Author: easyfilo

Enlarge / In the metaverse the actual boundaries will be invisible, but the results will be the same. (credit: Meta)

In the real world, the idea of personal space is ingrained from a young age and enforced mainly by unspoken interpersonal contract and subtle social pressure. In the world of virtual reality, on the other hand, Facebook parent Meta is now using software enforce a four-foot zone of “personal space” for each avatar in its metaverse-style social spaces.

As detailed in a recent blog post, Meta’s Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues spaces now include a default personal boundary that “prevents avatars from coming within a set distance of each other, creating more personal space for people and making it easier to avoid unwanted interactions.”

Circle of Protection: Metaverse. (credit: Meta)

The system in effect sets up an invisible cylinder with a two-foot radius that surrounds each avatar; if user movement would cause two cylinders to overlap, “the system will halt their forward movement as they reach the boundary” without any other overt feedback. Two users will be able to jointly reach outside their personal boundary for interactions like a high-five or fist-bump, Meta writes. Having the system on by default will “help to set behavioral norms—and that’s important for a relatively new medium like VR,” Meta writes.

Enlarge / This song sparrow would be a better parent if the ravens would just shut up. (credit: Reed Kaestner)

On paper, predators and prey have a pretty straightforward relationship when it comes to population totals. A lion kills a zebra, so there’s one less zebra in a herd. However, new research suggests that predators might have a deeper, longer-lasting effect on their prospective meals: fear.

This fear of predators can impact the reproductive success of prey animals, a team from Canada’s Western University argues. The team, headed by wife and husband researchers Liana Zanette and Michael Clinchy at Western’s biology department, came to its conclusions after performing an experiment on free-living wild song sparrows. The study’s authors say there’s reason to believe that the phenomenon they found among the sparrows would be present in other species as well—at least in birds and mammals that care for their offspring.

“The presence of the predator is actually dramatically changing the behavior of the prey to a degree and over a period that it can actually affect the prey population,” Clinchy told Ars.

Enlarge / The atoms (center foreground) alter a laser so it extracts energy from a membrane (blue). (credit: Departement Physik, Universität Basel)

Way back when I was still working in the lab, there was a lot of buzz about something called “coherent control.” The basic idea was to take the principles of traditional control theory—the same theory that makes things like cruise control work—and apply them to quantum systems.

Some very cool ideas and insights came out of that early work, but it has taken a while to put them into practice. Now, we might be starting to see some practical applications emerging, with researchers demonstrating in a new paper the active cooling of a membrane using coherent control.

Measurement is bad

A traditional control system has something like a desired state, such as the target speed of a car. By repeatedly measuring the speed of a car and accelerating or decelerating, the control system can bring the car to the target speed.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Wi-Fi 6E is the latest wireless tech standard, but due to components shortages, it wouldn’t be surprising if you never end up with a Wi-Fi 6E router or other supported tech and instead jump straight to the next generation, Wi-Fi 7.

Components shortages, which have hindered the availability of everything from graphics cards to Chromebooks, monitor panels, and integrated circuits for Wi-Fi, have impacted Wi-6E availability and adoption, telecommunications analyst Dell’Oro Group said in a statement released Thursday, as reported by Tom’s Hardware on Saturday.

“Although manufacturers launched Wi-Fi 6E products in mid-2021, products are either not available or they are in very limited supply,” Tam Dell’Oro, the founder and CEO of the firm, said in a statement. Dell’Oro added that Wi-Fi shipments are “significantly limited because of supply constraints,” except in China.

Enlarge / Let’s see, you landed on my “Google Ads” space, and with three houses… that will be $1,400. (credit: Ron Amadeo / Hasbro)

Google is being sued in the European Union again over anti-competitive shopping practices.

The EU Commission ruled in 2017 that Google’s preferential treatment of its own Google Shopping product in search results was illegal, and it slapped the company with a record-setting fine of 2.4 billion euros. The penalty was upheld in an appeal in 2021. Now, price-comparison service PriceRunner is suing Google for the harm it says was caused to its business over the last 12 years. PriceRunner is starting the suit at 2.1 billion euros, but “since the violation is still ongoing, the amount of damages increases every day,” the company said. “We expect the final damages amount of the lawsuit to be significantly higher.”

In a press release, PriceRunner Chief Executive Mikael Lindahl said the company is suing Google for “the damage Google has caused us during many years.” But the company also sees the lawsuit “as a fight for consumers who have suffered tremendously from Google’s infringement of the competition law for the past fourteen years and still today,” Lindahl wrote.