Video - You are not a gadget

Virtual caribou help scientists unearth Lake Huron's secrets, the ESO ALMA Antenna time lapse, and Jaron Lanier: you are not a gadget.

• Video: TEDxSF - Jaron Lanier - You Are Not a Gadget.
Jaron Zepel Lanier is an American computer scientist, best known for popularizing the term virtual reality (VR). A pioneer in the field of VR, Lanier and Thomas G. Zimmerman left Atari in 1985 to found VPL Research, Inc., the first company to sell VR goggles and gloves. In the late 1990s, Lanier worked on applications for Internet2, and in the 2000s, he was a visiting scholar at Silicon Graphics and various universities. More recently, he has acted as an advisor to Linden Lab on their virtual world product Second Life, and as a partner architect for Microsoft's controller-free Kinect device for Xbox 360.
Watch » [youtube.com]

• Video: Virtual caribou help scientists unearth Lake Huron's secrets.
Bob Reynolds watches caribou run across a wilderness of spruce and lagoons on the edge of Lake Huron. What's unusual is that the caribou herd is simulated. They are moving at their own whim across a virtual world that mimics an ancient land bridge that existed 10,000 years ago, but now is submerged beneath the waters of Lake Huron. Reynolds, a professor at Wayne State University, and other scientists are using modern methods, including artificial computer intelligence and roving underwater robots with video cameras, to look for evidence of ancient caribou hunters.
Watch » [freep.com]

• Video: ESO ALMA Antenna Time Lapse.
Time-lapse of a whole night at the ALMA Array Operations Site (AOS), located at 5000 meters altitude on the Chajnantor plateau, in the II Region of Chile. As the Moon sets at the beginning of the night, three of the first ALMA antennas start tests as part of the ongoing Commissioning and Science Verification process. Because they are pointing at the same target in the sky at any moment, their movements are perfectly synchronized. As the sky appears to rotate clockwise around the south celestial pole (roughly on the upper left edge of the video), the Milky Way goes down slowly, until it is lying almost horizontal before sunrise. The center of our galaxy becomes visible during the second half of the night as a yellowish bulge crossed by dark lanes in the center of the image, just above the antennas. The flashes on the ground are the car lights of the guards patrolling at the AOS. ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array is the largest astronomical project in existence and is a truly global partnership between the scientific communities of East Asia, Europe and North America with Chile. ESO is the European partner in ALMA.
Watch » [youtube.com]

Author: Regular Expression, for AZ10.com ~ 8 Mar 2011

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