That’s right, this isn’t a mistake. We, as humans constantly send carbon into the atmosphere and nothing short of stopping to breathe and exist as a whole could reduce our emission to zero. What is possible, however is offsetting that emission by helping get rid of carbon in other areas.
Finding our exactly how much carbon you are responsible for and how you can EXACTLY counter that is a tedius task that requires you to go through multiple steps, double check and then send your money to many different organizations…. But… What if it wasn’t?
Introducing: Wren. This company with a cute bird of the same name as a logo has a very interesting mission. To reduce the carbon footprint of every human who wants to do so to zero. It does so by first asking you a couple of questions like: – Where do you live – Would you prefer to spend more money or take more actions – How old are you And then proceeds to interview you on every possible way you can put carbon into the atmosphere. By the end of it, you have a very accurate model of how much you need to help to offset everything you put out.
The company then provides you a list of things you can do like: – Reducing your car usage by 10 minutes a day – Taking shorter showers – Eating Less Meat – Donating to given charities based on what prefrences you set up
All in all, this is a very novel take on reducion of carbon and I think it’s only going to get more interesting from here.
Between Janurary 5th and 7th this year, the Consumer Eletronics Show of 2022 has been held with over 180 thousand visitors showing up to take a look at the new and exciting technologies that were showed off. Many, exciting trends have been revealed and a lot of information was shared about upcoming projects.
Amongst all this excitement there was a single piece of tech that has stood out from the rest due to its… uniqueness. A brand called PurrSong has shown off its product called LavvieTAG. LavvieTag is a biometric device made to monitor the activity of your pets. This includes: -How much they eat -How much they move -Their heart condition as well as many more fitness-centered parameters.
Caudron, representative of the brand says ““The pet’s place in the family is changing, It’s no longer a dog-master relationship. We think of ourselves as parents and our dogs as a member of the family.”
The aim of the company to extend the life-expectancy of our feline friends by itroducing artifical intelligence and technology. It will be quite interesting what other, exciting ideas they can come up with
New and exciting technology comes out every day. With each passing hour humanity is closer and closer to what we can see in Sci-Fi movies like Matrix or Reaady Player One and Virtual Reality is leading the charge in the futurisation of media. Companies like Cyberith or KatVR recently made a large step towards making VR feel even more immersive with their new and exciting VR treadmills. But let’s start from the beggening.
Brief Summary of VR
VR stands for Virtual Reality, a technology that uses certain devices (most commonly goggles or glasses) to project an image of a different world in front of the user’s eyes and ears. In most simple terms, it is a way to transport yourself to a reality that doesn’t exist. Its most main-stream use is entertainment, be it movie or video games.
What is a VR treadmill?
With VR being just a headset and a set of controllers with trackers, one thing that has been greatly lacking in the immersion of the media was movement. When your body was travelling in-game, but you felt yourself just standing still, it took you out of the experience and a lot of times, caused motion sickness. Those problems are no more with the invention of a VR treadmill. Consisting of a couple of arms holding a waistband that goes around your belt as well as a slippery ground, the construction is made to create a walking experience that feels as effortless as possible. With a special set of slippery boots, the user hooks themselves into the waistband and from now on, they can slide around the platform just like if they were walking, but in place! Speed, positioning and direction are all translated into whatever game supports this hardware and in a moments notice, your character is moving just like you are.
VR treadmills are still relatively new and suffer from a couple of drawbacks like being hard to get used to the movement and quick wearing out of the shoes. However, the technology is exciting and with proper care and development, it won’t be long until we’ll be able to runaround the meta-verse very much like what we can see in Ready Player One.
At this point in time, I do not believe there are many people who haven’t at least heard of Facebook’s re-branding into metaverse. This bold move, which was talked about by Mark Zuckerberg at a livestreamed virtual and augmented reality conference, has seen much critisism and endorsement. It also didn’t fail to bring topics like virtual and augmented reality into the main-stream. After all, one of the biggest companies on earth openly re-branding to support those technologies cannot go unnoticed.
A couple of weeks ago we talked about the power of VR (Virtual Reality), so let’s focus on its less intrusive cousin, AR (Augmented Reality)
What is Augmented Reality (AR)?
Augmented Reality, just like the name suggests is used to change the reality, we, as humans perceive. In the simplest of terms, it is a technology used to add to the experiences we share in our normal, day-to-day life. If you want to delve deeper, it is a technology that uses cameras in specialized devices (like glasses), or ones we already own (like smartphones) to add visual, auditorial, or other type of sensation on top of what we already see and feel. For example, showing way-points in real-time to locations you wish to go to, right before your eyes, displaying additional information without having to look at your phone, or, in a dystopian vision, bombarding you with ads.
What Augmented Reality do we already use?
Google Glasses
Some of you might be unaware, but Augmented Reality technology is already out there and has been for quite a while. The most infamous case of which is Google Glasses. This piece of tech was used to display GPS, phone calls and other simple, yet useful applications and was way ahead of its time. So much, in fact, that the technology needed for its success wasn’t available quite yet. The ambitious project that aimed at bringing AR into reality and getting it noticed has proven too much even for the giant that is Google.
Another use can be found inside the very software of your phone. If you own one of the newer Smartphones you probably saw that they have an app that allows you to measure objects in real life by using your camera. That’s Augmented Reality in the works. By comparing the surroundings and the surfices around you, your phone can measure the lenght of an object and display a helpful ruler to aid you, all without having to look for a single tool in your tool-box.
Future Of AR
While it is impossible to determine what exactly the future holds for such a wonderful piece of technology, I can say pretty confidently that AR can become both an essential piece for our daily life and the biggest annoyance at the same time.
Displaying all the information we need without even looking away is great. The convenience of having your entire smartphone in front of your eyes is through the roof, but it also comes at a price. Facebook already started putting ads into their Oculus Quest (Virtual Reality headset) and one can only imagine how annoying it would be to stroll down the park with constant chatter about products blasting directly into your eyes and ears. If something like this would become reality, one would also need to ponder the dangers of advertising that is that aggressive, during, for example driving.
I believe that whoever the pioneer of AR will be is going to have the power to decide how we, as the populus perceive this tech, and with Facebook being in the lead right now, I do not see the future very fondly.
What is VR? VR, a common abbreviation of the words Virtual Reality, is a technology used to methaphorically transport its user into a different, virtual world. The most common ways of achieving said task are through the use of goggles, helmets, or glasses that use LED displays and lenses to show 3d imagery right in front of the user’s eyes, in real-time. Some of the more well-known companies that focus their efforts on the development of VR are:
Oculus by Facebook
HTC
Valve
VR in entertainment It wouldn’t be fair to talk about VR without mentioning what is its birthplace and most popular spot, the entertainment industry. The first Virtual Reality headsets have been created with the projection of visual entertainment in mind and to this day, it is their most common use.
Some people consider this type of content a niche, requiring specialized (and not cheap) equipment in a form of a headset, usually in addition to an already expensive computer capable of handling the calculations needed to run Virtual Reality.
However, the VR market seems to be doing just fine and is steadily growing, its size sitting currently at 4,8 billion USD$, 1,4 billion of which is from video games alone. With 6 million headsets sold in the last 12 months, the amount of people in possession of the technology capable of running the complicated software is increasing. It wouldn’t be a far cry to say that it may soon start to rival the sales produced by more mainstream products, like Play-station, which sold 12 million units this year.
VR in Training
The other interesting use for VR is practise. For example, when pilots train to “earn their wings”, they are often put in front of a flight simulator. This expensive piece of equipment is used to get the user familiar with the complicated art of flying a plane. However, the cost of this training could be greatly reduced if one would emoply VR. The large, expensive displays could be replaced by a single head-set that would provide immersive 360 degrees of visuals while also allowing the instructors to monitor what exactly the trainee is focusing on during the flight.
However, Aviation isn’t the only field in which Virtual reality is used to train rookies. Recently, a german company by the name of Refence adapted the technology to fulfill the needs of law enforcement. Using a large, empty room, tracking cameras and virtual markers, they are able to put people into an infinite ammount of difficult scenarios which would be impossible to recreate without said technology. Bank robberies, hostage situations and other dangerous situation can all be accuratly depicted and used to get the police force used to dealing with such high-risk factors. Additionally, the virtual set-up allows for perfect tracking of each of the moves that officers make, where their weapon was pointing and recreation of the entire action, making learning from ones mistakes much much easier.
Conclusion
VR is a piece of technology that is still in its infantile age, yet it is able provide us with so much. One can only imagine where it will take us in the following years and to assume that it’s going to slightly grow is a huge understatement. Anyone who has even the slightest interest in technology shouldn’t turn the blind eye to this piece of hardware, which one day will change the world.
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