There are all kinds of interesting controllers and haptic feedback experiments designed to make the virtual world feel more lifelike and immersive. One recent piece of research, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, could help out in this regard — and all thanks to a bit of trusty brain-zapping action.
It’s a twist on the so-called “rubber hand illusion,” in which a subject can be made to feel a connection with a fake rubber hand when they see one being touched at the same time as their own real hand is touched. The result is both a feeling of ownership and agency over the rubber hand. In this case, neuroscience researchers were able to re-create the effect without actually touching a volunteer — by instead zapping their brain using a safe process called transcranial magnetic stimulation.
“We showed that in healthy volunteers it is possible to induce the illusory feeling that a virtual hand belongs to them and that they can control it,” researcher Michela Bassolino told Digital Trends. “This has been obtained by stimulating the motor cortex so that it was possible to activate subjects’ hand muscles and to induce involuntary short movements in the subjects’ hand. If during this stimulation, subjects observed a virtual hand moving at the same time and in the same way as their own movements, participants [achieve] the illusory sensation that the virtual hand is part of their body and that they can control it. The illusion does not work if the virtual hand moves out of synchrony with respect to the subjects’ movements.”
Out of a total of 32 volunteers, 80 percent experienced the effect during two minutes of stimulation. Bassolino said that the effect may be achievable with video, instead of virtual reality, but that VR has the benefit of being a more immersive experience. Were this to be applied to mainstream applications, she suggested that it could be used for everything from video games to helping patients with sensory and motor deficit after a stroke, who have a reduced perception of their body.
A paper describing the work was recently published in the European Journal of Neuroscience.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.