Student Uses Oculus Rift and Kinect To Create Body Swap Illusion 88
kkleiner writes Using an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, Microsoft Kinect, a camera, and a handful of electrical stimulators, a London student's virtual reality system is showing users what it's like to swap bodies. Looking down, they see someone else's arms and legs; looking out, it's someone else's point of view; and when they move their limbs, the body they see does the same (those electrical stimulators mildly shock muscles to force a friend to mirror the user's movements). It's an imperfect system, but a fascinating example of the power of virtual reality. What else might we use VR systems for? Perhaps they'll prove useful in training or therapeutic situations? Or what about with robots, which would be easier to inhabit and control than another human? The virtual body swap may never fully catch on, but generally, virtual reality will likely prove useful for more than just gaming and entertainment.
Strange Days (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fatsos (Score:3, Insightful)
Conversely, maybe we can now take snide, fucking smart-alecks and swap them into the body of a lardass so they can experience the humiliation and despair of being obese, so people like you can have a little more empathy for the human condition.
Meanwhile, every tranny on earth just got serious wood thinking about the potential of this technology.
Re:Fatsos (Score:3, Insightful)
The fat community does nothing but road block people trying to lose weight. So fuck them. They sit there with a poor me complex and rail against anyone actively doing something about their weight. It shows to them that they too can lose weight and they want nothing to do with it. So no. I took shit for being fat. Then I took shit for losing weight.
Anyone that has actually done this can certainly understand why I hate fat asses.
Re:Fatsos (Score:3, Insightful)
Also you act like fat people just keep to themselves. They don't. They aren't. They take up 2 seats + seats on airplanes for instance. They also have a fat acceptance movement going on.
if.they have a few pounds on
I'm not talking about a few lbs overweight. But unfortunately, when you say a few lbs, in todays terms, you now mean obese people. Not people that literally have 2-5 lbs to lose.
Re:Fatsos (Score:5, Insightful)
Calorie in Calorie out.
That's not how it works. Celery has calories (in the sense that burning it will generate heat), but has negative digestive calories (in the sense that pulling the nutrients from it and pushing the waste out will burn more calories than gained by the process).
Some people have low absorption. They eat anything they want, and don't get fat. Others are much more efficient. The efficient can eat according to any diet you pick that is sustainable for an inefficient person, and still gain weight.
You don't make fat from nothing, but some people can get fat on 1/2 the calories of someone else. Blaming the person with the efficient metabolism for eating "only" 75% of the other person (despite having a nearly identical hunger response), makes you a gigantic asshole.
Re:Fatsos (Score:5, Insightful)
I would still argue one point then: weight stability has nothing to do with internal absorption.
If a person is gaining weight that means their caloric intake is in excess of what they are using. If a stable weight is desired they must either reduce intake or increase calorie usage into a balance. Even if they have a high hunger response and can't reduce caloric intake they could do more activities that burn calories rather continue a more sedentary lifestyle.
The thing that really sucks is that moving around more ( burning calories ) is much much more difficult to start once obesity has set in due to how obesity affects the body. Stresses on joints and support bones are much greater, Oxygen absorption is generally lower, and depending on how obese the person is pressure on the diaphragm may make hard breathing even more difficult.
Between the difficulty in getting started exercising and the difficulty in breaking bad eating habits makes it very hard for many obese people to lose the weight. This does not excuse them from giving up before trying though.
Re:Fatsos (Score:5, Insightful)
"Fat? No, I'm efficient!"
Though I agree in sentiment, there's still the case that if you don't eat more than X weight of food, you can't put on more than X amount of weight.
The ones who are happy being fat, fine. The ones who are trying to lose weight and can't because of their "hunger"... that's the problem. Because it's hardly ever a celery that they pig out on, but chocolate and other high-fat foods.
It's still down, in the end, to a question of willpower. If you want to slim, you'll allow yourself to feel a little more hungry and - at the same time - find ways to cure the hunger that don't involve fat.
Your gut is just as adaptable as any other part of you - it can learn, given time. And though I don't want to trivialise the effort of losing weight, especially if you have medical conditions or even just suffer from the inherent medical conditions of being overweight (such as it being more difficult on your joints to exercise), there's still a willpower game at play here.
I'm sure there are people who struggle 24 hours a day against hunger and lose. And I'm sure there are a hundred times as many who win for as long as they want to and then give up. And I'm sure there are a hundred times as many again who say they are trying, and don't even bother.
There are weight-loss TV programs where they "stalk" the contestants. They know they could be watched. They know they have cameras in their house. They know they have to cut down. But still they have midnight snacks and go shopping for high-calorie food (if it's not in the house, at least you have to expend more effort than normal to go get it if you have a craving!).
Not everyone is a lard-ass. But equally not every overweight person struggles against an unbeatable desire to eat only high-calorie food.
Re:Fatsos (Score:2, Insightful)
"We have a right to tell other people that they are living unhealthy lives. Because I now pay for it."
No you don't. Just simply, no, you don't.
Do others have the right to tell you that you must always drive the speed limit, for -them-, because they might pay a tiny sliver of the additional risk involved?
In any case, this is all moot. Studies have shown that the public costs for the "healthy" end up being significantly higher than the severely overweight or smokers. Statistically, the latter drop dead of things like heart attacks, cheap. The former linger on and on with enormously expensive chronic diseases, like Alzheimer's.
So, yeah, turns out -you're- the drain on society, ass.