Month: October 2014

Nintendo

Nintendo’s latest internal financial report came with a Tuesday presentation from company president Satoru Iwata, who took the opportunity to announce a new type of product being developed by the game maker: a touchless sleep sensor. (Wait, really?)

Though neither a design nor product name was announced, Iwata repeatedly described a forthcoming “Quality of Life Sensor” meant to sit next to a user’s bed during sleep. Overnight, the product will visually record “movements of your body, breathing, and heartbeat,” then upload resulting data to Nintendo’s cloud servers so that a corresponding app can analyze your sleep and offer suggestions for better rest in the future.

“Fatigue and sleep are themes that are rather hard to visualize in more objective ways,” Iwata said. “At Nintendo, we believe that if we could visualize them, there would be great potential for many people regardless of age, gender, language, or culture.”

The next wave of virtual reality may be largely driven by the gaming industry, but the technology’s impact is being explored and felt by many other fields as well. Join us at 1pm Eastern for a discussion of how the cheap availability of quality VR headsets is already changing the worlds of psychology and space exploration.

With us today are:

• Dr. Marat V. Zanov, director of training at Virtually Better Inc., which has used VR in the treatment of phobias and trauma for decades
• Dr. Albert “Skip” Rizzo, USC Institute for Creative Technology, who has been researching therapeutic uses for VR since the early ’90s
• Victor Luo and Jeff Norris, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who are using VR to improve Martian mapping techniques and robotic remote controls

Please join us using the link below and participate by leaving comments and questions for our panelists either before or during the event.