Put the headset away. Everybody has got to stop confusing AR and VR. This article is about AR (Augmented Reality), not about people stumbling into things while locked away inside a virtual world via their sci-fi goggles.
Does the above picture make you want to yodel? If so, you are probably Swiss, Austrian or Southern German. Now we’re not saying it’s silly season for course news or anything, but this one did catch our attention. So here it is: there is a course in yodelling.
Evening classes, you might be thinking. Or a video-based online course a few weeks long? After all, how long does it take to learn how to wobble your voice up and down?
Does the above picture make you want to yodel? If so, you are probably Swiss, Austrian or Southern German. Now we’re not saying it’s silly season for course news or anything, but this one did catch our attention. So here it is: there is a course in yodelling.
Evening classes, you might be thinking. Or a video-based online course a few weeks long? After all, how long does it take to learn how to wobble your voice up and down?
The 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea opened with a high-tech display involving 1,218 drones flying in tight formation, making various shapes including the Olympic rings, a snowboarder, and other fabulous coloured shapes in the sky. It totally wowed the crowd at the event and viewers around the world, and was a tour de force of what this article is about: entertainment engineering.
Have you seen Ready Player One? In a not-too-distant future, the film depicts humanity spending most of its time in a virtual world called the Oasis. Built by fictional software genius James Halliday, the Oasis becomes a refuge for the world’s population in the face of grim living conditions in the real world due to a breakdown in geopolitics and overpopulation. In this VR world, you can be anyone or anything you want, go anywhere you like, and live out your fantasies. It’s like Second Life on steroids.
Modern smartphones have a host of software tricks to make photos look better, plus cameras in some models that are as good as dedicated digital cameras. Almost everybody has a good quality camera in their pocket at all times now. But, as the saying goes, you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. The technology takes care of a lot of things, like exposure, colour and effects processing, but it does not (yet) point the camera in the right place and compose a scene for you.
In 2014 The University of California, Irvine staged an eight-week MOOC on the sociological, scientific and ethical questions posed by the zombie apocalypse portrayed in AMC’s The Walking Dead. With the mega-popular TV series as its starting point, the course explored key science and survival themes ranging from understanding social identities to modeling the spread of disease.
The well-known manufacturing principle of just-in-time aims to ensure that the right part arrives on the assembly line in the right place and the exact moment it is needed, thus reducing inventory overheads and making for a lean and efficient process. The same principle is being applied to learning for today’s busy professionals, by using algorithms to deliver just the learning content they need – and nothing else – at the time they need it.
According to Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the universe was sneezed out of the nose of a being named the Great Green Arkleseizure. But that theory was only accepted by the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI, who lived in perpetual fear of the time they called the Coming of the Great White Handkerchief. Here on Earth, we have our own theories on how the universe began, and thankfully they are a lot less icky and a lot more peer-reviewed.
After regional conflicts, when one side has won, both have given up and gone home, or when there’s nobody left to fight, there is work to do. Post-conflict reconstruction does what it can to clean up the mess, and business has a key role in it. Many conflicts are started by demagogues stirring up anger over real or perceived economic inequalities, which often still persist after the fighting has ended. The task of business in reconstruction is to restore production and distribution systems to energize the economy, create jobs and growth, and positively influence local perceptions.
Gardeners everywhere know the benefits of getting outside, getting their hands into the earth and, when the right time comes, enjoying the fruits of their labours. Working with the seasons rather than against them has a calming and grounding effect that can reduce worrying about life stresses by keeping in touch with nature. People who regularly work their gardens often have an aura of contentment about them that non-gardeners envy.
