Month: June 2018

Enlarge / Insert brain here (for a little while longer, at least). (credit: University of Queensland)

Today we present the second and final installment of my wide-ranging interview with holographer, former Oculus CTO, and current entrepreneur Mary Lou Jepsen. Part One ran yesterday—so if you missed it, click right here. Otherwise, you can press play on the embedded player, or pull up the transcript—they're below.

Today we open by talking about some astounding work of University of California-Berkeley neuroscientist Jack Gallant—he trained an AI system to infer what test subjects were viewing on a video screen just by watching their brains light up on an MRI. The AI’s inference videos are grainy, but they're often creepily accurate. Jepsen first saw his work several years ago, then presented it at TED as part of a main-stage talk in 2013.

fMRI technology was improving at a respectable pace back then—but nothing resembling Moore’s law—so the days of nodding off in an MRI and receiving a 4K-quality video of your dreams upon awakening seemed extremely distant. But if Jepsen actually finagles all she intends, they could be nigh.

Enlarge / Artist's conception of what Google's gaming hardware might look like. (credit: Ron Amadeo / Apple)

Google could be the next major company to announce efforts to stream high-end games from remote servers. Kotaku cites five unnamed people familiar with the company's plans in reporting on the existence of an effort to roll out a streaming gaming platform and hardware to enable it, alongside "an attempt to bring game developers under the Google umbrella, whether through aggressive recruiting or even major acquisitions."

The Information reported similar whispers of Google's game-streaming plans back in February, saying a program code-named Yeti had been in development for at least two years. But Kotaku adds that Google met with "several big video game companies" at March's Game Developers Conference and June's Electronic Entertainment Expo, looking to make acquisitions and attract support for the coming streaming platform. Kotaku's sources also suggest Yeti could be integrated with Google's existing YouTube services, letting users look up video walkthroughs without even leaving the game.

Since OnLive failed to build a successful business around streamed games earlier in the decade, there has been renewed interest in the idea of using high-end Internet connections to stream high-end games to cheap, low-end hardware. Sony has used its PlayStation Now to provide streamed versions of many classic PlayStation games for years now, and Nvidia's GeForce Now offers similar cloud-based functionality for PC games.