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Physics Rebel Aims To Shake Up the Video Game World
waderoush writes "Physicist Shahriar Afshar is famous as the designer of the 'Afshar Experiment,' a study first described in 2004 that called into question Neils Bohr's observation that it's impossible to observe light's wave-like properties and its particle-like properties at the same time. Not surprisingly, the idea met with widespread resistance in the physics community. While he waits for the controversy to settle down, Afshar himself is taking a detour into the video game world. He's now the president and CTO of Immerz, a Cambridge, MA-based startup building an 'acousto-haptic' interface that drapes over a gamer's shoulders and turns video game sound into (literally) chest-pounding vibrations. Xconomy was allowed to test the device, and has the full story behind Afshar's unusual journey and the company's hopes for enhancing PC and console gamers' experience of action/adventure/first-person-shooter titles."
unless it has application in the porn industry, it's dead in the water.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Immerz’s product, called Kor-fx ...
So anytime you get shot in game, Kor hits you with a bat'leth?
There is no "Neil" in Bohr. He's Danish: His Name is Niels Bohr, Niels Henrik David Bohr. Seriously, people...
...and unfit, overweight gamers. In the words of Jeremy Clarkson, what could possibly go wrong?
"Controversy" already settled by being tagged "BS" by major physicists.
839*929
Parent:
Chest pounding vibrations. That's all I'll say.
Product on thinkgeek:
...an impact-generating device that gives you precise pressure where it happens.
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
I hate when media makes up "impressive" headlines out of nothing.
The article may be worth from a point of view of a new controller but using terms such as "physics rebel" to make the controller sound like it will change the world (just like the "physics rebel" did) just pisses me off.
If Afshar's theory/experiment contradicts the mainstream physics, does this makes him headline-worth "physics rebel"? If yes, there are millions of wackos around the world with their crazy theories.
Foundations of Physics (where he published the last) may be a peer reviewed journal but its impact factor is very low (i.e. it is not a highly regarded journal) and it is known for publishing crazy (or should I call them rebellious) claims.
And they can't even spell Niels Bohr's name correctly...
This is fairly tame. I remember picking up a full aura bass cushion set for about $5 from a retailer, after they tanked. Geographically locating it on the shoulders isn't going to save it from being a bit of novelty nonsense.
I record my sleeptalking
Ten years ago, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a science court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune, physics rebels, if you will. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire...Shahriar Afshar
For those who care: some background. The experiment discusses the "duality of light" (light/particle nature). However, the question isn't "does light behave as a wave or a particle?" That's not really a question that needs asking, various theories of the propagation of light are well established and understood. Geometric optics treats light as a particle and is valid within the constraint that you're dealing with structures that are large compared with the wavelength of the light. The electromagnetic wave approach covers, more or less, all propagation of light and treats light as a wave. Finally, quantum optics is used to explore the interaction of light with matter. Here's where duality becomes interesting: working with the electromagnetic field as a quantum field, the notion of a photon as a quantum particle arises. The propagation of the photon is well described by considering it as a classical electromagnetic wave but the picture of a photon is useful when discussing it's interaction with matter (for example, the photoelectric effect).
In the case of the double-slit experiment, which is the basis for Afshar's experiment, the propagation of light can be described classically by treating it as an electromagnetic wave. However, double slit experiments work with single photons as well. Single photons are only described by quantum optics and when the experiment is done with prepared single photons, the interference fringes (viewed in the Fourier plane) can be considered a measurement of the momentum of the photon as it passes through one of the slits (where it ends up on the screen depends on what direction it was travelling in when it passed through the slit). Which slit it passes through is a measurement of the position. Position and momentum are complementary variables in quantum mechanics and cannot be measured simultaneously with perfect accuracy.
Afshar proposed an experiment to do exactly that, measure both. The key criticism, however, is that the interference fringes (momentum measurement) aren't observed, they're inferred, which doesn't really constitute a measurement. His thought experiment was analyzed quantitatively as well as was found not to violate the complementarity of the position and momentum variables. The issue is further obscured by the fact that the measurements are related to the spatial mode of the photon and it's propagation vector, which is related, but not quite identical, to a position-momentum measurement for a more classical particle. In any case, Afshar's work is interesting, but doesn't really tread the revolutionary/crackpot line, it can be analyzed well within the existing body of knowledge of quantum optics.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
Sounds impressively similar to the Aura Interactor which by the way is *very* old.
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