The future is arriving (at last)

Researchers at Berkeley have developed a system that reads people’s minds while they watch a video and then roughly reconstructs what they were watching from thousands of hours of YouTube videos.

Nishimoto and two other research team members served as subjects for the experiment, because the procedure requires volunteers to remain still inside the MRI scanner for hours at a time.

They watched two separate sets of Hollywood movie trailers, while fMRI was used to measure blood flow through the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes visual information. On the computer, the brain was divided into small, three-dimensional cubes known as volumetric pixels, or ‘voxels.’

‘We built a model for each voxel that describes how shape and motion information in the movie is mapped into brain activity,’ Nishimoto said.

The brain activity recorded while subjects viewed the first set of clips was fed into a computer program that learned, second by second, to associate visual patterns in the movie with the corresponding brain activity.

Brain activity evoked by the second set of clips was used to test the movie reconstruction algorithm. This was done by feeding 18 million seconds of random YouTube videos into the computer program so that it could predict the brain activity that each film clip would most likely evoke in each subject.

Finally, the 100 clips that the computer program decided were most similar to the clip that the subject had probably seen were merged to produce a blurry yet continuous reconstruction of the original movie.

(via kottke.org)

Avatar Days

Originally created for the Darklight Festival’s ‘4 Day Movie’ project, Avatar Days is a portrait of four online gamers in Dublin whose daily lives contrast with their virtual identities. Advanced 3D technologies and Motion Capture animation were used to insert the players’ in-game characters in place of their real selves against the backdrop of the banal urban landscape which they inhabit.

Guastafunerali

La notizia non è recente, ma il video è eccezionale e va segnalato. La storia è questa: una giocatrice di World of Warcraft, popolarissimo gioco multiplayer on line, muore nella vita reale. I suoi compagni di gioco decidono di celebrare un funerale nel mondo virtuale. Ma mentre la processione di personaggi fantasy sfila mestamente sulle rive di un lago, una banda di simpatici figli di puttana decide di guastare la festa, facendo una carneficina. Come se non bastasse, filma il massacro e lo mette online…

[via guerrilla innovation]