Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 14

Google Uses AI to Reimagine The Wizard of Oz (and Maybe the Future of Hollywood)

This past week, a closed group of attendees at a private Google event got a first look at an ambitious project that has been in the works for nearly a year to digitally remaster the original 1939 footage from the film The Wizard of Oz and somehow make it fit onto the 16k digital screens of The Sphere in Las Vegas. While the show doesn’t officially open to the public until late August, the fascinating backstory of how the team of technologists and artists managed to do it was just shared on Googl...

The Beautiful and Destructive Potential of Using VR on Prisoners in Jail

This week there were a few stories of questionably ethical uses for virtual reality headsets that raised some new questions about how it can and should be used. In one example, a California-based prison used VR on prisoners placed into solitary confinement as part of a general population reentry program, where incarcerated people “visualize scenarios like their first steps outside the prison walls, before working through their emotional and physical response with volunteers.” It is also being te...

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: The Sibling Effect by Jeffrey Kluger

As part of the celebration for National Siblings Day, I chose to resurface The Sibling Effect this week—a book written several years ago about the impact that birth order and our siblings have on our personalities and trajectory.

Reading this book, you may not agree with some of the theories inside or you may feel a bit uncomfortable at just how accurately they describe your relationships (either past or present) with your own siblings. Regardless, there is plenty of research today about...

“The Last Pot” Exhibit Reimagines Funeral Urns for Milan Design Week

At Milan Design Week (Salone del Mobile,) you might expect to see new designs for chairs or reimagined interior living spaces. A category that rarely receives any design attention from the most elite European design teams is the funeral urn. This year, The Last Post exhibit, a project curated by Alberto Alessi, “explores the funeral urn as a final container — an object surprisingly overlooked by the design world despite its significance.”

As one critic goes on to write, “The Last Pot refl...

How “Chrono-Nutrition” Could Use Metabolism Science to Change When We Eat Anything

If there is an optimal time to eat a particular type of food, then there are suboptimal times to have it too. The problem is, we don’t usually know this sort of detail about the things we consume. Yet scientists already know that “nutrient sequencing”—the act of eating fiber-rich vegetables first during a meal, followed by protein and fats, and then carbohydrates—is becoming a recognized way for people with Type 2 diabetes to better manage their blood-sugar levels. Now there is a startup called ...

The Backstory of How Dubai’s Museum of the Future Was Imagined Is Worth Reading

Thirty percent of the visitors to the Museum of the Future in Dubai have never been to a museum before. That’s just one of the fascinating insights that emerge from this interview VentureBeat did with the museum’s creative director Brendan McGetrick about the inspiration and creation of the immersive experiences that are inside the museum. I was lucky to visit for the first time back in January and even as someone who has been to many museums and spends a lot of time thinking about and talking a...

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Imaginable by Jane McGonigal

If you are a fan of thought exercises and a visual process to help you imagine the future, this is the perfect book for you. I first read it several years ago when it came out and was immediately captivated. The writing is excellent but the way that the concepts are broken down into easy methods anyone can use in a meeting or brainstorm to see the future and prepare is a masterclass in a book for how to run an effective workshop. Whether that’s your goal, or you just want to open your mind to se...

How NFL’s New 8k “Hawk Eye” Cameras Offer an Interesting Model for Truth and Verification

Rather than relying on chains and the human eye to measure whether teams have achieved a first down in NFL football games next season, the league is turning to Sony 8k cameras with a new technology known as “hawk eye” to precisely and instantly measure whether a first down was achieved. The idea is to verify the exact line and distance required by high-definition cameras to remove the possibility of human error and make the game faster.

Yesterday was also International Fact- Checking day,...

The Sad Retreat of April Fool’s Day and What It Reveals About Our Culture

The week of April Fool’s Day, I regularly look forward to reading about all the brands taking risks, exploring their fun sides and doing something with personality. This used to be one of my favorite weeks to read all the advertising trade publications. This year wasn’t as much fun. Much of the coverage seemed to center on spotlighting the cringiest pranks or the weirdest ideas or even offering a historical look back at failed efforts from previous years. So much negativity. Hardly any brands th...

Artificial Naps, Precognitive Dreams and the Evolving Science of Sleep

What if you could get the restful benefits of taking a nap without actually taking a nap? Researchers studying the health effects of “power naps” recently performed a test on monkeys where they simulated the brain activity of sleeping with electrical pulses. The monkeys showed the same cognitive benefits that come from sleeping without the nap. The findings suggest there may be new ways to treat sleep disorders but also may lead to an “artificial nap” industry where pods or venues offer this sor...