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Virtual reality and PTSD

virtual reality tape One of the little-recognized horrors from the Vietnam War was the amount of soldiers coming back from duty, only to be unable to reintegrate properly back into society, often leading to drug use and homelessness (at least, this is the stereotype I’ve grown up with – it may or may not be true).  As a child, there were always rumors of someone-or-other’s father or uncle or who was a vet and would jump at loud noises and always checked their surroundings for ambushes.  Of course, we also believed that the woods nearby was a secret testing ground for mutant animals, but hey – we were kids.

Now, in a bid to prevent this from happening to returning Iraq veterans, the US Department of Defense is attempting to treat Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with virtual reality as one of the main components.  The treatment is called “prolonged-exposure therapy,” meant to help people deal with traumatic memories by exposing soldiers to an environment similar to what they experienced in Iraq, but without people actually trying to kill them.  The details in the article explain it better than I can.  It’s not the first time this has been tried, but computing power is better now, and results seem promising. 

(photo via entro_py)

Future Imperfect

Toys of the Trade

Sven Johnson returns to Futurismic for another instalment of Future Imperfect.

Future Imperfect - Sven Johnson

Cyberpunk literature mirrored its era by speaking of the the fetishism of hardware; Sven takes a look at the state of play today, where what were once tools are now toys, and where complex design modeling software is available at the click of a mouse to anyone who wants it … as part of a video game. Continue reading Toys of the Trade →

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McLurkin and the Robot Swarm

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McLurkin swarm robotNo, it’s not the title of a new YA science fiction novel. James McLurkin is a researcher at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, which has to be one of the most awesome jobs I can think of.

He’s interested in swarm robots (which we’ve mentioned here on Futurismic before, sometimes in a military context), and believes that the future of robotic development is modular, because it allows researchers to design and develop complex robots quickly and cheaply.

Chris Kiick of Hack-a-Day went to see a demonstration of McLurkin’s swarm robots, of which I am quite jealous. Apparently McLurkin has over a hundred of these things, though he only takes about a dozen out for shows to do tricks like “circle-the-wagons” and physical bubble-sorts. Even so, my inner geek suspects it’d still whip the hell out of a night at the comedy club.

You can find out more about McLurkin’s research at his own MIT website; there’s plenty of video of his swarm in action, also.

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Making the Wiimote obsolescent – massive multi-touch Missile Command

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Did you ever play Missile Command in the arcades when you were a kid? I’ll bet you thought (more than once) “man, how awesome would it be if you could just touch the screen instead of using that trackball!”

Steve Mason evidently thought so, and has taken advantage of multi-touch technology to make a wall-sized version for the serious win:

I know we don’t do many gadget posts at Futurismic these days, but I couldn’t let that one pass by. 🙂 [vid via Engadget]

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Carpet-bombing in cyberspace – the case for a military botnet

Bombs in an aircraft bomb-bayMore botnet news, this time in the form of military fist-shaking bluster! Here’s an article [via SlashDot] in the Armed Forces Journal that suggests the US military apparatus should build its own botnet for “the ability to carpet bomb in cyberspace”:

“The time for fortresses on the Internet also has passed, even though America has not recognized it. Now, the only consequence for an adversary who intrudes into or attacks our networks is to get kicked out — if we can find him and if he has not installed a hidden back door. That is not enough. America must have a powerful, flexible deterrent that can reach far outside our fortresses and strike the enemy while he is still on the move.”

If I’m not very much mistaken, Colonel Williamson has only partially grasped the whole “internet as a non-locational space” thing.

“As much as some think the information age is revolutionary, local networks and the Internet are conceptually similar to the ancient model of roads and towns: Things are produced in one place and moved to another place where they have more value.”

Well, yes – things are produced in one place, sometimes (er, crowdsourcing?). But with the web, that thing can then be everywhere, all at once. Data is an infinite good. Colonel Williamson’s talk about roads-and-towns and “states competing against one another” goes a long way toward suggesting why traditional military organisations have struggled to combat terrorism – they simply don’t have a clue how it (or the internet) works.

But back to the carpet-bomb botnet – Colonel Williamson says that “[t]he U.S. would not, and need not, infect unwitting computers as zombies.” Instead, he thinks it best that the power be built up legitmately – which, again, kind of misses the point of a botnet, in that they’re designed to leverage an amount of hardware that would be financially impractical to buy, build and maintain. [image by TailspinT]

Here’s a better idea – how about a kind of “Milnet@home” project? Show your love and pride in your nation by letting it use some of your spare cycles for smiting the enemy! Come on – you’d trust Uncle Sam with your computer, wouldn’t you?

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