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The Utility of Virtual Reality

Future of Drone Tech page 6

Railgun - the Weapon of Tomorrow Automation takes over the industry Inside Artificial Intelligence

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Table of Contents About the Authors

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Photography Takes to the Sky

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A Century of Technology

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Automation of a Nation

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Railguns Weapons of Tomorrow

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VR Headset Comparison

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An Artificial World

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Best Drones for Photography

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Virtually Reality

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Automation in the Industry

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Letter from the Editor

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Ethan Ripp is an enthusiast of all things technology, from software programming to video games, and even materials science, in which he hopes to establish a career. While he loves gaming, he is also interested in how new technology arises and makes an impact in the world, which lead to his position in this magazine. While working on the stories, he was able to communicate with experts who worked in different fields that implemented autonomy in their professions.

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Makisig Cardenas, commonly known as Maki, is an avid gamer. He can often be recognized by his mane of unkempt hair. Maki is also interested in engineering, and is fascinated by how things work together in a machine. He aspires to become a student at MIT, and enjoys using TinkerCAD programs. He has also never been seen without his trademark gray jacket. During his time with his group, Maki was able to interview several inspiring leaders in the engineering field..

Madison Garofolo enjoys flying her own drones in her free time and taking pictures of Austin. She was inspired by drones because of their unique ability to take pictures from high up in the sky. While she often flies her drones in Austin, she has also taken her drone to Colorado, Bastrop, and Port Aransas. When writing her feature story, she interviewed multiple professional drone photographers in Austin and learned about what they do. She is very interested in the unique opportunities that drones offer.

Christian Kennedy enjoys using and learning about computers and all they offer whenever he has free time.

Fittingly, he hopes to have a career in computer science or something like it in the future. For Christian, technology is a tool for making the impossible a reality. When writing his feature story he used the chance to learn about a relatively new technology, virtual reality, because of his interest in computers and the realities they can create.

Terry enjoys reading and listening to music in her free time, and also enjoys doing sports like Ultimate Frisbee and Water Polo. She would like to follow a career involving psychology, specifically as a psychiatrist. Her interest in psychology is what sparked her choice in a feature story about artificial intelligence, because it has to do with the human mind and furthering scientists’ understanding of it. As she created her feature story she had the opportunity to speak with several experts in the field of artificial intelligence and was very interested in the science behind it and where AI is headed to in the future.

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Phantom 3 drone. The Phantom drone is made by DJI and is one of the best drones for photography because of their high-quality cameras, reliability, and battery life. Photo by Pexels Popular Technology 6

By Madison Garofolo The increasing popularity of these flying robots has changed the lives of photographers all around the world.

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three to five hour trip by car only takes 45 minutes with a drone in Rwanda.

This difference can be life saving to someone who is in need of a blood transfusion. The advancements of drones have opened up a variety of uses for them.

Unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones, have become popular over the last few years.

Drones used to be unreliable and they could not fly for a long time, but due to the increase in popularity, the technology used in drones has been significantly improved. They have become a hobby to people around the world, used for doing things like taking pictures or racing against other drones.

Drone photographer Christopher Sherman primarily uses drones for his photography in order to take pictures that will stand out against pictures taken with regular cameras.

Sherman said “It’s like ‘hey I can take a picture, and it’s something that somebody’s not seen before, it’s somebody’s not shot from that angle before or that perspective before.’”

Sherman prefers to use drones because they allow for a new perspective. Taking pictures from a drone offers a new angle on the world, which is beneficial to photographers.

Sherman said that a drone offers a unique aspect that is not available when using normal cameras.

“There’s a lot of folks that are doing photography out there and you see the same old shots: so and so has a picture of the bridge, so and so has a picture of the frost bank tower, or so on and so forth,” he said.

According to Sherman, with a drone you can take

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DJI Inspire 1 filming the mountains.

Photo by Pexels a picture that is original.

an hour.”

CEO of Drone Dispatch Chris Bonnet said that drones also offer functional uses that could improve the efficiency of tasks. Drone Dispatch is a company in Round Rock, Texas, that specializes in drone photography and provides photography services.

Not too long ago, drones were not so helpful because of issues caused by a lack of reliability. There were problems with the drones when they began to get more popular. They were unstable and wouldn’t always stay in the air.

“People have to go up there and visually inspect the cell towers.

Well, to reduce risk you can have the drone fly up there and use the zoom camera and save the guy from spending half the day climbing up and climbing down an unsafe structure,” Bonnet said.

“Four years ago the drones were still at a very early stage, and they would fly away, they would fall out of the sky, the technology really wasn’t there yet,” Bonnet said.

Things such as inspections of buildings and other structures have become easier to perform with the use of cameras on drones.

Bonnet said that because of the drone’s ability to fly with a camera attached people are “able to do aerial surveys in a matter of hours, and these surveys in the past have taken days or weeks and teams of 10 people, and we can do that with a drone in

Bonnet said that “just like the iPhone: there’s a new iPhone every year, there’s a new drone like every six months.”

As a result of this rapid improvement, more and more features have been added to the drones to fix these issues.

“The drones are so smart, so I can preprogram it to do a panoramic image right here ... there was a 360 degree image you can click and drag around downtown Round Rock.

You can’t do that stuff with regular cameras” Bonnet said.

Some of these new features allow for more creativity in photography while some provide more ease when flying the drone and less risk of a crash or accident.

Bonnet points out the sensors on the sides of the Phantom 4 drone.

“I could fly this drone flying at its top speed right at me,” he says as he stands holding the drone in front of him “and it’ll stop itself 10 feet away from me because of these sensors.”

These improvements of drones have given photographers new opportunities, but it has also lead to the creation of a new sport.

Michael Giangutsos, Chief Marketing Officer for MultiGP, a drone racing league, noticed the increasing interest in drone racing. “A lot of parents are getting their children involved. Because of that, it gets them up off the couch, it gets them outside, it gets them learning about

Downtown Austin, Texas, from the perspective of a drone. Photo by Madison Garofolo

something new, but also having a you know a blast at the same time,” Giangutsos said.

Multi GP was created because there were people all around the world who wanted to race drones, and so they created a place where anyone can organize their own races. MultiGP has a website where drone pilots can organize their own flying events.

“This stuff started out with guys taking little miniature security cameras and putting them on drones and kind of hacking them to make them work,” Giangutsos said.

Starting with a few groups of friends, drone racing gradually became a popular sport with larger groups of people competing.

“We started MultiGP about two years ago and we saw a lot of pilots getting interested the racing aspect of it. Myself and our founder ... noticed the trend of all these groups popping up around the nation that you know wanted to race each other,” Giangutsos said.

“We have seen better antennas come out, more durable motors, more durable antennas, outstanding frame designs that are more aerodynamic, propellers have made leaps and strides this past year” Giangutsos said. He said that these improvements have affected the sport in a positive way.

MultiGP’s ultimate goal is to have a world competition to bring the world together through drone racing.

Giangutsos said that their “longer term plan is to have the world competition where you know nations can compete.”

Improvements in technology have given photographers the opportunity for a new way to capture a picture, have created a new popular sport, and have made some difficult and tedious tasks more efficient because of the different uses for drones.

Drone racing was not always so hightech because of powerful motors, virtual reality goggles, and lightweight frames.

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The Elektro Robot

Top-Down Approach

A robot built by Westinghouse, it could move its head and arms, and would respond to the rhythm of people’s voice commands, replying with pre-recorded answers. It was showcased at the World’s Fair in 1939.

Marvin Minsky was an influential person whose view dominated AI research. He favored the “top-down” approach in artificial intelligence, which meant programming the computer with the rules that govern human behavior.

1939

1956

First Programmable Robot 1954 George Devol files a patent for the first programmable robot and is th first to use the term “universal automaton.”

1939

The AI Winter 1973

Due to little results being produced, funding for the AI industry was cut and did not resume until about 1981.

A Century of

Three Laws of Robotics

The Turing Test

Unimate

Sci-fi author Isaac Asimov created “Three Laws of Robotics” every robot should be programmed to obey.

Alan Turing creates a question in order to test the theory if machines could think. He said that if a computer, based off of a series of written responses to questions, could not be distinguished from a human responder, then it must be “thinking.”

It was the first mass-produced industrial robot in the world, named Unimate.

Unimate was first put to work in a General Motors assembly line, here it was given step by step commands and stacked hot pieces of die-cast metal.

1942

(1) A robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

(2) A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. And (3) A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

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1950

1961

Shakey the Robot 1966-1972

Shakey the robot was the first robot that could take in its surrounding and react to it, it could recognize and move itself around obstacles. However, it was extremely slow and a moving obstacle could cause it to take hours to plan its next move.

The Roomba 2002 The roomba was a robotic vaccuum, which used a cleaning algorithm and insect-like behavior to clean and navigate obstacles.

The Furby 1998

The furby toy became very popular very quickly. The toy could speak and could evolve its language over time, changing from gibberish to simple english commands.

Also, it had an infrared port it could use to communicate with other furbies.

BigDogs 2005

A war machine, BigDog was a robot built for the US military. It was made to be a robotic pack animal for areas too rough for conventional vehicles.

Technology

Apple’s Siri

The AIBO was a robotic dog that was able to “learn” by interacting with the environment, it’s owners, and other AIBOs. it was programmed to respond to over 100 commands, and it was programmed to occasionally ignore commands like a regular dog would.

Siri was first introduced with the then-newest Apple iPhone 4S. Siri had voice recognition and could process requests, and it could also learn from the user’s tendencies and preferences. Speech recognition was a huge goal for AI research. As of now, Google’s speech recognition accuracy is currently about 92%, which is an improvement as speech recognition used to not be even over 80% accurate.

Chess Champion Defeat 1997

Deep Blue, a chess computer, defeated worlds best chess champion, Gary Kasperov in a chess game.

2016 - Present Self driving cars is just one of the ways we can see just how far artificial intelligence has come in the past hundred years, as companies such as Apple and Google constantly come up with new technologies designed to impress and improve our daily lives.

Present

Written by Terry Patten

AIBO 1999

Self-Driving Cars

2008

Jeopardy Loss 2011

The computer program, Watson, defeated two former Jeopardy contestants, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings.

Watson won by analyzing natural language questions and content much faster than its human contestors.

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By the year 2020, an estimated three million fully autonomous robots will work in factories around the world, and with more recent advances in versatile robots and software, many could struggle to find a job in the newly competitive environment.

Given the positive and negative implications of this technology, much depends on what ability we give these robots.

Industrial robots are adapted to perform multiple jobs, such as assembling parts in a factory, welding and soldering, and writing records. By Mirko Tobias Schafer (http:// www.flickr.com/photos/gastev/2174505811/) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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A look at the future of autonomous technology

By Ethan Ripp

Over two and a half million people over the globe are working to manufacture industrial robots and software that may soon take over their own jobs.

As an the number of advancements in the field of robotics is rapidly increasing, the dangers of these robots become even more imminent.

For some people, robots can help in everyday life, or explore where humans have never explored before. But for others, this will mean losing a job, or fighting wars from a continent away. Soon the developers and the tens of millions that could be affected must decide how much of this they want in their future, and whether or not to curb the growing number of abilities that robots have.

Matt Berlin is a recipient of a PH. Degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and co-founder of If Robotics, and is currently invested in the development of autonomous and “social” software. Some of the positive aspects of this newly Popular Technology 14

developing technology he says, “An elderly person needs someone who needs help around the house, where you need to make the decision of whether they maybe should be more suited in a hospital environment, or can they stay in their home for another couple of years -- having another robot helper could help people stay in their houses for longer.”

Because of robots’ potential across hundreds of fields, many think that they will one day become an integral part of our economic structure, and could potentially endanger even jobs that have a personal aspect to them, such as the role of a nurse in the previous scenario.

“Nursing is a job that’s pretty easy to get, some of it you need to a good education for, and some of it you don’t, so it’s a good way for people to go to school for a few years and then get a good paying job,” Berlin said.

So, if robots can replace popular jobs, what else can they replace? The first thing that comes to mind for many is the Terminator scenario: Technology has become so advanced that it starts making decisions for itself, and decides that the world would be better off without humanity. Considering recent developments such as the creation of fully autonomous cars by companies such as Tesla, the idea certainly seems plausible. For example, the classic dilemma that comes to mind when thinking about autonomous vehicles: the car has to make the choice of killing the passenger or the pedestrians. However, that’s still a long way off.

Berlin says that currently, and in the immediate future, autonomous cars don’t have the sophistication to make complex moral decisions, or even the ability to tell the exact locations of pedestrians, but on the other hand, we aren’t that far off from autonomous robots taking over a large part of the industrial workforce.

However, that’s not to say that ethical issues are not present in tech design. During design, an engineer will have to decide what exactly he or she will want their technology to be capable of. Normally this does not carry too much weight, but when they device could cause negative effects that you never intended, or be repurposed to do so, it is important to be cautious in considering the capabilities of your technology. Keith Pflieger, who designed part of the connection between Earth and the Pathfinder Mars rover, talks about some of the dangers of tech design: “I don’t normally feel that there’s ethical issues at stake, but what I personally have for, have an ethical question with is not necessary the raw technology that I’m developing, but the industry that I’m developing it for, says Pflieger.

However, it’s important to keep in perspective that some technologies aren’t in immediate danger of potentially malicious intent, such as drone technology.

“You know, there’s a concern about what a drone can fly. Can it fly a bomb or things that could hurt people? They absolutely can. If it fell into the right hands it could be a problem. Especially into large groups of people and things like that. But so can a car, so can a truck,” says Ross Havlick, member of the

“Red Team,” a drone oriented firefighting group that’s part of the Austin Fire Department.

Some technologies that are intended to help could indirectly cause harm by making it easier to do something. With increased ease of doing something, it incentivises one to perform that task relatively carelessly.

Berlin says that with the ability of drones to fight a war from thousands of miles away, a country or group could go to war on another population and hardly notice, because the distance can twist the psyche and make it difficult to notice the effects of such an action.

Voltzwagon experimental Auotnomous car can detect obstacles and find the optimal route to avoid that and other immediate obstacles. By Steve Jurvetson (originally posted to Flickr as Handsfree Driving) [CC BY 2.0 (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

It is clear that, going into the future, people everywhere will need to be aware of the advancements being made in autonomous robots and software, because the product of those developments will certainly affect them, whether it cooks their food or it steals their job.

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By Maki Cardenas

Using a new device called a railgun, humans may soon be launching things at over six times the speed of sound.

Railguns are devices that utilize an electromagnetic principle called the Lorentz force to launch projectiles at many times the speed of sound.

“At the lowest level, it’s really simple,” says Robert Hebner, a lead researcher at UT of electromagnetic launch. “It’s just one magnet repelling another. What you end up with is very much like if you took your grammar school science kit, and took the little bar magnets and

“In fact, my dream is that someday soon, we’ll actually see this as a way of launching people back from the moon.” put one on your desk and let go, so they’d repel each other and one would go flying across the desk.” Of course, it isn’t as simple as that.

Normal magnets are not strong enough to achieve the speeds that researchers are looking for.

“Now the way we do it is that we have to put together electromagnets that run electrically, rather than a permanent magnet.

There’s not enough force in a permanent magnet. So in an electromagnet, we typically run about a million Amperes. Your house has two hundred Amps service, we run a million Amps into there, and that’s how we get that acceleration of that projectile,” Hebner says.

Storing power is another problem with railguns.

How can anything store a million amps?

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There isn’t a set answer for that.

“There are electrical components, capacitors, you could use generators, you could use inductors, there’s a variety of storage components,” says Hebner. However, there is a setback to some devices. “Capacitors are essentially electric devices in which we can store electrons, and they tend to leak over time, so after a while, you have no charge,” explains Ahmed Tewfik, the head of the Cockrell School of Engineering at UT.

Generating power is also a problem for railguns.

A million Amps is nothing to laugh at. People who make their own railguns normally use several car batteries hooked together to get power.

Organizations that research and develop railguns use nuclear reactors.

Larger nuclear reactors can generate up to 508 million amps. UT itself has a nuclear reactor on the Pickle research campus where railgun research is carried out.

Railguns are soon to be used commercially. “In fact, my dream, is that someday soon, we’ll actually see this as a way of launching people back from the moon,” says Hebner.

“We have to carry all that fuel to come back, to the moon and back. If we had a system like we have in our laboratory, that would take solar power, and store it, we could store up enough energy to launch the

the rocket back to Earth, from the moon.�

For now, that will have to wait. Systems that would be that large aren’t feasible with the technology available. The military itself is still developing railguns. Until that day comes, people will have to be satisfied with a mere speed of Mach 6.

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The Navy is testing railguns, which can easily fire at over three kilometers per second.

Below is a Navy-developed railgun, manufactured by General Atomics.

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By Christian Kennedy A Comparison of the four major Virtual Reality headsets on the market.

The Oculus Rift is regarded as the original headset that sparked the world’s fascination with virtual reality. As such, it boasts the second best hardware of all headsets and receives its own exclusive titles.

However, its exclusive titles caused an uproar in the VR community, causing many developers to develop for the Vive instead.

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The Vive has the best screen, controllers, head tracking, and game selection of all headsets and has a price to reflect that. The Vive is the best headset on the market if your wallet can handle it.

Playstation VR is the only VR headset for consoles, making it the only choice for those with a console besides the phone. Currently its game selection is small and requires an attachment to the system to function.

Phone VR is the cheapest way to experience VR, with google cardboard being practically free. However, its game selection is minimal since phone VR seems to be gear towards experiencing VR content, not gaming.

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Artificial Intelligence in the Future

By Terry Patten

Apple computers on a desk, photo from Terry Patten Popular Technology 22

“AI’s are only really learning when they are supervised by a human.

They say deep AI is going to be a kind of an AI that can learn in a unsupervised way.”

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University o f Texas Dell Computer Science Hall, photo from Baker Triangle

You stand on the curb and hear a car approaching from your left, and turn to see a driverless car pass by you.

Later down the street you notice it swerving to avoid a careless pedestrian who was worriedly staring at his phone, making sure his mole was not melanoma. The light turns green and you cross the street, off to talk to the robot that acts as your broker to double check that you are still investing in the best choices possible.

are not talking about a completely self-aware computer.

Gordon Novak, a professor who works at the University of Texas in Austin and specializes in artificial intelligence, theorizes that this is the world humans will live in 20 years from now, full of technology and robots that will improve the average person’s life in immeasurable ways.

Even now, there are teams of people all over the world who are working to make this scenario become a reality through the use of artificial intelligence in machines.

And essentially, according to Novak, rudimentary AI works by simply recognizing objects.

However, when a professor or specialist speaks about artificial intelligence, chances are they probably

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Actually, according to Todd Humphreys, a UT professor who deals with artificial intelligence, “[AI’s] are only really learning when they are supervised by a human... They say deep AI is going to be a kind of an AI that can learn in a unsupervised way.”

“If you take a machine and just show it a million pictures of things that are cats and things that are not cats, then come to find out it can learn which of those things are cats and do pretty well,” he says.

Although rudimentary AI can accomplish only basic tasks, it has actually been able to achieve several accomplishments as of late.

Novak lists some of these accomplishments which include beating Garry Kasparov in chess, Jennings in jeopardy, Lee Sedol in the game of Go (a popular Asian game), and lately beating the best poker players in the world at Texas Hold’em, unrestricted.

These kinds of things, done just by rudimentary AI, has been very significant to scientists in the world of artificial intelligence, and it shows just how far humans have come lately.

A true testament to just how far technology has progressed is shown in far away Africa, where the amazing things the U.S. has done can be seen being used improving people’s lives in Africa. “in Africa you have people who are you know, living in a grass hut with solar panels on the roof because they don’t have electric wires bringing electricity to their village. they can’t afford to install electric wires and electric plants, but they can afford a solar panel,” Novak says.

An electronic hand being analyzed, photo from everink.com

If Africa has reaped the benefits of tech from the U.S., what kind of new, up-to-date, advanced technology, should people be seeing being created right now in the U.S.?

Well, now the average human being can diagnose, and be diagnosed, with just a simple app. And it does not just diagnose humans, it can check on plants too. This technology is just one of the new gadgets experts are working on.

“So, if you can take a picture of your plant, and it can tell you what disease your plant has, and it can tell you what you need to do to cure it.

That’s something that AI technology on a cell phone could do. So if you just want to take a picture of your leaf, which is turning yellow, you take a picture of it and you can diagnose what kind of problem it is, if you need this kind of fertilizer or, uh, is it this kind of a disease and what do you need to do to save your crop,” Novak says.

Imagine someone knowing how to fix a plant with just one snap and a click!

However, there are some dangers in new technology too, especially in the job area.

“I have a friend who is a lawyer, and I would think that that’s a job that requires some really human cognition, but it turns out that a lot of startups that will teach you how to um, start a company or put in all the legal documents to form an NLC or an entity like this, and they will generate the legal document and all the legalities,” Professor Humphreys says.

This kind of scary situation may seem like a thing of the future, but Bruce Porter, Professor and Chairman of the Department of Computer Sciences at UT who specializes in artificial intelligence, has a different opinion.

“Trump talks a lot about losing jobs.

And he claims that it’s because of bad trade deals and outsourcing to Mexico and china but the fact is that a lot of the jobs that have been lost are being lost to automation. They’re

lost to robots and other technology, that’s where the jobs are going,” he says.

So it may seem like humans have plenty to worry about, but some say that at least people will have more leisure time. However, that might not be as relaxing as people may think.

“Well if we could just have world harmony, world peace, then we could all just relax on the beach all the time. Then we wouldn’t have world harmony and world peace. Leisure is not what we’re all after it’s to feel like we’re valuable, like we’re part of something bigger. And, and I really feel that large sections of the population are gonna be without that, sometime,” Humphreys says.

Perhaps the average human being will have access to apps that will help them prevent sickness, but they will be so bored out of their mind that it will be pointless anyway. There can be much to be gained, but how much will be lost in this new age of technology?

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By Madison Garofolo

One of the best ways to take a photo is to use a drone. With drones you can take a wide variety of different pictures. Some drones are made for photography and are made with features like high-quality cameras, long flight times, and even smart flying modes. This is a list of some of the highest-quality drones for taking great photos.

The DJI Mavic makes a great aerial camera because of its portability.

This drone is very portable because it is very small and it can be folded up. Along with a battery life of about 27 minutes, the Mavic is perfect for traveling to different spots.

Photo by pexels

DJI’s Inspire has a camera that can rotate 360 degrees, allowing you to get perfect shots from every angle. The arms can move up and out of the way of the camera to give you an unobstructed view. Overall, the Inspire is easy to fly and it works well for both beginners and experts.

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Photo by pexels

Obstacle avoidance, improved battery life and a higher quality camera is what makes the Phantom 4 stand out from the Phantom 3. In addition, this drone has multiple flight modes to do things such as following a moving object, raising the drone’s top speed, and more.

Photo by pexels

Yuneec has a drone that has many smart flying features. The Breeze is meant to be a drone that anyone can use to take great photos. With four different modes to choose from, the Breeze can do anything from circling an object to taking a selfie of you and your friends. This is a perfect drone for photographers with little to no flying experience.

Photo by Marco Verch

The Typhoon 4K is a drone with lots of smart flying modes. Similarly to the Inspire, the Typhoon 4K has landing gear that moves up to allow an unobstructed 360 degree camera rotation. It also has a similar flight time of about 25 minutes.

All of this combined with obstacle avoidance and folding arms makes the Typhoon 4K a fitting drone for any type of pilot.

Photo by Denis Loh

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Exploring the many uses of VR

By Christian Kennedy

“It almost feels like I can put my feet in the sand, and you take the goggles off and you’re smacked right in the face with reality” This is how Phil Warner, a 360 film maker, describes the rapidly growing experience, VR. Business friendly Austin is becoming the new Silicon Valley and as a result becoming a city full of VR entrepreneurs. This VR technology and content they are developing is and will the way people do their jobs and consume media. The VR content that Phil Warner is developing will appear in stores in home all across the world.

Warner has decided to film for VR for multiple reasons, one of them being because “it gives you the feeling that you’re actually there. You’re not there as a spectator. You become more of a participant.”

Warner came to this conclusion when he noticed people ducking when an object was about to hit them or screaming when they were about to fall off something. These reactions are how he came to the conclusion that VR offered an experience like no other.

In Warner’s words, “It becomes an experience versus something you’re just observing.”

Horror films are the genre that Warner believes will benefit the most from this aspect of VR. When someone experiences the horror of a jump scare they try to look away, but with VR you can’t. It’s this presence in the movie and the inability to look away from the screen that is strapped to their face that makes VR horror so unbelievably scary.

It is this unparalleled immersion that allows people like Andrew Caven to

use VR in hospitals to calm patients.

“VR allows the user to be completely transported to another location.

Often, patients would rather be anywhere other than a hospital or doctor’s office. The immersive and distracting capability of VR is what makes it so useful in therapy,” Caven said.

The feeling of being somewhere else allows the user to calm while they are in the hospital dealing with an injury. This method is also much easier to use than meditation or the imagination at calming patients. Of those people, children seem to be benefiting the most.

“Our most successful so far has been a specifically designed game to help children during emergency room visits. Emergency Rooms are the most promising group we are working with right now. They have a need for acute pain relief and distraction for

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their patients. They see VR as a cost effective way of making their patient experience more comfortable,” said Caven.

It’s the cost-effectiveness of VR that makes it useful for things other than calming patients. Andrew Caven mentioned how, “Doctors are starting to use it for training and simulations”, a popular opinion among VR entrepreneurs.

“I think there is going to be a lot of uh use for VR in training and education You can train individuals in situations that are too dangerous or cost prohibitive,” said the CEO of Ghost Machine VR, Neal Nellans .

“It becomes an experience versus something you’re just observing.”

Nellans owns Ghost Machine VR, a company that creates games and also experiences for those who hire them. His

company has created training experiences for their clients. But his company also makes games with a focus on combating VR gaming’s biggest pitfall, motion sickness.

“One of the first things I discovered is that one of the primary issues with Virtual Reality was a lot of early developers were making people uncomfortable or nauseous” said Nellans.

This led him to lead his company to develop with motion sickness in mind. His company’s list of games reflect this principle.

“What’s another way to have a racing game that wouldn’t make people sick as far as driving? I thought, well, put them out of the car,” said Nellans.

This led to the creation of his VR racing game, Gumball drift.

Nellans sought to curve motion sickness by reducing the amount of screen that was moving in game.

In gumball drift the ground never moves unless you move, and in his many vehicle simulators

the cockpit seldom moves.

This lack of movement is what Nellans believes aids in reducing motion sickness.

VR is not without it’s problems, but there are a wide variety of fields using it and improving it. All three of the entrepreneurs named believe VR is growing and will one day change each of their fields dramatically.

1. Woman wearing an off brand Virtual Reality headset 2. Man wearing the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset 3. 360 view of a rooftop San Francisco sunset

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Automation in the

Industry

A growing number of industrial robots utilize exchangeable parts that can be swapped out or modified easily so that they can fit into many different niches, such as painting, drilling, or assembly. Some robots are also starting to use certain, more felxible strategies of movement and rotation that allow them to imitate a human.

These factors could prove to endanger the jobs of human workers, however, they can also be used to amplify the efficacy of human work - it all depends on how they are used.

At the base of robots such as this one there is commonly a computer that controls the movements of the arms is the access point where movement and operation patterns are input, which allows them to perform different tasks if the need arises.

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The Efficacy of Automation Industrial robots can often be up to ten times as effective as human workers in certain circumstances, such as factory assembly of ordered pieces. Because of this, they are becoming much more common in areas such as assembly, where that advantage is the most pronounced.

However, in some areas, workers are using this advantage to help them become more effective in positions that require a person.

Industrial Robots and the World There are an estimated 600,000 thousand industrial robots in use right now, across 5 continents of the globe. However, certain areas use more than most, with over 50 percent of these robots being used in east Asia. Similarly, though Europe contains many of these robots, nearly all of them are based in Germany.

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A

s time goes on, people continue to discover and invent. Along with this discovery comes advancements.

Technology has advanced dramatically within the last few years. Cars are becoming more efficient, phones are becoming more powerful, and cameras are becoming more and more advanced. Robots can do some jobs better than people can. As long as we have internet connection, we can instantly look up the answer to almost any question you can think of. Every day when you wake up you can turn your lights on and open your blinds without even having to get out of bed. Technology will keep getting better and better, and the number of possibilities will continue to increase. Because of how quickly all of this happens, it can be difficult to keep up with all of the new tech. This is what inspired us to create a magazine highlighting some of the most interesting new technology.

The purpose of this magazine is to showcase some of the greatest aspects of the newest technology. We learned a lot while making this magazine and even making the magazine itself was a great experience. I am very glad that I was able to have this experience and that I was able to learn about something and then share what I learned with others. I hope that you enjoy reading this magazine and learn everything you need to know about the latest technology.

Madison Garofolo

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“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic�

- Arthur C. Clarke