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How to become a World Memory Champion in ten steps

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<div class="intro">
As you throw back another egg nog, mulled wine or other variety
of sickly Christmas cheer, save a thought for the brain cells that take a hit
with each swig. Your memory might not fare so well the morning after, but
thanks to these tips from England's eight-time World Memory Champion and author
of <i><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;">How to Develop a Brilliant Memory Week by Week</span></i> Dominic
O'Brien, there are a few things you can do to improve it in the future -- or at
least, give the impression you remember the night's events. This man can recall
a binary list of 2,385 digits, so pay close attention.</div>
<h3>
1. The Link Method</h3>
To remember a list of words or shopping items make a link between each of
the objects. For instance, with Torch, Grapes, Ring, Sherry, imagine shining a
Torch on a bunch of Grapes. Inside one of the Grapes you see a Ring sparkling
with diamonds. As you squeeze the grape, the ring falls into a glass of Sherry.<br />
<h3>
2. Acronyms</h3>
Use extended acronyms to remember a series of data by creating a fun
sentence. For example "My Very Easy Method Just Speeds Up Naming
Planets" gives you the order of the planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth,
Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.<br />
<h3>
3. Mental Pictures</h3>
Turn data such as facts and figures into pictures. Arctic or Antarctic? If
you think of looking up at an arch and down at an ant you'll never confuse the
two again.<br />
<h3>
4. The Journey Method</h3>
To remember a list of information, choose a familiar route or journey, maybe
around your house, to picture each item on the list.<br />
To remember a sequence of numbers -- say, 1024337864 -- you could also choose
a route around your house, to picture each number pair. By picturing David
Cameron at my front door, an alarm clock in the hall and two blackbirds flying
up the staircase, I can remember these three pairs of numbers easily: 10, 24,
33.<br />
To add more pairs of numbers, just extend the journey: in my bedroom I hear
an old 78 record and in the bathroom Paul McCartney is in the shower singing
"when I'm 64".<br />
<h3>
5. Remembering to spell correctly</h3>
Accidentally or Accidently? Turn tricky words into scenes to help you
remember correct spellings. Picture an accident in an alley…
accidentally.<br />
<h3>
6. The Rule Of Five</h3>
To avoid information gradually fading from your memory banks it's important
to know when to review information. Apply the "Rule of Five":<br />
First review : Immediately<br />
Second review: 24 hours later<br />
Third review: One week later<br />
Fourth review: One month later<br />
Fifth review: Three months later<br />
<h3>
7. PIN Numbers</h3>
If you can remember your name, you'll never forget your PIN number. Just
make up a memorable sentence and count the number of letters in each word. For
instance: "My name is Dominic": 2 4 2 7; or "This number is
secret": 4 6 2 6.<br />
<h3>
8. The Story Method</h3>
To remember a group of information, create a story which links them all
together. In chemistry the Noble gases are: Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon
and Radon. Imagine taking off in a Helium balloon lit up with a Neon light. An
Argon welder turns into superman who takes you to the planet Krypton, and so
on.<br />
<h3>
9. The Body System</h3>
This works by associating parts of the body with key images of whatever it
is you want to remember, like a to-do list of things. Let's say you have to buy
cheese, eggs and a bottle of milk. Picture cheese on your head, an egg balanced
on your nose and a bottle of milk on your shoulder.<br />
<h3>
10. Healthy Body, Healthy Memory</h3>
Exercise and diet can help to maximise the effects of memory. Gently raise
your heart rate with daily physical exercise and include foods rich in
antioxidants as well as vitamins A, C and E. Oily fish such as salmon contains
folic acid and omega-3 oils are ideal for maintaining a healthy brain and
nervous system.<br />
<h3>
Quick Test</h3>
By using the memory tips outlined, see how many of the items in the festive
list below you can remember. First, choose a location that is familiar to you
such as your home, your place of work, your hometown or a nearby park. The idea
is to use this location as a backdrop for a short journey consisting of a
series of places or stops along the way. The places are then used to mentally
store items of the list you wish to memorise. The route you take will preserve
the natural order of the list, assuming, that is, that you don't forget the
journey or the stops along the way.<br />
Try positioning them along a familiar route around you house and garden or
down the street:<br />
Mistletoe             <br />
Smoked Salmon<br />
Santa Claus         <br />
Holly<br />
Brandy Butter     <br />
Snowman<br />
Turkey               <br />
Stocking<br />
Xmas Tree         <br />
Chestnuts<br />
How many of those items can you now recall in the correct order?<br />
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How to become a World Memory Champion in ten steps

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07Jan2014

How to learn a new skill in 20 hours

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<div class="adavoidedbutflowable">
In his latest book, <em>The First 20 Hours: How
to Learn Anything</em>… Fast, American author Josh Kaufman explains how
you can pick up a new skill much faster than you think. He breaks
down his method into five steps to get you started on your next learning
curve, be it playing the ukulele, picking up programming or trying out
windsurfing -- all in 20 hours.</div>
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<div class="adavoidedbutflowable">
<strong>Set your target</strong><br />
Kaufman suggests focusing on one skill at a time, narrowing it down to a
specific discipline, then setting realistic goals. "If you're learning
golf, being on the PGA tour after 20 hours' practice is not going to
happen," he says. "But learning how to tee off in a reasonably
straight line, fairly consistently -- you could totally do that within 20
hours."</div>
<strong>Break it down</strong><br />
"Most of the things we think of as skills, such as learning a new
language, aren't one skill -- they're a bundle of smaller ones," Kaufman
explains. Deconstruct your chosen activity into two or three sub-skills.
Setting out to achieve these smaller goals in isolation will be more manageable
than trying to learn everything at once.<br />
<strong>Hit the books</strong><br />
"Research enough to start practising, but not so much that it is
procrastination," says Kaufman. Spend one or two hours reading up on your
skill before you give it a go -- and skim through five books rather than
examining one in depth: the techniques that keep reappearing are the ones to
focus on. And talk to a practitioner of your skill to get an idea of aims and
goals.<br />
<strong>Just do it</strong><br />
Actually focusing on the task is often the hardest step, so Kaufman suggests
you turn off your TV and phone, and block the internet. Then, reduce
"friction" -- any unnecessary energy it takes to get started:
"If the guitar is in its case, you're not going to practise as much as if
you took it out of the case and put it on a stand right where you sit all the
time."<br />
<div class="adavoidedbutflowable">
<strong>Make a commitment</strong><br />
Pre-commit to at least 20 hours of practice. Little and often is best; you'll
reach 20 hours by doing 45 minutes daily for around a month. "I find hours
one to four are terrible," says Kaufman. "Around hour three or four
you start to get the hang of it and see some results." Once you've
completed 20 hours, decide if you want to continue, or try a new activity.</div>

How to learn a new skill in 20 hours

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24Dec2013

The Wired Smart List 2013

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Welcome to the second wired Smart List. To
discover who will shape our future, we asked the people who shape our present.
Fifty of the world's brightest minds -- from Peter Gabriel to Jane Goodall --
tell us about one emerging talent whose ideas or influence they think will soon
be part of our lives.<br />
<div class="adavoidedbutflowable">
<b>1. Bill Gates chairman, Microsoft,
selects: Margarida Matsinhe -- field officer, VillageReach</b></div>
<div class="adavoidedbutflowable">
After a century of brutal colonial rule and
decades of civil war, Mozambique in 1992 was a country in need of good news.
That's when Margarida Matsinhe chose to dedicate her life's work to saving
children's lives by restarting her country's immunisation programme. Her team
at an organisation called <a href="http://villagereach.org/">VillageReach</a>
trains workers who make sure vaccines travel "the last mile" through
remote areas with treacherous roads and little infrastructure, and end up at
health centres where children can get them. Before the improved distribution
system, nobody knew how many people lived in the communities and what the
demand was for vaccines. Now, her team tracks demographic information. These
figures are then used to forecast the number of vaccines needed in each health
centre, ensuring that the correct ones arrive where and when they're needed.
The alternative would be sending away children and pregnant mothers who walked
up to 15 kilometres to get there. As a result of her work, the percentage of
children receiving vaccines has risen from 68 to 95, getting ever closer to her
goal of 100 percent.</div>
<b>2. Martha Lane Fox, entrepreneur
and philanthropist, selects: Leila Janah -- founder,
Samasource</b><br />
Leila is defying poverty by <a href="http://samasource.org/">deploying technology</a>
in one of the most powerful ways that I have<br />
ever seen. She is turning the developed-developing world relationship
upside-down by investing in local people (mainly women) to learn digital skills
that can be sold to their own or other markets. The applications are many:
after the Haitian disaster, young Haitians were paid to translate
emergency<br />
texts from Creole into English, and in Kenya virtual assistants were set
up for CEOs in Silicon Valley. I love the imagination with which she has
approached complex problems, using technology for what I find most
inspiring: eroding the geographical and structural barriers between people.<br />
<b>3. Iris van Herpen, fashion designer, selects: Martin Hanczyc
-- chemist</b><br />
Martin is a chemist exploring the line between life and non-life. He says:
"Over the last 150 years or so, science has kind of blurred the
distinction between non-living and living systems, and now we consider that
there may be a kind of continuum." His research inspires a future where
biology and technology will merge into "living technology". He
inspires architects for "living architecture", and even for fashion
it can mean an important next step towards self-repairing, metabolic,
size-fit-changing materials. In a TED talk in 2011 he made the point that we
can't discover life beyond Earth if we don't recognise other forms of life than
the forms of "life" we know today on Earth. Martin shows us the
future of creation: where people are able to create forms of life, technology
comes alive and new forms of biology are created. As a designer I find the
concept of life and creation coming closer and closer together both
hugely exciting and frightening.<br />
<b>4. Elaine Mardis codirector, the Genome
Institute, selects: Malachi and Obi Griffith -- researchers,
Washington University</b><br />
Malachi and Obi Griffith are identical twins who lost their mother to cancer
just as they were graduating high school. They're set to change the world of
cancer genomics. The powerful combination of commitment, incredible intellect
and a sharp focus is shared by this duo as they decode the secrets of
individual cancer cases and try to identify the best-targeted therapies to
treat advanced-stage disease. The vision of these two young bioinformatics
wizards has helped build a pipeline for data analysis and interpretation that
is set to change our approach to cancer into an "N of 1" [an
individualised] focus that will deliver precision diagnoses to each patient.<br />
<b>5. Siddhartha Mukherjee author and physician, Columbia
University, selects: John Dick -- senior scientist, Ontario Cancer
Institute</b><br />
It would be unfair to call John Dick an "emerging" talent, since
he's emerged already: <a href="http://www.uhnres.utoronto.ca/institutes/oci/">his
laboratory</a> sits at the cutting edge of cancer biology. Dick discovered that
cancers can co-opt the properties of stem cells. Like stem cells, cancers can
renew without exhaustion; they acquire self-renewal -- but without
self-control. And he and others have hypothesised that this property might be
the reason that some cancers cannot be cured by chemotherapy or surgery. Now,
laboratories around the world are exploring these parallels between normal stem
cells and cancer stem cells in the hope of creating new medicines that attack
these cells. It is a parallel that has both medical and philosophical
consequences: could cancer -- a disease often described as
"degenerative" -- actually instead be a disease of uncontrolled
regeneration?<br />
<b>6. Eric Topol, cardiologist and geneticist, selects:
Stephen Quake -- professor of bioengineering at Stanford</b><br />
Stephen is the founder of a technology to sequence the whole genome of a
foetus. He also invented a biological equivalent of an integrated circuit, as
well as the first single-molecule DNA-sequencing tech. Much of his work has
already changed medicine.<br />
<b>7. Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, selects:
Cameron Simmons -- professor of infectious diseases</b><br />
Based in Vietnam, Cam is leading important research on dengue fever, which
infects 400 million people a year and is one of the few infectious diseases for
which there's no vaccine or treatment. Cam's work encompasses epidemiology,
genomics, bioinformatics, trials, entomology, immunology and virology.<br />
<b>8. Natalie Jeremijenko, artist and engineer; director,
Environmental Health Clinic, selects: Caroline Woolard cofounder,
ourgoods.org and trade school</b><br />
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Caroline has set up two successful web companies, <a href="http://ourgoods.org/">OurGoods</a> and Trade School, that have transformed
the lives of creatives. Trade School creates educational experiences and
operates in 47 cities internationally. In addition to the classes, it creates
the professional communities and social relationships required to use new
knowledge meaningfully. I now only look at a CV that has at least one Trade
School course (preferably 20). OurGoods is a formal barter network for the
creative community, formalising with contracts and making explicit and
accountable the activity that drives new urban economies. Small, real exchanges
build innovative communities, and Caroline understands the social nature of
exchange -- that things worth doing are not done for the money; that the formal
economy is an impoverished representation of what we actually do and why.<br />
<b>9. David Southwood, president, British Astronomical
Society, selects: Helen Jane Fraser, physicist</b><br />
Helen is a dynamo. She and I spar on the council of the Royal Astronomical
Society. She epitomises everything astronomy and space science wasn't when my
career started 40 years ago. Then, no one talked about life elsewhere in the
cosmos and not too much about how life came to our planet. Astronomy has moved
on and now these are central issues. Helen, who has moved from chemistry to
astrochemistry and then to astrobiology, is part of that change and is always
moving on. Recently, she's been active in getting Britain into using the
science that can now be conducted on the International Space Station and in
tying that to Tim Peake's selection as the first British European Space Agency
astronaut. Everything she does she communicates -- and she communicates to
anyone who will listen. One day, humans will move off into the galaxy. My guess
is something that Helen has done, or will do, will help that happen.<br />
<b>10. Martin Sorrell CEO, WPP, selects: Lei Jun -- founder,
Xiaomi Tech</b><br />
Lei Jun is the founder of <a href="http://www.techinasia.com/tag/xiaomi/">Xiaomi</a>,
the crowdsourced Chinese smartphone, and he also has an --internet-TV box
currently in test. He's a serial entrepreneur on his third creation, and is
taking on Apple and Samsung. Arguably, you could call him the Steve Jobs of
China. He proves that the Chinese are extremely innovative, brand-conscious and
internationally focused.<br />
<b>11. Chris Hadfield, Canadian Space Agency and Nasa
colonel, selects: Darlene Lim -- research scientist, Seti Institute</b><br />
<a href="http://www.seti.org/">Deep under a Canadian lake</a>, microbialites
(whose fossil remains date from more than 3.5 billion years ago) still form.
Darlene Lim is the geobiologist, submarine pilot and exploration -- activist
leading the team to understand them, and help to explain the history of life on
Earth.<br />
<b>12. Jacob Appelbaum, computer-security
researcher, selects: Osman Kibar -- journalist</b><br />
In the past few years Osman has become one of the best in-depth
investigative journalists specialising on the topic of surveillance. His work
is often ground-breaking and very lengthy. The infographics in his publications
create a general understanding that is unmatched when explaining complex topics
relating to surveillance.<br />
<b>13. Scott Belsky founder and CEO, Behance, selects: Ben
Blumenfeld and Enrique Allen -- codirectors, Designer Fund</b><br />
Apple and other companies have proved design is a competitive advantage.
However, the VC/finance world still doesn't fully value the advantage. Ben
(formerly at Facebook) and Enrique created the <a href="http://designerfund.com/">Designer Fund</a> to support design-founded
business. They're making waves.<br />
<b>14. Cynthia Breazeal Director, MIT Media Lab's Personal
Robots Group, selects: Rana el Kaliouby -- research scientist, MIT
Media Lab</b><br />
Rana is a brilliant scientist and entrepreneur who's doing incredibly
exciting work in enabling computers to measure emotions. The ability for
computers to sense and respond to people in a socially and emotionally
intelligent manner is transformative.<br />
<b>15. Martin Varsavsky, Entrepreneur, selects:
Hans-Christian Boos -- CEO, Arago</b><br />
The amount of data we produce has increased exponentially -- I think
Chris and his company Arago are doing great things in big data with
knowledge-based automation, through the implementation of complex machine
learning and AI techniques. Chris could be the creator of the next European
startup worth over a billion.<br />
<b>16. Peter Molyneux, video-game designer, selects: Demis
Hassabis -- research fellow, UCL</b><br />
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Demis is an extraordinary polymath, able to find unexpected and profound
connections between very disparate subjects. He combines these
interdisciplinary skills with an exceptional ability to assemble and inspire
talented teams to tackle innovative ideas. His prolific and diverse
accomplishments range from -- when he was just 17 -- programming the artificial
intelligence for the multimillion-selling simulation game Theme Park, to
winning the world games championship a record five times, to pioneering
neuroscience research connecting memory and imagination, which was listed by
Science as one of the top ten scientific breakthroughs of 2007. Uniting his
eclectic interests is a lifelong passion for advancing AI. His new work fusing
the latest progress in systems neuroscience with cutting-edge machine learning
looks set to revolutionise the field.<br />
<b>17. Thor Halvorssen President, Human Rights
Foundation, selects: Jan Tore Sanner -- Norwegian parliamentarian</b><br />
For 20 years Jan Tore has used his position as an elected representative to
focus Norway on global human-rights issues. Quietly and implacably, he has
taken on governments across the world for human-rights violations. When the
Norwegian government baulked at criticising Cuba, he revealed solidarity with
persecuted dissidents by nominating them for the Nobel Peace Prize -- a
privilege of Norwegian parliamentarians. His recent targets include Belarus and
Vietnam. Norway's potential to support liberal democracy and strengthen
civil-society movements around the world is unique given its reputation for
even-handedness, the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, and a commitment to
dialogue and fairness. The phrase "human-rights superpower" is used
in Oslo as an aspirational description for this nation.<br />
<b>18. Juan Enriquez Author, life scientist, selects: Alex
Fattalb -- anthropologist</b><br />
Alex does not yet have his PhD in anthropology and critical media practices.
But his thesis, Guerrilla Marketing, Information War and Demobilisation of FARC
Rebels, is already making waves. By bringing together big data, Facebook,
YouTube, public relations, military strategy, PTSD, national and international
politics, he has already changed minds and strategies in many fields. His work
ranges fearlessly across disciplines, continents and cultures, covering the
innards of Facebook -- where he did a separate ethnographic study of that odd
tribe -- through Colombian exiles using YouTube in Sweden to influence
Colombian politics. He spent two years in some of the more
"interesting" parts of Colombia, interviewing rebels on their dreams,
fears, traumas. Many were filmed inside a truck that functioned as a giant
camera obscura, projecting the rebels' villages as a backdrop. In the middle of
his PhD he experienced a forced two-year sabbatical: hikers, including his
brother, were arrested and held hostage by Iran. Alex organised a campaign,
mobilised and pressured the White House and 40 countries to free them. His
understanding of social media and partnerships with figures such as Muhammad
Ali, Desmond Tutu and many others resulted in a release of all the
hostages and established new parameters for diplomacy. Who knows
where he will end up after collecting his doctorate.<br />
<b>19. Stefan Sagmeister, Graphic designer and
typographer, selects: David Rinman -- graphic designer</b><br />
David has a lot of joy and merriment mixed in with his clearly rigorous work
ethic, and it shows: his graduation project in Stockholm lights up a ping-pong
table in wonderfully diverse and gorgeous ways. His poster for the Swedish
Screen & Special Printers Association lets the viewers display their
perspectives on the future. He is equally comfortably at home in analogue and
digital worlds.<br />
<b>20. Peter Gabriel, musician and activist; founder, Real
World Records, selects: J Philipp Schmidt -- cofounder and executive
director, Peer 2 Peer University</b><br />
The old model of further education belongs to a time when universities were
essentially for the wealthy. In terms of access and cost, our universities can
never hope to satisfy people's needs, either in traditional economies or those
of the booming young populations in transitional economies. Philipp's team is
well on the way to providing a model that might be the basis of the next
generation of university education. <a href="https://p2pu.org/en/">P2PU</a> is
a wonderful idea that not only ensures a lot of education is available online
free (or freemium), but emphasises the power of group learning and
mentoring. The goal is also to transform the accreditation system, and to make
further education incremental and flexible.<br />
<b>21. Jack Horner, curator of paleontology, Museum of the
Rockies, Montana State University, selects: Tyler Lyson --
postdoctoral fellow, Smithsonian</b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9QFdUpQBbRjAIX7oG_SrAUwrdtwpM7OygPi8ARW_DnWDoNtrBhkqAMUAzqRVmN3SaQRGhSZ2wKw0lMBedzTyqJ3sRZSHD-v4byk93TyvqvWAfjFM9UnZaBbEK1zx_BBsdkZBSpFlVRYk/s1600/smart+list+04.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9QFdUpQBbRjAIX7oG_SrAUwrdtwpM7OygPi8ARW_DnWDoNtrBhkqAMUAzqRVmN3SaQRGhSZ2wKw0lMBedzTyqJ3sRZSHD-v4byk93TyvqvWAfjFM9UnZaBbEK1zx_BBsdkZBSpFlVRYk/s640/smart+list+04.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
Tyler Lyson studies the origin and evolution of turtles, and he has made
some very significant recent discoveries. But, because dinosaurs get so much
more press than any of the other reptile groups, Tyler's innovative research on
turtles is somewhat overshadowed. Tyler also has some interest in dinosaurs, as
he excavates them (and turtles) in the badlands of his home state of North
Dakota. He seems to have a keen interest in the evolution of North American
Mesozoic terrestrial ecosystems, and is utilising turtles to understand better
the K-T extinction events. Tyler is a dynamic young man who thinks out of
the box and doesn't mind responding to challenges to his theories. With such a
mindset he is likely to be a driving force in paleontology over the next few
decades.<br />
<b>22. Steven Pinker Johnstone family professor
of psychology, Harvard University selects: Joshua Greene
-- associate professor of the social sciences, Harvard University</b><br />
It's rare to come across a genuinely new idea on the nature of morality, but
Josh, a philosopher who uses the methods of cognitive neuroscience and social
psychology, has come up with several. He took the old chestnut -- why is it OK
to divert a runaway trolley from a track where it will kill five workers to a
track where it will kill one, but not OK to slow it down by pushing a fat man
in front of it? And he put people in a brain scanner as they pondered it.
Ancient circuits for emotion lit up when people pondered killing a man with
their hands, perhaps explaining the feeling behind the difference. Although his
synthesis of philosophy and biology has made some philosophers hopping mad, it
has excited others, grateful for the infusion of new ideas and the cross-talk
between the sciences and the humanities.<br />
<b>23. Julie Hanna, chair of the board, Kiva, selects: Ben Rattray
-- founder & CEO, Change.org</b><br />
Be the change you want to see in the world, we're told. Ben enables us to do
that: <a href="http://change.org/">Change.org</a> lets anyone start a petition.
In a few short years, the least empowered people in the world have quietly
become the largest collection of unlikely heroes: 45 million people in 196
countries, growing at a rate of three million a month.<br />
<b>24. Paul Jacobs, CEO, Qualcomm selects: Raj Krishnan --
cofounder and CEO, biological dynamics</b><br />
Raj Krishnan has discovered a new, low-cost, easy way to detect cancer in
its earliest stages. He became the CEO of Biological Dynamics (BD), a startup
that creates the patents for this groundbreaking technology, while in his
twenties. I've been so impressed with Raj and his work that I've invested
in BD.<br />
<b>25. Lesley Yellowlees president, Royal Society of
Chemistry, selects: Kylie Vincent -- research fellow, University of
Oxford</b><br />
Kylie is an inspirational chemist whose drive and passion have led her to
achieve great things early in her career. Her research focuses on enzyme-based
technologies that could provide solutions to energy storage and sustainable
fuels. Working at the chemistry-biology interface, her research group studies
how nature handles these challenges, and how they can apply this knowledge to
technologies that can benefit humankind. By studying the enzymes that allow
bacteria to live off hydrogen gas and make useful chemicals from carbon
dioxide, she has developed and patented a new technology called HydRegen -- a system
of graphite beads coated with enzymes that allows chemists to capitalise on
nature's methods for producing complex chemicals. She was overall winner of the
Royal Society of Chemistry's Emerging Technologies competition in 2013.<br />
<b>26. Bre Pettis cofounder and CEO, MakerBot selects:
James Turrell -- artist</b><br />
I'd like to meet James Turrell, a land and installation artist who creates
amazing experiences. He's terraforming a giant piece called The Roden Crater
outside Flagstaff, Arizona, that will act as a modern Stonehenge. For his
interior work, I particularly like his "cloud rooms", where you enter
a room and there is a seamless hole to observe the sky. I'm always
inspired to examine the way I see the world when I encounter his art.<br />
<b>27. Nathan Blecharczyk, cofounder and CTO,
Airbnb, selects: Satoshi Nakamoto -- founder, Bitcoin</b><br />
I'd love to have dinner with the founder of bitcoin, even if he or she
remains unknown. The --distributed nature of bitcoin could make it possible to
exchange value between individuals, completely agnostic of country, at
near-zero cost. At Airbnb, I was the first engineer and built our first
payments platform. Now we have a robust platform to make payments between
countries easy, but on the back-end this is very complex and our capabilities
vary by country. The idea of simplifying the process across the globe is really
intriguing.<br />
<b>28. Alex Hawkinson founder and CEO, SmartThings, selects:
Valentin Heun -- PhD student, MIT Media Lab</b><br />
I'm inspired by Valentin Heun's work on the Smarter Objects project. As the
everyday objects in the world around us become connected as part of the
internet of things, it presents an incredible opportunity to bring more
intelligence to the everyday world.<br />
<b>29. Chris Anderson curator, TED, selects: Taylor Wilson
-- nuclear scientist</b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3QxHSpJZmrj93hMFGFsEszGB9RldnYfwvEawlQ4znyth7JR7mpuMSog-ZFicWxPdFkofiLqtMD8xb4VZ-7kzEXsVUHf2txMESecsybBQaAb5DK65JPn7SGabLreTthMn39voSsvq2jMY/s1600/smart+list+05.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3QxHSpJZmrj93hMFGFsEszGB9RldnYfwvEawlQ4znyth7JR7mpuMSog-ZFicWxPdFkofiLqtMD8xb4VZ-7kzEXsVUHf2txMESecsybBQaAb5DK65JPn7SGabLreTthMn39voSsvq2jMY/s640/smart+list+05.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
At TED, we've had our eye on physics wunderkind Taylor Wilson, who made
headlines at 14 by building a nuclear-fusion reactor in his garage. Now 19,
he's focused on nuclear fission. He believes he has a winning design for a type
of microreactor that is safe and capable of rapid roll-out.<br />
<b>30. Penelope Curtis, director, Tate Britain, selects:
Giorgio Sadotti -- artist</b><br />
I find Giorgio Sadotti and his work amusing, confusing, crystal clear,
beautiful and romantic -- by turns or all together. He makes little
gestures mean a lot, he packs big themes into small means, he is
never heavy or portentous, but neither is he flippant nor cynical.<br />
<b>31. Muhammad Yunus, founder, Grameen Bank and the Yunus Centre;
Nobel Peace Prize laureate, selects: Saskia Bruysten cofounder and
CEO, Yunus Social Business</b><br />
Saskia is an amazing young entrepreneur who's pioneering a new way to turn
charity money -- as well as business money -- into investment capital and
creating and empowering entrepreneurs to address social problems. Within the
last three years, she and her team of 30 have built a small empire of
social-business incubator funds in Haiti, Albania, Colombia, Brazil, Tunisia
and Uganda. She was instrumental in changing policies and opening doors for
social businesses at unlikely places -- the traditional multilateral and
bilateral donors such as the African Development Bank and USAID. Saskia has an
indomitable energy, inspiring vision and ambitious plans for the next
three years. I predict that they won't remain only plans for long. These social
businesses will soon be sprouting all over the world. I'm confident about her
successes.<br />
<b>32. Ben Goldacre, author and Wellcome research fellow in
epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical
Medicine, selects: Peter Doshi -- postdoctoral fellow, Johns
Hopkins University</b><br />
There's a huge problem in medicine: about half of all clinical trials for
the treatments we use today haven't been published. Peter has been at the
forefront of solutions to this problem, documenting the details and helping to
devise a project that might at least restore some missing trials to the public
record. I know from my own work that many people in medicine don't want to
discuss these kinds of problems, even though the impact on patient care is
significant. So the fact that Peter is doing this as an early-career researcher
-- apparently without fear, but also without melodrama -- is inspiring. If he
doesn't go far, something has gone very wrong in medicine.<br />
<b>33. David Attenborough, broadcaster, selects: Xu Xing --
paleontologist</b><br />
I met Xu Xing in China this year while filming a BBC series. He is a
professor at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in
Beijing, and he instantly struck me as a highly engaging and energetic
character (he plays badminton with his colleagues in the institute's entrance
hall at lunchtime). He is also an expert decoder of dinosaur fossils and
already has a long list of remarkable discoveries to his name. I had the good
fortune to get a guided tour around some exquisite specimens that have shed new
light on the evolutionary links between dinosaurs and birds. China is the new
frontier of fossil discoveries -- finds made there have filled some of the most
intriguing gaps in our evolutionary past -- and Xu Xing is a key player in
that. So far he is relatively unknown in the west outside
paleontology, but I think his name and work will reach a wider
audience soon.<br />
<b>34. David Karp, founder and CEO, Tumblr, selects: Brandon
Stanton -- photographer, Humans of New York</b><br />
Tumblr's mission is to empower people to create something extraordinary, and
Brandon is one of the most innovative creators in our community. After losing
his job in 2010, he relocated to New York with a vision for creating his
art project, <a href="http://www.humansofnewyork.com/">Humans of New York</a>:
daily portraits of people he'd see on his walks.<br />
<b>35. J Craig Venter, founder, chairman and CEO, J Craig
Venter Institute, selects: Daniel Gibson -- associate professor, J Craig Venter
Institute</b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsKPjKvqIDBN01JrUieKAomANhzMIUtPDw9Xk4NjL6_SLzfWSshRXg5gG42tsw8Q_eOvFOL_dSAPFJ0DPtnwwLIuUAjVVxZzqFsWx4zo9PCI4gAhJ9_1bMfPZkxtSDIdPaIbIEE0fc_l0/s1600/smart+list+07.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsKPjKvqIDBN01JrUieKAomANhzMIUtPDw9Xk4NjL6_SLzfWSshRXg5gG42tsw8Q_eOvFOL_dSAPFJ0DPtnwwLIuUAjVVxZzqFsWx4zo9PCI4gAhJ9_1bMfPZkxtSDIdPaIbIEE0fc_l0/s640/smart+list+07.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
He's a scientist who's made <a href="http://www.jcvi.org/cms/home/">major
contributions</a> to DNA synthesis that have resulted in the creation of the
first synthetic bacterial cell, and the development of an enabling suite of DNA
synthesis and assembly methods, including Gibson Assembly, which is
used in laboratories around the world.<br />
<b>36. Rachel Botsman, social innovator, selects: Won-Soon Park,
Mayor of Seoul</b><br />
Mayor Park and his team are turning Seoul into a "shareable city"
by applying technology to unlock the value of existing assets and reimagine the
way everything -- from transportation to elderly care -- could work. His office
has a greenhouse of rare plants and walls covered with Post-it suggestions from
citizens.<br />
<b>37. Andrew Zolli, executive director and chief creative
officer, PopTech, selects: Claudia Perlich -- chief scientist, Media6degrees</b><br />
In an age not just of big data, but of big algorithms, the future will
belong to people such as machine-learning expert <a href="http://m6d.com/">Claudia
Perlich</a>. She has pioneered the development of breakthrough algorithms for
everything from pricing advertising to detecting breast cancer and rating
movies.<br />
<b>38. Paul Davies, director, Beyond Center for Fundamental
Concepts in Science, AZ State University, selects: Sara Walker -- assistant
professor, School of Earth and Space Exploration and Beyond Centre</b><br />
Sara is a 29-year-old astrobiologist who trained as a physicist and
cosmologist, and now works mainly on the puzzle of how life began. Much hinges
on the answer -- for example, whether or not we are alone in the universe. The
mystery requires technical proficiency across a range of disciplines, including
chemistry, physics, biology, mathematics and computing. The pathway from
non-life to life involves a transition from the realm of molecules and forces
to the conceptually completely different realm of information processing,
coding, instructions and signals. Sara is one of the few scientists I know who
can grasp the problem from both ends and glimpse how to join them in the
middle.<br />
<b>39. Marc Andreessen cofounder, Andreessen Horowitz, selects: Balaji
Srinivasan -- cofounder and Chief Technology Officer, Counsyl; lecturer,
Stanford University</b><br />
With a voracious mind in an environment that often favours narrow specialists,
Balaji is something of a unicorn. He's that rare computer scientist who
combines coding prowess with a wide--ranging --knowledge of how the world
actually works, whether it's regulation, politics or global markets. That's led
him to software that's eating the world in fantastically different domains,
from developing cheap genetic testing for pregnant women, to working on the
technical underpinnings and policies required for crypto-currencies (such as
bitcoin) to become real alternatives to fiat currencies.<br />
At Stanford, he's training the next generation of hackers to take on some of
the thorniest problems, but always with an eye on the human aspects that need
to be addressed alongside the technical. With him leading the way, technology's
relationship with our lives will only get more intimate.<br />
<b>40. Rachel Armstrong, Sustainability innovator, selects:
William Harries Graham -- ecologist and writer</b><br />
Fourteen-year-old William is one of our next--generation visionaries in
sustainable design. He believes that the modern ecological movement has created
a dystopian vision of environmental issues. William's pioneering project, the
"Luxa-sphere", proposes that we can live in harmony with the natural
world without adopting austere lifestyles. He suggests that emerging new
materials and technologies will enable us to use our natural reserves
differently by functioning as metabolically active "organs" within
our buildings. These -systems will help us to use our natural reserves
differently and to transform resources into biologically compatible substances
that do not kill the planet. He is building support for his idea by
enthusiastically raising awareness about the impact of our current generation
by establishing think-tank pods as innovation hubs that develop Luxasphere-style
solutions.<br />
<b>41. Ken Levine, cofounder and creative director,
Irrational Games, selects: Gabe Newell -- cofounder and managing director,
Valve Corporation</b><br />
Gabe has not only led the creation of half a dozen or more top-flight PC
games, such as <i>Half-Life</i> and <i>Counter-Strike</i>, he's forced us
to rethink the nature of game development, distribution and retail. With the
introduction of the Steam service a decade ago, the <a href="http://www.valvesoftware.com/">Valve</a> crew were widely mocked for their
software: it was buggy, with only a smattering of product and, worst of all,
they were doubling down on PC gaming when everyone knew PC gaming was dead. But
they became the number-one way people purchased and played PC games, and they
introduced concepts such as user-generated (and monetised) content,
deep-discount sales and sticky community features -- and most importantly put
PC games at the forefront of the technical pack. Gabe understands one thing
very clearly: you can't tell the consumer what he wants: you have to build
something he wants.<br />
<b>42. Jane Goodall, primatologist; UN Messenger of Peace,
selects: Itai Rothman -- anthropologist</b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg56Y570aKt2Tm50ntItk9a0u7QLKzcXTvzIhsKJ018E9C68bjc-cAtXNQWH4DvRr-YrIElxlkvrITrGZ_eR0dicaSAOrQpuVwNpScN0sXra3YaLizljjXlk8hVuGnsGAAWgxLe0JPfKOs/s1600/smart+list+09.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg56Y570aKt2Tm50ntItk9a0u7QLKzcXTvzIhsKJ018E9C68bjc-cAtXNQWH4DvRr-YrIElxlkvrITrGZ_eR0dicaSAOrQpuVwNpScN0sXra3YaLizljjXlk8hVuGnsGAAWgxLe0JPfKOs/s640/smart+list+09.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
I am recommending Itai because I really like the way his mind works. He has
an unusual way of thinking about things, extraordinary persistence in finding
ways to attain his goals, and deep commitment and passion. I met him when he
was fighting to save an endangered toad -- he created a whole new protected
area in Israel as a result. His current research is learning about the unknown
and intriguing life of cave-dwelling chimpanzees in Mali. With his usual quick
grasp of possibilities, he also began interviews with the local Maninka
tribespeople to discover their relationship with the chimps. Already, he has
made fascinating discoveries. And, despite lack of funds, he's developed a
partnership with the zoo for the betterment of the three chimps there. I think
that he will go far in anthropology.<br />
<b>43. Philippe Starck, Product designer, selects: Thibault
Damour, physicist</b><br />
A few years ago, Thibault was kind enough to try to educate me. We had a
wonderful time, even though I understood very little. Thanks to him, I heard
the sound of real human intelligence, of science, the relationship between
mathematics, astrophysics and the laws that govern us -- I heard the poetry
that we are living every day. Thibault is my reference point for absolute
beauty. He's one of the most advanced thinkers of our age. He's an
astrophysicist whose ideas extend to philosophy, and it's through philosophy
that we find real poetry. I would have liked just to talk about this poetry,
which is the only way to understand these subjects. We weren't raised to
understand it and we don't have the necessary education, or perhaps even the
intelligence level to do so. The sound of such intelligence is extraordinary.
Thibault Damour is my role model. He's a kind of Professor Calculus with the
elegance of absolute thought.<br />
<b>44. Zach Sims, cofounder, Codecademy, selects: Sam Chaudhary
and Liam Don -- founders, ClassDojo</b><br />
I find the founders of <a href="http://www.classdojo.com/">ClassDojo</a> to
be an inspiration in education technology -- they've built a tool that's truly
useful for teachers. Doing so has helped them find traction among 15 million
teachers. It's notoriously hard for an education company to get adopted in
school systems, but building a great product has helped ClassDojo to do so.<br />
<b>45. Peter Diamandis, founder, X Prize; cofounder, Singularity
University, selects: Jack Andraka -- scientist and inventor</b><br />
At 16, Jack is the youngest adjunct faculty member to teach at Singularity.
His insightful, persistent and innovative work -- at age 15 -- in cancer
research and detection, and his entrepreneurial approach, demonstrate he has
the passion, intellect and resources to change the world. He has done so
already.<br />
<b>46. Jim Al-Khalili, professor of physics, University of
Surrey, selects: Molly Stevens -- professor of biomedical materials and
regenerative medicine, Imperial College London</b><br />
Molly was one of the very early guests on my Radio 4 programme The Life
Scientific and she was quite fascinating. What struck me most is her ability to
bring so many different people from diverse disciplines together under one
roof.<br />
<b>47. Danah Boyd, senior researcher, Microsoft Research,
selects: Janet Vertesi -- sociologist of science and technology, Princeton
University</b><br />
Janet has embedded herself at Nasa to understand how social, cultural and
organisational dynamics shape the science and engineering efforts surrounding
the Mars Exploration Rover and Cassini Saturn missions. Her brain
makes me drool.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0BgibMcNmQwQ3iPZzh7xb528q4HEDUIRAhFyA6D_6Oxng4AAB3S4Xa_DIboR_iloWd1bY6M12K0KZNHHKNto-gidsW_s-cGqgfjvYu6oubzzBoiweLIwm_oLZ9OOvCAtXiNxA7WGg49Y/s1600/smart+list+10.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0BgibMcNmQwQ3iPZzh7xb528q4HEDUIRAhFyA6D_6Oxng4AAB3S4Xa_DIboR_iloWd1bY6M12K0KZNHHKNto-gidsW_s-cGqgfjvYu6oubzzBoiweLIwm_oLZ9OOvCAtXiNxA7WGg49Y/s640/smart+list+10.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<b>48. Martin Rees, cosmologist, astrophysicist and
Astronomer Royal, selects: Didier Queloz professor of astrophysics, University
of Cambridge and University of Geneva</b><br />
While still a student, Didier and his adviser were the first to discover a
planet orbiting a star similar to the Sun. Now at Cambridge, he's developing
special instruments to study Earth-like planets. He may be able to tell us if
there's life on them.<br />
<b>49. John Brockman, president, the Edge Foundation, selects:
David Moinina Sengeh -- PhD candidate, MIT Media Lab (biomechatronics);
cofounder and president, Global Minimum Inc</b><br />
David Sengeh, from Sierra Leone, established Innovate Salone, a
youth-mentorship programme that gives people the opportunity to innovate, to
learn from making, and to solve very tangible problems in their communities.<br />
<b>50. Ben Silbermann, cofounder and CEO,
Pinterest, selects: Karl Deisseroth -- professor of bioengineering and of
psychiatry and behavioural sciences, Stanford University</b><br />
<div class="adavoidedbutflowable">
Karl Deisserith has made some
really tremendous breakthroughs in the development of optogenetic methods
for studying the function of neuronal networks' underlying behaviour. He
takes risks and encourages others to do the same. He gives people on his team
great opportunities and always makes sure to share the credit.</div>

The Wired Smart List 2013

Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE Welcome to the second wired Smart List. To discover who will shape our future, we asked the people who shape our presen…

20Dec2013

How the team behind Oculus Rift conquered the 'Uncomfortable Valley

<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkNRGjhAS0XsVoV1iybbvxJELc1Jk_iqSz-gzOcfVrG0NXdsgtdgXqx3gO1w7nsHj1lgGG4vJ36TJEDWDPCpzylTNL8Vn7_5ne6xUpD37iq_GXDfB3MGSyC-X9lgzmC-etxMejDCc1C88/s1600/How+the+team+behind+Oculus+Rift+conquered+the+%27Uncomfortable+Valley%271.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="425" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkNRGjhAS0XsVoV1iybbvxJELc1Jk_iqSz-gzOcfVrG0NXdsgtdgXqx3gO1w7nsHj1lgGG4vJ36TJEDWDPCpzylTNL8Vn7_5ne6xUpD37iq_GXDfB3MGSyC-X9lgzmC-etxMejDCc1C88/s640/How+the+team+behind+Oculus+Rift+conquered+the+%27Uncomfortable+Valley%271.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<div class="adavoidedbutflowable">
In May 2012, a programmer named <a href="http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/12/john-carmack-doom/">John Carmack</a> -- who,
as a cofounder of id Software and the man behind games like <em>Doom</em> and <em>Wolfenstein
3D</em>, is widely seen as the father of 3D gaming -- <a href="https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/203135890690805762">tweeted a
picture</a> of what looked like steampunk bifocals made out of a black
shoebox. "This is a lot cooler than it looks," read the caption.</div>
<div class="adavoidedbutflowable">
He was right.</div>
<div class="adavoidedbutflowable">
Since then, that awkward contraption -- now more
streamlined, and known as the Oculus Rift -- has become the most anticipated
new product in gaming since the Nintendo Wii got people off the couch. It's a
head-mounted display that promises to be a gigantic step toward what many had
dismissed as an unrealisable dream: virtual reality.</div>
The Rift is the brainchild of a 19-year-old tinkerer and VR enthusiast named
Palmer Luckey. A collector of old VR headsets, Luckey was all too familiar with
the shortcomings every system had faced -- small fields of vision, unwieldy
form factors, horrific resolution. He was also uniquely suited to do something
about it: Years of modding videogame consoles and refurbishing iPhones for fun
and profit had given him enough fine-soldering skills to start Frankensteining
pieces from his existing headset collection. Eventually, <a href="http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=120&t=11970">chronicling
his efforts</a> on a message board devoted to 3D gaming, he figured out a
way to cobble together a headset with a field of vision that dwarfed anything
else on the market and allowed people to become completely immersed in a
360-degree playspace.<br />
Luckey originally envisioned his creation as a DIY kit for hobbyists; after
joining up with two partners and officially incorporating, though, they
realised they could have a game-changing consumer peripheral on their hands.
They began pre-selling $300 (£183) prototype headsets to software developers on <a href="http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/12/oculus-rift/www.kickstarter.com/projects/1523379957/oculus-rift-step-into-the%20game">Kickstarter</a> in
August 2012, just weeks after Carmack had taken his early version (on loan from
Luckey) to the E3 gaming trade show. They pulled in nearly $2.5 million (£1.5
million) -- and in spring of 2013, when those units began shipping to
developers, virtual reality started to seem a lot less virtual.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhozay9-FhVJUjk5k5esLy5SFAnIrTB73eMcXEvV8y9cpxVdhljWOBGKGWbs1NGM-sTDJZnaP48nhLl9AXpfV_u6d3Rzdqa1w5BUycDZlewksUvIBMxM3Ro9HVGUVrlBrgE7L-ZzwW8D-4/s1600/How+the+team+behind+Oculus+Rift+conquered+the+%27Uncomfortable+Valley%272.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhozay9-FhVJUjk5k5esLy5SFAnIrTB73eMcXEvV8y9cpxVdhljWOBGKGWbs1NGM-sTDJZnaP48nhLl9AXpfV_u6d3Rzdqa1w5BUycDZlewksUvIBMxM3Ro9HVGUVrlBrgE7L-ZzwW8D-4/s640/How+the+team+behind+Oculus+Rift+conquered+the+%27Uncomfortable+Valley%272.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
Since then, the hype has only gotten louder. Oculus brought an improved
version of the Rift to E3 in June and showed off its 1080p resolution as well
as demos that placed wearers inside a virtual movie theater watching a trailer
for <em>Man of Steel</em>. For the first time, applications beyond gaming
began to suggest themselves. People, to use the clinical term, freaked out.
Hell, I <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7O4sNu78oo">freaked
out</a>. Media coverage was rapturous; devoted Oculus forums and subreddits
proliferated. Oculus launched a <a href="https://share.oculusvr.com/">project
depository</a> for game demos, and developers responded, creating
completely new experiences for a completely new medium.<br />
Now they just need to build a consumer version that can pay off the promise
of Luckey's early experiments. And now that the company has received <a href="http://www.wired.com/business/2013/12/oculus-vr-funding/">$75 million</a> (£45.9
million) in Series B funding from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz -- which
sources say value the company at more than $250 million (£153 million) -- the
stakes are even higher. Before the official consumer version of the Rift (known
internally as V1) becomes available in 2014, they'll have to iron out seemingly
innumerable kinks, from finalising the display tech to deciding exactly what
features will be included. But first and foremost, they'll have to solve a
problem that has plagued VR since the days of <em>Tron</em>: how not to
make people sick.<br />
There are a number of hurdles to creating a seamless virtual experience.
Tracking, resolution, motion blur; sometimes it seems like the list never ends.
But underneath them all is the most visceral obstacle of all. It's the one that
makes people feel dizzy, or hot, or nauseated. It's latency.<br />
Latency is lag. It's the delay between inputting a command and seeing the
effects of that command. You see it today in online gaming when your broadband
connection gets unreliable: suddenly, you're a half-step behind the action.
Your button pushes and thumbstick moves don't kick in immediately, and by the
time you've seen another player he's already killed you. In that kind of
situation, the only price of latency is frustration. Wearing a VR headset,
though, the price is something akin to motion sickness. Oculus CEO Brendan
Iribe calls it "the Uncomfortable Valley" -- that queasy feeling
players get when they move their head and experience a barely perceptible delay
while the world catches up. People are willing to put up with many things in
the name of novelty, but nausea isn't one of them.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiX82TM28xDOp_UZ_byMw3de6zIjokCrMsBbogThadSpgzx7gjVgaRMKJ9h7sDpKdYxbSLNXzEubDMv197sO3cDANcNWP61mQGf3knuv9BVTRCnopjV7iXIkx9l115kt1QHBrRtYOorYYI/s1600/How+the+team+behind+Oculus+Rift+conquered+the+%27Uncomfortable+Valley%273.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiX82TM28xDOp_UZ_byMw3de6zIjokCrMsBbogThadSpgzx7gjVgaRMKJ9h7sDpKdYxbSLNXzEubDMv197sO3cDANcNWP61mQGf3knuv9BVTRCnopjV7iXIkx9l115kt1QHBrRtYOorYYI/s640/How+the+team+behind+Oculus+Rift+conquered+the+%27Uncomfortable+Valley%273.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
Of course, you can't fully remove latency -- there always will be some
delay. The question is how low latency needs to be. As processor power has
progressed, various head-mounted displays and VR sets have claimed to have
solved the latency problem at various thresholds: 100 milliseconds! 40
milliseconds! Those thresholds might do away with the most frustrating delays,
but they can't guarantee comfort. "It's easier to get sick from latency
than it is to perceive it," Luckey says. "People in the VR industry
have been disagreeing on what humans can perceive -- and that number always
seems to match up to what their system is just barely able to do."<br />
For Oculus, that magic number is somewhere under 20 milliseconds. "When
you cross that, you get to something magical. It really enhances the sense of
presence," says Nate Mitchell, the company's vice president of product.
"I'm very confident we'll be sub-15." That's about half the latency
than the devkit version can attain, and it will require a bunch of innovations
-- some that cut the actual latency, and some that just convince you that they
have.<br />
1. User input<br />
2. A USB cable delivering that command from the Rift to a computer<br />
3. The game engine translating that command for the graphics processor (GPU)<br />
4. The processor issuing a "write" command for a new image<br />
5. The Rift's display switching pixels to display the new image<br />
6. The new image appearing in full<br />
Oculus' task is shaving as many milliseconds of latency from as many of
these stages as possible.<br />
The first step is minimising input latency -- speeding the process of
translating action into digital commands. That's a matter of hardware. While
Luckey's original prototypes used an off-the-shelf sensor, current Rift
headsets utilise a proprietary inertial measurement unit (IMU) tracker that
uses a gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer and then fuses those readings
to evaluate head motion in real time. That "sensor fusion," as Oculus
calls it, drops latency for this first stage -- which was often around 15
milliseconds for the original tracker -- to below a millisecond. Getting that
input command from the Rift to the computer-- where all the actual processing
takes place -- adds another 1-2 milliseconds, a number that can't be reduced
without reinventing the USB cable entirely.<br />
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At that point, the burden of latency shifts from the Rift itself to the game
developer -- in particular, how high a frame rate the game is able to deliver.
Most modern-day games play at 60 frames per second; at that speed, a single
game image takes 16.67 milliseconds to render and get pushed to the computer's
graphics processor. If a developer is able to double that speed, of course,
they can halve the latency introduced by that render time (i.e., a game that
plays at 120fps takes 8 milliseconds to render a single image). That's not
unheard of for PC games, but for now Oculus has to assume the lowest common
denominator of 16.67 milliseconds.<br />
If you're keeping track, we're already close to 20 milliseconds of latency
-- and the image in your headset still hasn't changed. For that to happen, the
computer's GPU needs to send a command back up the USB cable to each pixel in
the Rift's display. Some pixel switches happen very quickly -- a black pixel
can turn white in less than 10 milliseconds -- but for one gray pixel to become
slightly grayer can take close to 30 milliseconds. To save time, each
individual pixel starts switching as soon as it receives its "write"
command from the GPU; the Rift writes from bottom to top, so by the time the
GPU is sending a command to the top lines of the display, the bottom lines have
already switched.<br />
All told, that process "smears out," in Mitchell's words, to
between 20 and 30 milliseconds overall; since the processing and writing happen
somewhat concurrently, that adds up to a total lag of up to 40 milliseconds for
a 60fps game. (For reference, Luckey's original duct-tape prototype was in the
50s -- and Sony's <a href="http://store.sony.com/wearable-hdtv-2d-3d-virtual-7.1-surround-sound-zid27-HMZT3W/cat-27-catid-3D-Personal-Viewer">$1000
(£612) HMZ T3W</a> has 52 milliseconds of latency in the device itself,
not counting the latency introduced by a game.) That's still too much.<br />
Fortunately, Oculus has a few tricks left to employ.<br />
<strong>Nips and tucks</strong><br />
So that time-consuming pixel-switching process that hogs so much of the latency
pipeline? Turns out it's only time-consuming on LCD screens. OLED technology,
such as what's found on a Samsung Galaxy phone, can switch pixels in a matter
of microseconds. So will the consumer version of the Rift utilise OLED panels?
"We haven't decided anything, but it would make a lot of sense to
consider," says Mitchell (with a smile, it should be noted). "The
real trick to OLED is that there's only one manufacturer in the world making
OLED technology in the form factor we want." That would be Samsung -- and
they've never sold their tech to any third party.<br />
That doesn't mean Oculus isn't considering other display technologies that
outperform LCD -- and it doesn't mean they're not tinkering. As part of their
ongoing collaborative work with Valve Software, the two companies worked up a
prototype that, along with a number of other improvements that Wired saw but
can't discuss, utilised an OLED panel. That was the prototype that got them
below 20 milliseconds for the first time. It was also the first time that Iribe
was able to use the Rift without feeling sick. "I'm one of the most
sensitive in the office," Iribe says. "People always joke that 'it's
not ready to show Brendan.' And for the first time, I felt incredibly
good." So where did the OLED panel come from? "We gutted a
phone," says Luckey. They won't say what phone they gutted, but it's clear
that it's a Galaxy S4.<br />
By all accounts, that was a turning point. Andreessen Horowitz founder Marc
Andreessen had been asking how long it would take for Oculus to conquer the
Uncomfortable Valley. "We've had to be honest and say it's soon, but not
yet," Iribe says. After he saw the prototype, though, Iribe emailed
Andreessen: "I said, 'Okay, we're ready -- you need to come down here on
the next flight.'"<br />
Chris Dixon was among four people from Andreessen Horowitz who saw the
newest prototype. "I'd tried the devkit and thought it was really
impressive, but the latency wasn't quite there in my opinion," Dixon says.
"Going and seeing the new prototype gave me confidence that they were
going to solve all of those problems. I think I've seen five or six computer
demos in my life that made me think the world was about to change: Apple II,
Netscape, Google, iPhone…then Oculus. It was that kind of amazing." (The
prototype and functionality that Andreessen Horowitz saw will not be
shown at CES, as has been speculated elsewhere.)<br />
It's not all thanks to the OLED display, though. The Rift's three-sensor
head-tracking unit also samples motion data at 1000 times a second -- four
times faster than the original tracker from Luckey's prototype. That high-speed
data collection has not just allowed them to shave even more latency, but to
actually predict where a player will move his head before he moves it. "There's
research that says you can't predict where the head's going well enough to
render ahead of it, but nobody's ever had a thousand samples a second to be
able to try," says Luckey.<br />
He goes on: "If a head's moving very quickly, you know it cannot
instantly stop, and you know that it can only start slowing down at a certain
speed, so you can say 'well, if they're turning their head, I know that they
can't slow down their head beyond a certain amount, so I'm going to render a
little bit ahead of where it's reporting they are.' Then, as your head starts
to slow, it lowers the prediction back down to zero, and during a very
high-speed turn it can ramp it back up, which is when you need it as
well." This doesn't change the latency of processing in any real way, but
it allows the user to see the new image faster, and thus change
the perceived latency -- nearly 10 milliseconds less.<br />
And then there's Carmack, the graphics wizard who officially joined Oculus
in August as CTO. Before he joined the team, Carmack wrote <a href="http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2013/02/22/latency-mitigation-strategies/">on
his own blog</a> about mitigating latency by changing the way the GPU
writes displays. (If you're not a programmer, don't even bother trying to parse
it: just know that it mentions things like "late frame scheduling"
and "asynchronous time warp," and be thankful there's not a quiz.)
Since then, Oculus has met with GPU manufacturers NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and AMD in
an effort to ensure off-the-shelf PCs (and next-generation Android phones) will
be able to pump the proper experience to the headset. "Making people buy a
particular graphics card just to use Rift is totally off the table,"
Mitchell says.<br />
There's still one more piece of the puzzle: ensuring the games and
applications people are developing for the Rift are as streamlined as possible.
In October, Oculus began shipping the Latency Tester, a tiny tool that allows
developers to measure latency of their own motion-to-photons pipeline. By
placing it in one of the headset's two eyecups and pressing the test button,
developers send a test signal that tells their game engine to draw a colored
square on the screen; the tester reports how many milliseconds it takes for the
square to appear.<br />
Granted, it's all still a work in progress, but after attacking it from so
many angles, Oculus doesn't consider latency the bugaboo it once was.
"We've crossed the Uncomfortable Valley," Iribe concludes. So it's on
to other things. Mitchell points out that the Oculus team still needs to make
significant progress on a number of challenges -- tracking precision, image
quality, resolution -- before the consumer unit finally ships. But with an
extra $75 million (£46 million), and the guidance from one of the most hands-on
VC firms around, they're confident that they'll get there.<br />
<div class="adavoidedbutflowable">
In the meantime, there are always more
milliseconds to lose. "We're shooting for zero," Mitchell says.
"We're super-close."</div>
<br />
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