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Remember
the Matrix where all you need to do to learn kung fu is to get it uploaded
to your brain? Well, that may soon be coming to real life:
New research published today in the journal Science suggests it may be possible to use brain technology to learn to play a piano, reduce mental stress or hit a curve ball with little or no conscious effort. It's the kind of thing seen in Hollywood's "Matrix" franchise.
Experiments conducted at Boston University (BU) and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, recently demonstrated that through a person's visual cortex, researchers could use decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to induce brain activity patterns to match a previously known target state and thereby improve performance on visual tasks.
Think of a person watching a computer screen and having his or her brain patterns modified to match those of a high-performing athlete or modified to recuperate from an accident or disease. Though preliminary, researchers say such possibilities may exist in the future.
Link - via Science360
Love The Matrix but wonder where you've seen those action moves before? Everything Is A Remix (previously on Neatorama) is back, and this time it has Neo, Morpheus, Trinity and co. in its sights.
Hit play or go to Link [Vimeo] - via Have You Seen This?!
Matt Mulholland, a vocal artist, recreated the soundtrack and sound effects from the lobby shootout scene in The Matrix. The only instrument that he used was his own mouth. Pew pew! Artist’s Website -via Geekologie
In this mashup by YouTube user ThreeFinchLynch, Morpheus explains the Matrix to the Dude, for he is the One destined to deliver us. The Matrix is, of course, that which ties the room together. Some NSFW language.
via Geekologie
Books, movies, TV series and video games are full of them: the men and women who are destined to complete Herculean tasks against all odds, usually something like saving the world from utter destruction and such. They usually start off as the unlikely underdog, but grew into their roles as saviors, champions, and heroes.
Geekosystem blog has compiled 15 of such unlikely heroes we usually call "the chosen ones". See if you agree with their picks:
#14 Neo
Over the course of three movies, we see Neo die and resurrect himself in Christ-like fashion, become near-invulnerable by his ability to read the code of the Matrix, negotiate a truce with the Machines in return for the agent-turned-virus Smith’s destruction, and sacrifice himself in order to save humankind. His powers extend beyond the Matrix, as by the third film he is able to see everything, even in the real world, connected to the Source. The peace he creates does not last forever, however, as creators continued to squeeze the franchise for money in The Matrix Online. The game was shut down due to low sales before the end, but according to the Sony forums, the planned conclusion would indeed have meant peace between humans and machines, meaning that Neo ultimately did succeed in fulfilling his foretold Destiny.
Trevor Boyd and Steve Ilett remade the slow-moving bullet-dodging scene from The Matrix. Their official website goes into detail about how they executed the project:
By “frame accurate” we mean that we took all of the video frames from that part of the movie (that’s nearly 900 frames for just 44 seconds of footage) and reproduced them all in Lego.
This was time-consuming to say the least, taking us something like 440 hours to make the completed movie. At that ratio of 10 hours per second we figured we could do the whole film in about 9 years, so long we didn’t need to eat or sleep. As a full-time job then, we’re probably looking at 25 years or so. No thanks.
Early in the piece we decided we wanted to do everything “in camera”. No wire-removal, no special effects, no crazy Photoshop tricks. We pretty much regret this now, but I guess it gives us bragging rights of some sort. We did do some colour correction and image stabilising, and at one point we edited a very small number of frames in one scene so that some minor background shake was taken out, but that’s it.
Official Website via io9
