Month: May 2021

The art of mime has been around in some form for millennia, although when it comes to contemporary depictions in popular culture, mimes seem to be almost universally hated. But they still have something to teach us. Scientists at Johns Hopkins University have brought mime into the laboratory for a series of experiments exploring how the human brain fills in perceptual gaps. When a performer mimes an action on an unseen object, we form a kind of visual representation of that object in our mind, even though there is no physical object there. The implication of its physical presence is sufficient, according to a recent paper published in the journal Psychological Science.

"Most of the time, we know which objects are around us because we can just see them directly," said co-author Chaz Firestone of JHU's Perception & Mind Laboratory. "But what we explored here was how the mind automatically builds representations of objects that we can't see at all but that we know must be there because of how they are affecting the world. That's basically what mimes do. They can make us feel like we're aware of some object just by seeming to interact with it."

Firestone's research to date has focused on a couple of key questions in cognitive psychology. First, how do people come to possess basic intuitions about the physics of the objects around us? If we see a precariously stacked pile of dishes, for instance, we worry about the possibility it might topple over, breaking the dishes.

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  Spectacles worn by Snap content-creation partner Leighton McDonald. [credit: Snap ]

Snap Inc., the company best known for the popular Snapchat social camera app, has announced its first pair of augmented reality glasses that most people would agree actually qualify as real AR glasses. Like previous glasses the company has produced, they are called Spectacles.

Spectacles will not be available to buy as a mass-market consumer product—at least not in the immediately foreseeable future. Instead, Snap is seeding units to developers and content creators so the glasses can be used to create new experiences and filters. These creators will build these with Lens Studio, a Snapchat-specific tool that is already widely in use.

Spectacles enable new ways to view and create Snapchat Lenses, which are generally simple augmented reality filters that Snapchat users apply to the videos they send each other.

Enlarge / Google's mockup of its retail store. (credit: Google)

In a new blog post, Google announced its "first-ever physical retail store" will launch this summer in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City. The company says the "Google Store" will feature the predictable assortment of Google hardware like Pixel phones, Nest devices, Fitbits, and everything else the company makes, along with repairs, workshops, and tech support.

If you're thinking "There's no way this is Google's first-ever physical retail store!" Google's statement is a reference to a permanent, freestanding store. The company regularly does temporary, seasonal "pop-up" stores all the time around the holidays, and it has a small brand store inside of Best Buys in the US as well as similar deals with other stores worldwide, like a larger store inside Curry's PC World in London.

By our count, this is Google's fourth attempt at a freestanding, permanent retail location. Who could forget the first attempt, the Google Barges, a fleet of container ships that Google secretly purchased starting in 2010 in order to create floating retail showrooms that would presumably travel the world while pitching futuristic products like Google Glass. (What a time that was!) By 2014, regulators had gotten wind of Google's plan, and fire-safety concerns torpedoed the project.