collaborate on a big cultural project” Whistleblower Edward Snowden teams up with electronic music producer Jean Michel Jarre to record a techno track called Exit
Painting in the gaps UK company Magic Pony has unveiled an AI that attempts to fill in missing parts of an image. Given just a small section of a scene, the system finds rules that describe that part and uses these to devise imagery to complete the picture. It can be also used to fill in details in blurry images, automatically making poor-quality photos or video clearer.
Autodesk Research
age fotostock / Alamy Stock Photo
JAGUAR Paw Temple lies deep in the Guatemalan rainforest, part of the ancient Mayan ruins of El Mirador. Three days walk from the nearest road, it’s almost inaccessible. And yet here I am. I get down on my knees to examine a sculpture of a jaguar, its crannies full of jungle dirt. Dead leaves have collected at its feet. I can see it all, right in front of my face. But my body is back in San Jose, California, at the GPU Technology Conference, with a screen strapped to my face and two motion-tracking cameras watching my movements. I’m exploring the latest destination offered by virtual reality company Realities.io, which lets you visit some of the world’s most beautiful and
ONE PER CENT
Let your mind wander Virtual reality tourism has arrived. Hal Hodson heads into the jungle
24 | NewScientist | 23 April 2016
striking places without leaving authorities do let tourists visit, your living room. but unless they take the expensive CTO and founder David helicopter they must hike through Finsterwalder made the Jaguar the jungle for three days. “They Paw Temple reconstruction just want to let tourists go there, but two weeks ago. After flying to they don’t want to have roads,” Guatemala City, then catching a says Finsterwalder. “With roads local flight to the small town of you will have loggers, and this is Flores, he and a team from the the last part of Guatemala where Global Heritage Foundation took the rainforest is really complete.” a 30-minute helicopter ride into Instead of bringing people to the jungle. Armed with a highsuch places, his small start-up is definition still camera and a tape bringing the places to people. The measure, they stayed long enough to take a few hundred photos and “The Mayan ruins are three days walk from the nearest record key measurements. road – so I’m exploring They then stitched it all together them from San Jose” into a virtual reality for anyone to explore. Most people who visit the Mayan ruins are just one of the real site are archaeologists – destinations on the company’s Finsterwalder’s original books. I also explore the ruins occupation. The Guatemalan of Castle Hohenrechberg in southern Germany and gaze up at the ceiling of 10th-century Cluny Abbey in Saône-et-Loire, France. Then I poke around in a room of the abandoned Beelitz-Heilstätten hospital, where Adolf Hitler recovered after being wounded at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. I can’t touch the places I visit, but I can teleport around them with the click of a button. Pointing a controller to where I want to go, I zip through the environment. Stone walls blur past as I zoom to the top of Hohenrechberg. There’s a broken beer bottle on the floor and I can see the brand. “The photorealism hooked me,” says media researcher Xárene Eskandar at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “You can look in holes, behind doors and under chairs.” I watch other people step into Finsterwalder’s worlds. “Oh my God, oh my God, this is so cool,” says a woman. She gasps in wonder as she looks up. “I feel –Closer than ever– like I’m really in here.” n
Licence to mod Think you can improve on the design of your gadgets? Now you can put your skills to the test with RetroFab, a system that lets you customise the controls on devices from TV remotes to toasters. Developed by Autodesk Research in Toronto, Canada, it scans the device and suggests alternative button layouts that you can tweak before 3D printing the results. The new controls can then be fitted over the ones they replace. The developers suggest that RetroFab could be applied to making appliances child-proof.
“It’s a treat to be invited to collaborate on a big cultural project” Whistleblower Edward Snowden teams up with electronic music producer Jean Michel Jarre to record a techno track called Exit
Painting in the gaps UK company Magic Pony has unveiled an AI that attempts to fill in missing parts of an image. Given just a small section of a scene, the system finds rules that describe that part and uses these to devise imagery to complete the picture. It can be also used to fill in details in blurry images, automatically making poor-quality photos or video clearer.
Autodesk Research
age fotostock / Alamy Stock Photo
JAGUAR Paw Temple lies deep in the Guatemalan rainforest, part of the ancient Mayan ruins of El Mirador. Three days walk from the nearest road, it’s almost inaccessible. And yet here I am. I get down on my knees to examine a sculpture of a jaguar, its crannies full of jungle dirt. Dead leaves have collected at its feet. I can see it all, right in front of my face. But my body is back in San Jose, California, at the GPU Technology Conference, with a screen strapped to my face and two motion-tracking cameras watching my movements. I’m exploring the latest destination offered by virtual reality company Realities.io, which lets you visit some of the world’s most beautiful and