HTC has announced a new set of trackers for its Vive virtual reality headsets, including one that captures facial expressions and mouth movements. The $129.99 Vive Facial Tracker attaches to the Vive Pro headset. It uses two cameras and an infrared illuminator to record lip, cheek, and jaw movements and then translates that into virtual facial expressions. HTC says the product is “coming soon.”
HTC unveiled an experimental VR facial tracker in 2019, and it teased the product earlier this week on Twitter. A few developers, like the creators of social space Neos VR, have worked with the tool. Until today, though, HTC hadn’t confirmed a wide commercial release. The Facial Tracker supports 38 distinct facial movements, and users can also pair it with the Vive Pro Eye, a Vive Pro variant with built-in eye tracking. That could effectively translate most of a user’s face onto an avatar or into a motion capture system.
There’s also a new, third-generation version of HTC’s general purpose VR tracker. The palm-sized tracking pucks are 33 percent smaller and 15 percent lighter than the last generation, and HTC promises a 75 percent increase in battery life. They will also be released “soon” for $129.99. Depending on the exact date, they could end up competing with the upcoming Tundra Tracker — a smaller, SteamVR-based alternative that is expected to ship this summer.
These HTC modules offer precise, accurate tracking for body parts that standard VR headset sensors don’t capture. Several VR social experiences, for instance, already estimate people’s lip motion based on the sound of their voice. But the new facial tracker can directly capture how their faces move, reflecting expressions like smiles and frowns. Similarly, the VR trackers can be fixed to custom controllers or attached with straps to people’s legs or feet — which are often given rudimentary animation or not displayed at all in VR.
Unfortunately, the facial tracker apparently has limited compatibility. It’s listed as working with the professional-level Vive Pro line, but not the newer, consumer-focused Vive Cosmos. As VR developer Olivier JT notes on Twitter, it also doesn’t appear to support Valve’s Index, a high-end headset whose hardware setup overlaps with the Vive Pro’s.
Despite this, face tracking could become an increasingly important part of current-generation VR. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this week that Facebook’s VR division, Oculus, will prioritize capturing eye movement and facial expressions in future hardware as well as releasing more realistic virtual avatars.
This image shows the head and body of an Elysia cf. marginata sea slug one day after separation.
Sayaka Mitoh
Most animals can’t lose their bodies and still survive. Two species of sacoglossan sea slugs aren’t most animals. A team of researchers observed sea slugs that severed their own heads and then regrew their bodies complete with hearts and other internal organs. The action of shedding a body part is called autotomy. It’s what lizards do when they lose a tail for self-preservation.
Dropping an entire body is much more dramatic than losing a tail. “We thought that it would die soon without a heart and other important organs, but we were surprised again to find that it regenerated the whole body,” Sayaka Mitoh of Nara Women’s University in Japan said in a Cell Press statement Monday. Mitoh is lead author of a study on the sea slugs published in the Cell Press journal Current Biology.
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The severed sea slug heads were able to feed within hours.
Sayaka Mitoh
The regenerating sea slugs were younger individuals. It took about a week to regrow the heart and they had completely regenerated their bodies within three weeks. The researchers suggest there may be “stem-like cells” where the neck severs that allow for the regrowth.
The younger sea slug heads were able to move and feed on algae shortly after separation, which seems to have been the key to their survival. Older slug heads didn’t feed.
The unusual animals take a cue from plants. “The sea slugs in question already were unique in that they incorporate chloroplasts from algae they eat into their own bodies, a habit known as kleptoplasty,” said Cell Press. “It gives the animals an ability to fuel their bodies by photosynthesis.”
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The ability to regrow a body isn’t unheard of. Some species of jellyfish can regenerate after an injury. The self-decapitation part of the sea slugs’ process adds to the mystery though. The researchers suggest the action may be a way to get rid of internal parasites, but the impetus is unclear.
The surprising body regeneration process is already giving scientists ideas for further studies. Said Mitoh, “As the shed body is often active for months, we may be able to study the mechanism and functions of kleptoplasty using living organs, tissues, or even cells.”
The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office announced that an area realtor is dead after being shot in Jefferson Parish over the weekend. According to JPSO, the body of Joseph Vindel was dumped in the Garden District of New Orleans after he went missing trying to sell a bike on Facebook. Between 10 a.m. and noon Sunday, JPSO said Vindel met with Jalen Harvey, 20, at an apartment complex in the 2100 block of Manhattan Boulevard to sell a dirt bike. During the course of the transaction, the suspect shot and killed the victim. JPSO said Harvey then drove Vindel’s vehicle to the 2300 block of Coliseum Street in New Orleans and abandoned it. Vindel’s remains were still inside the vehicle, according to JPSO. Sunday night, JPSO was contacted by the victim’s family and became involved in the investigation. Investigators were able to determine Vindel’s last known location, and located the victim’s dirt bike at an apartment. Detectives found Harvey at his apartment and during questioning, Harvey admitted to shooting the victim and taking the vehicle to New Orleans, according to JPSO. JPSO said detectives are currently seeking an arrest warrant for Harvey for first-degree murder. JPSO said the gun in the incident was recovered.
JEFFERSON PARISH, La. —
The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office announced that an area realtor is dead after being shot in Jefferson Parish over the weekend.
According to JPSO, the body of Joseph Vindel was dumped in the Garden District of New Orleans after he went missing trying to sell a bike on Facebook.
Between 10 a.m. and noon Sunday, JPSO said Vindel met with Jalen Harvey, 20, at an apartment complex in the 2100 block of Manhattan Boulevard to sell a dirt bike.
During the course of the transaction, the suspect shot and killed the victim.
JPSO said Harvey then drove Vindel’s vehicle to the 2300 block of Coliseum Street in New Orleans and abandoned it. Vindel’s remains were still inside the vehicle, according to JPSO.
Sunday night, JPSO was contacted by the victim’s family and became involved in the investigation.
Investigators were able to determine Vindel’s last known location, and located the victim’s dirt bike at an apartment.
Detectives found Harvey at his apartment and during questioning, Harvey admitted to shooting the victim and taking the vehicle to New Orleans, according to JPSO.
JPSO said detectives are currently seeking an arrest warrant for Harvey for first-degree murder.
The head (left) and body (right) of a regenerative, photosynthetic sea slug.Image: Sayaka Mitoh
Looking like opened pea pods with a lustrous sheen, the sea slugs Elysia cf. marginata and Elysia atroviridis aren’t your average gastropods. First off, they’re members of sacoglossa, a clade of slugs known for taking the algae from marine plants and integrating the chloroplasts from that algae into their own cells, allowing them to get energy from sunlight. These two slug species are also capable of extreme regeneration; they can sever their heads and grow entirely new bodies.
New research published today in Current Biology describes this incredible feat of autotomy, or self-amputation. (It’s worth mentioning that the bodies do not generate new heads.) The discovery was made in Yoichi Yusa’s lab at Nara Women’s University in Japan, which cultures sea slugs from eggs to adulthood across generations to better understand these slimy creatures.
Sayaka Mitoh, a biologist at the university and lead author of the recent paper, stumbled upon the slugs’ well-intentioned self-dismemberment when she came across an individual in the lab whose head was no longer connected to its frilled, pickle-colored body. But its head was still moving.
“We had not thought they would perform such an unusual autotomy,” Mitoh said in an email. “This finding was completely a serendipity.”
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Once the team found one self-severed individual, they went about investigating why, and precisely how, that breakage occurred. These observations included attempts to induce a self-beheading, by imitating the sort of cursory nips a marine predator would make on the slug in the wild (perhaps, they guessed, the slug parting with its body was similar to a fighter jet pilot using an ejector seat).
The researchers tied a nylon cord around where the slug’s head met its body, where it seemed the slug was predisposed to make the corporeal-cranial split. They did this lightly enough, more akin to a too-tight necktie than an asphyxiating agent—but the slugs don’t have respiratory systems as vertebrates do, so no biggie either way.
Though the true nature of the autotomy remains unknown, the team was able to induce autonomy in all but one slug within a day. In the paper, Mitoh’s team suggested that autotomy in the wild could happen in Elysia atroviridis because the slug is regularly encumbered with planktonic parasites—perhaps leaving a parasite-ridden body behind to grow a new one is the easiest way of dealing with the infestation. The researchers found that the slugs could go days without their hearts (located in the body, just below the breakage plane), and, over the course of a couple weeks, the new bodies were nearly at full size. In the paper, the team posited that the slugs could get by without their bodies by surviving purely on their photosynthetic capabilities.
“While living for a few days without a heart might sound impossible from our human perspective, these animals actually breathe through their skin and completely lack gills,” said Elise Laetz, a expert in photosynthesizing sea slugs at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands who isn’t affiliated with the new study. “It doesn’t surprise me that they can withstand a week without a heart to pump oxygenated hemolymph (like blood for invertebrates) around their bodies while they regenerate a new one.”
Laetz said in an email that the photosynthesis-as-rations idea seemed less likely, as a lot of the mechanisms for kleptoplasty (that unique ability of taking algal chloroplasts and using them to harness solar energy) are located in the body, not the head.
“Chloroplasts are stored in the slug’s digestive gland, which is highly branched and mainly located in the body of most sacoglossan species. When the slug autotomizes its body, it throws away most of its chloroplasts and therefore most of the energy it could get from those chloroplasts,” Laetz said. “I think it more likely that the slug fuels regeneration by feeding directly after it autotomizes its body, as the authors observed.”
Much more research needs to be done to better understand how these wriggly little slugs eke out existence without the help (or hindrance) of the majority of their corporeal form. The new observations suggest there are a lot more questions to ask of these animals.
“We want to study whether other species of sacoglossans have this ability, to study the evolutionary pattern and process of such extreme autotomy and regeneration,” Mitoh said. “The function of the autotomy is also worth studying. Moreover, we will further explore the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon at the tissue and cellular levels.”
They may not have the charisma of a “corgi” giraffe or the zany DNA of a platypus, but the photosynthesizing, self-beheading sea slugs within sacoglossa deserve every bit the same amount of attention. The headless bodies will continue to be probed, and the bodiless heads even more so.
“Observations like those presented in this paper highlight the need for fundamental scientific research on all branches of the tree of life,” Laetz said. “You never know when an animal as innocuous as a sea slug has an ability that could lead to advancements in applied research.”
A massive brawl caught on camera over the weekend between a customer and Bath & Body Works employees in Arizona’s Fashion Square Mall has gone viral.
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Footage of the incident, taken on Saturday, begins with a woman fighting with a female employee, before another employee joins in, tackling the customer to the ground.
The woman shouts ‘let go of me’ as another customer and two other staffers rush over to intervene. The group can be seen fighting on the ground, screaming at each other and pulling hair, before the male staffer grabs one of the women and pushes her toward the door, telling them to ‘get out now!’
The man then forcibly pushes the woman involved in the inital tussle toward the door, repeating: “Out now!”
The woman tells the male staffer to stop touching her and says she isn’t leaving until she gets her purse, before being ushered out of the store.
As of Sunday evening, the video, posted to Twitter, has more than 173,000 likes and 30,000 retweets.
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The person who took the video, Genevieve Winslow, claimed that the incident took place after the woman in the video got into an argument with another customer after standing too close.
Winslow said that the Bath & Body Works employees tried to de-escalate the situation but that the customer wouldn’t leave. She also noted the woman was “loud and uncooperative the whole time before the fight started.”
According to TMZ, another video of the incident shot at a different angle reportedly shows that the customer involved was arguing with an African American woman before the fight took place and that politcally charged language was used.
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A spokesperson for L Brands, the parent company of Bath & Body Works, told FOX News that it is “deeply concerned by the incident in one of our stores” and that they are “currently investigating the matter in partnership with local law enforcement.”
Scottsdale Police Department spokesperson Sergeant Kevin Quon told FOX News that the incident was started over someone cutting in line and that it was “not mask nor race related.” He added that two female subjects involved in the fight have been cited criminally for the incident.
They were surrounded by soap — but still fighting dirty.
Two women were charged after a wild caught-on-camera brawl at an Arizona Bath & Body Works on Saturday, a report said.
The feud at the Scottsdale store began when one woman was accused of cutting another in line, before devolving into a brawl when employees intervened, police told the Arizona Republic.
“She was standing too close to the African American lady who had a child with her,” witness Genevieve Denslow told the newspaper.
“Race wasn’t the initial problem but racial slurs were called during the fight,” said Denslow, who recorded part of the fracas.
The footage, which was posted to Twitter by Denslow, begins with a woman and an employee exchanging shoves before another worker joins in and wrestles the customer to the ground.
“Oh my god!” somebody can be heard saying as the trio hit the ground.
Two other workers step in, along with a second woman who appears to coming to the defense of the customer.
“Let go of her!” a woman yells, according to the video.
The second woman then starts wrestling with one of the workers before a male employee breaks them up, yelling, “enough!”
“Out now,” the man tells the two women.
“She attacked me,” the first woman responds.
“You attacked her,” the man responds.
It was not immediately clear which two women were charged in the melee.
A brawl broke out at a Bath & Body Works in Arizona, where the employees of all people are the ones who stepped in … and proceeded to whoop on a woman.
Check out this insane fight that broke out over the weekend at the Fashion Square Mall in Scottsdale — where a middle-aged white woman is said to have been causing a ruckus inside with another customer before s*** hit the fan.
A whole fight just happened at bath & body works 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 I’m dying pic.twitter.com/ocumzj8G9f
— Genevieve (@gendenslow) March 6, 2021
@gendenslow
The person who shot this claims the white lady was standing too close to another customer and they started arguing … something she says the workers tried deescalating.
At some point, somebody put hands on the other … and all hell broke loose. You see an employee start to go at it with the blonde woman, while her co-worker rushes over to help … knocking everyone over in the process. Not too far away, another woman gets into it with yet another worker.
Eventually, a male employee steps in to break it up — and he orders the women who were fighting to get the heck out of their establishment. The blonde lady tells him to stop touching her, and then says she ain’t leaving ’til she can get her purse amid the commotion.
Somebody else got a different angle, and it looks like they shot some of what precipitated this. Sure enough, this older white woman is indeed arguing with an African-American woman … and you hear some politically charged rhetoric. The African-American woman calls the white woman “trailer white trash” … and it’s downhill from there.
Unclear if this had anything to do with it — but we should note, the main character here doesn’t seem to be wearing a face covering. We reached out to this location and BBW HQ as well … the Scottsdale store had no comment, no word back yet from corporate.
A special peace tribunal in Colombia has found that at least 6,402 people were murdered by the country’s army and falsely declared combat kills in order to boost statistics in the civil war with leftist rebel groups. That number is nearly three times higher than the figure previously admitted by the attorney general’s office.
The killings, referred to in Colombia as the “false positives scandal”, took place between 2002 and 2008, when the government was waging war against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (or Farc), a leftist guerrilla insurgency, which ultimately made peace with the government in 2016. Soldiers were rewarded for the manipulated kill statistics with perks, including time off and promotions.
Included in the 2016 deal was the creation of a special peace tribunal – known by its Spanish initials, JEP – to investigate and try crimes committed by all sides in the conflict. On Thursday, the JEP made public the preliminary results of its investigation into the “false positives” scandal, following the exhumation of mass graves across the country over the past two years.
A statement by the JEP confirmed that the investigation will continue, and will now focus on provinces in the country not yet prioritized in its probe.
Jackeline Castaño, whose brother was abducted and murdered by the military in 2008, felt that justice was closer to being served following Thursday’s announcement. While many rank-and-file soldiers have been sent to prison and dozens of senior officers have been fired, victims say that those who gave the orders still have not faced justice.
“We are grateful for the publication of the findings of the JEP’s investigations which show how widespread extrajudicial executions were during the period of [then-president] Álvaro Uribe, from 2002 to 2008,” said Castaño, who leads a victims’ group. “We hope that the truth will continue to come out.”
Movice, a collective of victims of crimes committed by the Colombian state, also welcomed the JEP’s findings. “The high figure of these crimes is not a surprise,” read a statement by the group, adding that it demonstrates “an internal policy” within the military “without any form of control or sanctions for those responsible”.
Medical imaging has revealed that COVID-19 can in some cases “cause the body to attack itself,” marking the first glimpse at what is behind mysterious severe, long-lasting and sometimes bizarre symptoms – even in those who never knew they contracted the virus, a new study has found.
From rheumatoid arthritis flares to autoimmune issues to “COVID toes,” there have been several reports of unusual and potentially concerning symptoms associated with coronavirus, many of which have been a mystery during the pandemic.
But according to a Northwestern Medicine study, radiological imaging has “for the first time, confirmed and illustrated the causes of these symptoms.”
“We’ve realized that the COVID virus can trigger the body to attack itself in different ways, which may lead to rheumatological issues that require lifelong management,” corresponding author Dr. Swati Deshmukh said in a release.
The study, which was published Wednesday in the journal Skeletal Radiology, showed that imaging through CT scans, MRIs and ultrasounds can help explain why some patients suffer from “prolonged musculoskeletal symptoms” after contracting the virus.
“Many patients with COVID-related musculoskeletal disorders recover, but for some individuals, their symptoms become serious, are deeply concerning to the patient or impact their quality of life, which leads them to seek medical attention and imaging,” Deshmukh, an assistant professor of musculoskeletal radiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a Northwestern Medicine musculoskeletal radiologist, said. “That imaging allows us to see if COVID-related muscle and joint pain, for example, are not just body aches similar to what we see from the flu — but something more insidious.”
In some cases, the imaging can even suggest a patient has had COVID-19, but otherwise did not know they had it, the study revealed.
According to the Deshmukh, experts look for fluid or swelling in tissues, collections of blood, or gangrene.
“In some patients, the nerves are injured and in others, the problem is impaired blood flow,” Deshmukh said.
Bizarre symptoms like “COVID toes,” which in some cases can last for months, have been reported throughout the pandemic, though are not as prevalent as other common symptoms associated with the virus.
According to the study, however, there have been a “surprising number of extra-pulmonary manifestations” associated with the virus, along with emerging reports of other abnormalities and musculoskeletal disorders, which “can have dire short- and long-term consequences.”
Such long-term inflammation recently made headlines after Gwyneth Paltrow revealed she has been suffering from certain ailments for months after her initial diagnosis.
“I had COVID-19 early on, and it left me with some long-tail fatigue and brain fog,” Paltrow wrote in a recent post for her website, Goop.
Paltrow said she had tests done in January that showed she had “really high levels of inflammation in my body.”
Researchers in the Northwestern study said they hope their findings will help doctors to properly treat certain rare ailments the can come with a coronavirus diagnosis.
“I think it’s important to differentiate between what the virus causes directly and what it triggers the body to do,” Deshmukh said. “It’s important for doctors to know what’s happening in order to treat correctly.”
