The artificial assistant has been around for some time now, since the mid-90’s Clippy for Microsoft Office. Today’s version is much more intelligent, and we helped it get there. Today we see them everywhere, as in-store assistants, as sales representatives and even as medical helplines. The chatbot has become so…
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Star Trek Technology in Real Life – Warp Drive #StarTrekTember
Of the many fictional and theoretical Faster Than Light (FTL) travel methods, Warp differs in that it does not instantaneously take you to your destination. In order to travel faster than light, you either have to bend space itself to create a wormhole or change your own mass to be…
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Third Party Viewers for Second Life – An updated look
It has been a while since we wrote about third-party viewers here on The Torch. A lot of old ones have been updated and a few new ones have popped up. Here’s what’s on the menu at the moment. Alchemy Alchemy viewer has been around for about 2 years now.…
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Zappar – The gateway to Augmented Reality
Those who have followed my articles knows that I personally thing Augmented Reality is the path to the future, rather than Full Immersion Virtual Reality. Or, to be more precise, I think FI-VR will be implemented through AR. I have followed the VR/AR technology advancement closely over the past decade…
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Gadget Show Live – My impressions
I was at the Gadget Show Live in NEC Birmingham and got a sneak peak at some of the best technology in the world. There are way too many things to talk about in a single article, which is why I’ve decided to make a number of spotlight videos for…
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Technologies that revolutionized Second Life – Shared Media Textures
Originally intended to replace the built-in browser in the viewer, the Shared Media Texture soon became so much more. Shared Media Textures, dubbed by users as Media Prims, allows a user to add a web page directly onto the face of a prim. It was introduced along with the Viewer2,…
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Technology that revolutionized Second Life Part 1: Third Party Viewers
Second Life today is a far cry from what it was when it first started. Updates in the technology behind the virtual world has completely transformed the way users interact with objects and other people, more than once. One of the biggest advances in technology in Second Life was…
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Intellectual Property laws and Virtual Worlds
Welcome to the Future of Virtual Worlds article series. In these articles, I will try to analyze all the things that speaks for and against the success of massive virtual worlds, such as Second Life and its future iteration, Project Sansar. Keep in mind as you read, that I am…
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Skype, Microsoft servers and the issues these brings
Monday of this week (21 sep 2015) the global community saw a strange thing happen. Skype and several other services were acting really weird. On Skype, all your contacts would be listed as offline, but you could still message them or even call them. You would not be able to…
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Does school computers help or hinder results?
At the moment of writing, there’s a big buzz on British social media, after BBC reported on a recent OECD study that showed no increased results in pupil performance when introducing computers to the class rooms. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) educational director Andreas Schleicher even goes so far…
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