reality labs

A clip from Charlie Brooker's BBC show Screenwipe showing how reality TV uses editing to manufacture emotion and narrative. It demonstrates how the same footage can be cut to give very different impressions.

Tantacrul analyzes how stock music in reality TV uses blunt, repeated tropes to manipulate viewers, comparing it to nature documentaries. He ties it to ideas of reification and cultural homogenization.

Keiichi Matsuda's short concept film depicting a future where physical and virtual realities have merged and the city is saturated with media and advertising. It shows an augmented-reality-filled daily life as a provocative vision.

A short Magic Leap promo clip of a whale breaching through a gym floor in mixed reality.

A 1973 AT&T training film made for new employees at Bell Labs' Holmdel Computing Center, when Unix was in its third version and running at 16 computer centers in the Bell System. It shows how users submitted jobs and used the center's machines.

A capture of Second Reality, the real-time audiovisual demo by Future Crew first shown at Assembly 1993, recorded from a 486DX2-66 with a Gravis Ultrasound. It showcases the peak of early 1990s PC demoscene techniques.

Home video from 1993 showing Future Crew members at Mika Tuomi's home finishing the PC demo Second Reality shortly before release.

Tested gets hands-on with four Meta Reality Labs research VR headset prototypes testing resolution, brightness, focus shifting and form factor, plus an interview with Mark Zuckerberg on display technology.

A 12-minute demo of the Alternate Reality Kit, built by Randall Smith at Xerox PARC in 1986. It is a simulated physical world in which users manipulate objects and program by direct interaction.

UploadVR covers a Facebook Reality Labs prototype that tracks facial expressions using cameras mounted in a VR headset. The updated version captures subtle micro-expressions for realistic avatars.

Dodoid gives an in-depth look at an SGI Onyx RealityEngine2, a $250,000 graphics supercomputer from 1993, covering its history, a physical overview, a teardown and some demos and games.

A one-minute clip of Steve Jobs at the D3 conference in 2005 discussing virtual reality. He compares VR headsets to headphones for video, an analogy later applied to Apple's Vision Pro.

A scene from the film Disclosure showing its virtual reality interface, including a 3D file system visualizer.

Anthony Marcar describes lessons from three years of using Clojure at WalmartLabs, including scaling a team and a large multi-project codebase in an enterprise setting.

Henry Segerman and collaborators demonstrate virtual reality experiences in non-Euclidean spaces, including hyperbolic and mixed hyperbolic-Euclidean geometry. The browser-based demos let viewers move through these spaces and show how strange the geometry feels from inside.

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues in this TED talk that evolution shaped perception to track fitness rather than truth. He uses evolutionary simulations and the Australian jewel beetle as examples.

Rick Roderick's 1993 lecture on Baudrillard, the last in his series The Self Under Siege. It covers hyperreality, simulation and what Baudrillard calls fatal strategies.

Computerphile with Professor Brailsford on how a 1979 Bell Labs team reverse engineered a Linotron 202 phototypesetter over a summer to get high-quality print output. It covers typesetting history and the later 2013 rebuild of the famous vacation memo.

Adam Savage's Tested spends a week with the Magic Leap One developer kit. They dig into the hardware, display technology, user experience and launch apps.

A one-minute demo of Safespaces, an open source 3D and VR desktop built on the Arcan project.

Guardian News coverage of Mark Zuckerberg's 2021 reveal of Facebook's metaverse plans alongside the rename to Meta. It shows a glimpse of the VR and AR vision.

A one-minute demo of Word Lens, an iPhone app that translates printed text in real time by overlaying the translation on the camera view. It was later folded into Google Translate.

Magic Leap's original 2015 concept video, made with Weta Workshop, showing what mixed reality could look like. It was posted to explain the company's goals to outsiders.

The first part of Welch Labs' series on imaginary numbers, presenting them as the natural extension of the number line into two dimensions. It covers the history and the math with strong visuals.

The first of a short series by Welch Labs on building a complete neural network in Python. It introduces the data and the architecture of a simple network before later parts cover forward propagation, gradient descent, and backpropagation.

Lex Fridman has a three-hour conversation with Joscha Bach about artificial consciousness, the workings of the mind, intelligence and the possibly simulated nature of reality.

Redis Labs and Tim Davis present RedisGraph, which uses GraphBLAS to treat graph queries in Cypher as sparse linear algebra for lower latency.

A 60fps capture of Future Crew's 1993 MS-DOS demo Second Reality, one of the best-known pieces of the demoscene. It runs about 16 minutes of real-time graphics and music effects on PC hardware of the era.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth argues in this TED talk that perception is a controlled hallucination: the brain constantly predicts the world and our shared agreement is what we call reality. He also touches on the construction of the self.

A guest video by Welch Labs on 3Blue1Brown explaining how text-to-image and video models work. It covers CLIP, shared embedding spaces, diffusion models (DDPM, DDIM), conditioning, guidance and negative prompts.

A one-minute clip of Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents' Dinner delivering the line that reality has a well-known liberal bias.

A Bell Labs film in which Dr. J.N. Shive uses a mechanical wave machine to demonstrate reflection, standing waves, resonance and impedance matching. He includes some equations but relies mostly on real-world examples a layperson can follow.

R. Stanley Williams of HP Labs gives a keynote on the memristor, covering the physics, crossbar computation, and potential for memory and new computer architectures.

Brian Kernighan interviews Unix co-creator Ken Thompson at VCF East 2019. Thompson recounts how he was hired at Bell Labs, writing the Unix kernel in about three weeks, the origins of B and TMG, pipes, and other anecdotes.

Richard Hamming's 1995 recording of his talk 'You and Your Research', drawn from his graduate engineering course. He discusses how great scientists pick important problems and build careers, drawing on his years at Bell Labs.

A 1982 Bell Labs film hosted by Victor Vyssotsky on the origins and design philosophy of the UNIX operating system, with appearances by Kernighan, Thompson and Ritchie. It shows pipes, filters and a shell one-liner spell checker being built.

BobbyBroccoli's first of three parts on Jan Hendrik Schon, the Bell Labs postdoc whose fabricated organic semiconductor results nearly won a Nobel Prize. It covers his rise and the context around Bell Labs.

A 1982 AT&T Bell Labs film for students about the Unix system and how it can be used practically. It includes Lorinda Cherry building a talking calculator by piping together Unix commands, and a spell checker made from Unix utilities.

PBS Space Time explains Noether's theorem: conservation laws such as energy and momentum are consequences of deeper symmetries. It also covers why those laws hold only under certain conditions.

David MacKay's TEDxWarwick talk uses basic arithmetic to show how much land and energy renewables would need to power a country like the UK. It explains the limits of sustainable options and why they should still be pursued.