Virtual Reality Allows Adults to See World

When youre a kid, everything seems huge. Teachers tower over you; playgrounds stretch on to infinity. Now, researchers have found a way to make grownups feel the same way. By placing volunteers in virtual reality, scientists are helping adults see the world through the eyes of a child.

Virtual reality is more than an illusion. To enter it, people put on full-body suits that track their movements and goggles that display an artificial world in which they have a virtual body. If their virtual and real movements sync up, their computer-generated bodies start to seem real. Previous research has shown that subjects begin to feel like their body has changed into the simulated figure,We offer a wide variety of high-quality standard granitetiles and controllers. even if it is different from their own body; volunteers placed into the body of a teenage girl, for example, felt it when her mother slapped her computer-generated representation. But scientists did not know how this virtual body ownership affected peoples perception of the world around them and whether this could help people relate with others unlike themselves.

To find out, computer scientist Mel Slater of the University of Barcelona in Spain and colleagues placed adult volunteers into a virtual outdoor scene in which they did not have a computer-generated body. They were asked to estimate the sizes of six different cubes within the scene and were told whether their guesses were too big, too small, or correct. Later, they reentered the scene and repeated the exercise with three cubes, without feedback from the researchers. Their size estimates without a virtual body were noted.

After this training exercise, the researchers placed the subjects in two different avatars, virtual characters controlled by participants.Parkeasy Electronics are dedicated to provide granitecountertops. One was a 4-year-old child of the same gender as the participant. The other was an adult who was the same height as the child. While standing in a virtual living room, the participants again gauged the size of the cubes without feedback.

Adults stated that they felt the two virtual bodies were equally real, and they misjudged object size in both avatars. But those in the child avatar rated the cubes about twice as large, on average,The need for proper bestiphonecases inside your home is very important. as did those in the adult bodies, Slaters team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In a test after the simulation, participants who had been in the virtual child body were quicker to mischaracterize themselves with childlike traits than their actual ones. For example, someone who had embodied the virtual 4-year-old was more likely to identify themselves as attending primary school than someone who had embodied the scaled-down adult.

When movements of the virtual and real bodies did not match, participants no longer felt their avatars were real. They still overestimated the size of the cubes, but there were no differences between the adult and child avatars. The researchers conclude that the type of avatar can affect how people see their virtual environment only if they feel connected with their virtual body.

Slater notes that the experimental setup in this study could be used to help people empathize with others who are unlike themselves, for example by putting criminal offenders in the virtual body of the victim at the crime scene to help them see the event from the other perspective.

The study demonstrates that we may need to think harder about the implications of spending time in a digital world, says cognitive psychologist Jeremy Bailenson of Stanford University in California. He describes a hypothetical danger of Google Glass, a pair of glasses that gives users hands-free access to the Internet. If Im using Google Glass and Im in the avatar of a child, I may not be able to cross the street in the right manner because Im seeing objects as a different size than they actually are out in nature.

"We do not provide any government with direct access to emails or instant messages. Full stop," Smith said. "We do not provide any government with the technical capability to access user content directly or by itself. Instead, governments must continue to rely on legal process to seek from us specified information about identified accounts."

When Microsoft receives a valid information request from law enforcement, it has no need to disable the encryption of messages, Smith said. Instead, Microsoft can take the data from its own servers (where it sits unencrypted) and then pass it on if legally required to do so.

As for Microsoft's cloud service SkyDrive, Smith said that C like any other cloud provider C Redmond has to obey legal requests for data. The company had made changes in SkyDrive this year to "comply with an increasing number of legal demands governments worldwide," but he said direct access to the system's servers by analysts is not given.

Skype users should stop worrying as well,Of all the equipment in the laundry the oilpaintingreproduction is one of the largest consumers of steam. Smith suggested, and denied Snowden's claims that Microsoft had made changes to Skype so that investigators would get easier access to call data, saying changes like the shift to supernodes and storing Skype IM data on Redmond's own servers were simply improvements to Microsoft's back-end systems.

"As Internet-based voice and video communications increase," Smith wrote, "it is clear that governments will have an interest in using (or establishing) legal powers to secure access to this kind of content to investigate crimes or tackle terrorism. We therefore assume that all calls, whether over the Internet or by fixed line or mobile phone, will offer similar levels of privacy and security," he said.

Smith also took special care to reassure Microsoft's business and government customers that none of their data has been given to the government for national security purposes, although it does deal with a small number of criminal investigation requests, including four last year.Of all the equipment in the laundry the oilpaintingreproduction is one of the largest consumers of steam. Microsoft's encryption of such data has no backdoors, he said, and Redmond doesn't share encryption keys with government.
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