NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

Virtual Tech Lets You Swap Bodies

Google Street View already offers virtual tours of Rome, Paris and London. But imagine if virtual travelers could feel the sun beating down on their faces as they toured the Colosseum? Or could feel the burn in their quads as they walked up the Eiffel Tower? Or could smell the old tapestries hanging in Westminster Abbey?

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If Ikei Laboratory has anything to say about it, that soon may be no stretch of the imagination. A part of the Tokyo Metropolitan University Graduate School of System Design, the lab is developing so-called "virtual body technology."

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Revealed at the Digital Contents Expo 2012 in Tokyo, the system will engage all five senses and make users feel as if they're inhabiting another person's body, the designers say.

Ikei Laboratory's system includes a vibrating chair that leans back and forth, a 3-D monitor, headphones, a fan for odors and breezes and foot pedals that replicate the sensation of walking and running. How taste enters the picture remains unclear. Perhaps it's on the tip of their tongue?

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"The chair will move to provide directional and vestibular sensations," Professor Yasushi Ikei said in a promo video. "The legs will move to create a sense of actually walking or running and a sense of moving in parallel or up and down, or to create a sensation as if the feet are touching the ground. Extremely large vibrations are felt when you are running, so it is possible to create vibrations from the shins to the knees. When you walk in the city there are various scents and breezes, and these are also recreated."

It will be the next best thing to going there.

via Gizmag

Credit: YouTube screengrab

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Vibrator Gives Hands-Free O-vation

Most hacks are done in the name of hacking with the end result rarely being put to good use, if ever leading to an orgasm. With a simple declaration, one woman took matters into her own hands by removing them from the equation. Her goal: create a hands-free vibrator.

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"I wanted to hack something I actually use: my vagina," writes Beth, author of Scanlime, a blog documenting her forays into improvisational engineering.

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Using a sonar sensor and Arduino software, Beth created a haptic device with two parts: a transmitter that wirelesslessly links up with the vibrator on the receiving end. Here's how she describes it:

The two black circles are ultrasonic transducers. One of them transmits short “chirps” at a frequency too high for humans to hear. The other listens for echoes. The 4-digit display gives another satisfying bit of feedback, in visceral high-contrast blue LED light. The external antenna gives it quite a bit more radio range than the original remote, and the exposed serial port on the left makes it easy to reprogram the remote using the Arduino IDE.

Additionally, Beth says the toy becomes more than the sum of its parts and begins to enter the realm of virtual reality:

This toy serves as a kind of analog bridge between two remote spaces: the column of ultrasonically oscillating air in front of the remote, and whatever body part happens to be in contact with the vibrator. Touch that invisible space above the remote, and the vibrator touches you.

In fact, it does start to feel like there’s a palpable object in space above the remote’s sensors. Move your body close to it and it reacts. Press into it lightly, or tease the edges. Flick your hand through it, or make graceful waves back and forth. You can use your whole body to touch it, almost like a big fuzzy vibrating cone floating in air.

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Check out Beth's tutorial video below to see what all the buzz is about. For those of you hoping the tutorial strays into more intimate territory, keep hoping. However, if you're arroused by dinnerware, then you might want to dim the lights and draw the curtains.

via Tech News Daily

Credit: Scamlime

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Humans Use Avatars To Talk To Rats

In the film "Avatar," humans are linked to genetically engineered bodies so they can communicate more easily with the alien Na'vi. A group of computer scientists in the U.K. is making that a reality –- but with rats.

The team, based at University College London and the University of Barcelona, used a system of movement-tracking software, cameras and laptops, along with a virtual-reality headset. The set-up also included a rat in a pen.

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To interact with the rat, a person puts on the VR headset and sees a virtual room. A camera with tracking software picks up the user's movements and duplicates them in a virtual room. Meanwhile another camera looks at the rat. In the virtual room, the (human) user sees another person, which is the avatar of the rat.

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As the rat moves, so does its avatar. The tracking software picks up both the movement of the rat around its pen and where its face is pointing and duplicates that in the virtual environment. So the human user sees a person running around the room, with his or her face pointing in the same direction as the rat's is.

As for the rat, it gets to interact with a robot that looks like a hockey puck. The robot has a bit of jam attached to it to entice the rat away from the walls of the pen. As the human moves around the room (both real and virtual), the robot duplicates the movement. The whole set up is structured as a game: get a point for convincing the rat to interact.

Mandayam Srinivasan, director of the Touch Lab at MIT, is one of the co-authors of the research, which was published in PLOS One. He told Discovery News that while the group was more focused on the technology and getting that to work, there were interesting questions about behavioral science that were explored.

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For instance, most users know they are interacting with a rat, even though it looks like a human in the virtual space. But what if you told them it was a human on the other end of the connection? Would that change their behavior?

Virtual reality like this can also give scientists studying animals in the wild a better tool for observing behavior. Usually, the only options are to mount a camera in a given spot, or strap one on to the animal in question. Radio tags can be used to track movement. But there hasn't been a good method for actually interacting. Srinivasan said it's even possible to envision using robotic insects.

Image: University College London

 

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Tech Takes Sting Out Of Swing

Two summers ago, I played on a championship slowpitch softball team. A few of my teammates were, and still are, real bat hounds. As obsessive merchants of home-run glory, they would troll bat auction sites for their white whales and spoke of their conquests like wine connoisseurs do over vintage bottles of Pinot Noir.

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If the Amateur Softball Association (ASA) ever certifies the following, I suspect it's only a matter of time before their bats are equipped with these: Dr. Daniel Russell's tunable vibration absorbers that take the sting out of the swing.

Russell, a number-crunching professor in the graduate program of acoustics at Pennsylvania State University, has calculated that vibrations between 600 and 700 hertz (Hz) cause the most pain when batters miss hitting the ball on the bat's sweet spot.

Trust me, I'm a professional shanker of easy outs off the handle or end of the bat, and doing so feels like touching an electric fence.

"Having identified that vibration I helped tune a mass spring vibration absorber" embedded in the bat's knob "that attacks that frequency," Russell told Discovery News. "We tried it out and did pre and post measurements and found that it completely removed that unwanted vibration from the bat."

Russell worked with baseball bat manufacturer Marucci Sports to incorporate the technology into their youth and senior league bats.

"I know a number of coaches with little kids who have used the bats with great success," said Russell. "Their kids aren't complaining about bad hits or that they want to quit because their hands are sore."

Much to the dismay of the softball-bat mercenaries I knew who roved the grounds of the Rainbow Softball Center in Columbia, Mo., Marucci doesn't make softball bats. Even if they did, I doubt my old teammates would purchase any.

You see, Marucci's pitch-man is former St. Louis Cardinal Albert Pujols, who left many rabid fans of Redbird Nation somewhat disgruntled when he dumped the Cards for big money in Southern California. If I know my former teammates, it'll be a cold day in hell before they step up to the plate holding anything endorsed by Pujols.

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But, guys, if you're listening, now might be a good time to pitch Dr. Russell your ideas for The Ultimate Softball Bat. He'll be presenting his research this Monday, October 22, at the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) conference in Kansas City.

Dudes, that's just a quick jaunt down I-70. You might have to play hooky from work, but don't worry, your secret is safe with me.

via Newswise

Photo: iStockPhoto

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Hands Do the Talking on Squeezable Smartphones

Ever squeezed your phone in a way you wished the person on the other end could feel it? Whether conveying frustration or love, a new smartphone prototype could help you do just that.

A group from Nokia Research and the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology has created a smartphone prototype dubbed ForcePhone. During a live call, users squeeze the phone to convey different kinds of messages. These physical messages, called "pressages," are communicated through both users' phones as varying vibrations depending on how pressure is applied.

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Unlike similar tech in development, ForcePhone wouldn't have preloaded audio-tactile messages. Instead, users could come up with their own. Let's say you want to give your loved one a cuddle at the end of a long-distance call. There's apparently a pressage for that.

The Finnish research group, led by postdoctoral researcher Eve Hoggan, presented a ForcePhone paper (abstract) and prototype recently in Cambridge, Mass., at the Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. Technology Review contributor Nidhi Subbaraman blogged that she got to try out one of the phones firsthand.

Only one of the ForcePhone prototypes was working at the symposium but when squeezed it vibrated in her hand like the other person's phone would, Subbaraman wrote.

In their paper, the researchers said their studies have shown that "such a system has value as a communication channel in real-world settings with users expressing greetings, presence and emotions through pressages." The testers were three long-distance adult couples who ended up using the phones to cuddle, express annoyance during a fight, and do other things not appropriate to describe in polite company, according to Subbaraman.

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Not to get all mushy, but I could see such functionality helping couples literally stay in touch. In different hands, it could drastically change a certain, ahem, phone industry as well. If only certain large company's reps picked up with ForcePhones. Pressing customer service calls indeed.

Photo: The ForcePhone would let you send messages as physical sensations. Credit: Nidhi Subbaraman, Technology Review

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Tap Your Chair, Dim the Lights

Imagine touching your headboard to adjust the room temperature or tapping on a wooden armchair to dim the lights. Spanish technologists want to introduce such seamless, sophisticated interfaces to wooden household furniture.

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The Spanish technological research center Tecnalia created the project, called WoodTouch, with furniture companies Grumal and Nueva Linea, electronics developer Elson Electronica and the lighting company Ekoleds. Details on exactly how it would work weren't available online, but the plan is for the furniture to be connected to heating, lighting and various electrical devices.

WoodTouch "uses the warm feel of wood" to change furniture into a new intelligent control system that allows us to control all our home electrical devices in "a simple and intuitive way," according to the project description. The button-free project is still in development.

Looking back at other efforts to create smart furniture, the results are mostly coffee tables that look like giant iPads. I'm curious about what WoodTouch will produce, since there's so much surface area to play with in wooden furniture.

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There are a number of challenges I'm sure will have to be overcome to make this furniture functional and attractive to potential customers, though. Tecnalia needs to make the touch technology safe and protect the furniture from overheating. No use adding a lights controller if it means lights-out for real.

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Another hurdle could be cost. While I love the idea of turning a Poäng chair from Ikea into command central, it probably wouldn't sell for an affordable price. Plus, there's the issue of making touchscreens too seamless. Don't want to hit the headboard and accidentally turn on the AC or all the bedroom lights at the, um, wrong time.

As a more traditional girl on the style scale, giving wooden furniture more functionality has a particular draw for me. I know a bunch of people who won't care for it, though. They like their technology shiny and metallic.

Photo: The WoodTouch project aims to bring wooden furniture to life. Credit: Basque Research

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Tilted 3-D Screens Coming Around The Bend

Whether for television or mobile devices, most 3-D displays have used autostereoscopic parallax barriers, such as liquid crystal displays, to give users a three-dimensional viewing experience.

However, a team of scientists, led by the University of Bristol, have chosen a different route. They've developed Tilt Displays, a new type of screen composed of nine smaller panels that physically tilt and contort to give the impression of depth.

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Collectively, its display surface is approximately half the size of a standard tablet, with each individual screen capable of tilting on one or more axes and moving up and down.

Imagine looking at an image of a soup bowl where the screen mutated itself into the shape of a bowl.

While Tilt Displays only exists as a three-screen by three-screen prototype, one could easily imagine a screen composed of tens, hundreds or even thousands of smaller individual screens capable of turning the surface into an undulating display full of tangible contour.

Researchers from the Bristol University's Department of Computer Science presented the the display in San Francisco this week at MobileHCI 2012, an influential conference in the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI).

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"The ability to tilt along multiple axes distinguishes our display from previous actuatable displays. Such screen versatility opens a range of opportunities for providing an additional integrated information channel to the user," Sriram Subramanian, Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the Department of Computer Science's Interaction and Graphics group and co-chair of the MobileHCI 2012, said in a press release.

He added: "These opportunities include collaboration, terrain modeling, 3D video that is beyond auto-stereoscopic 3D and tangible gaming. We can imagine many scenarios that would benefit from the physicality offered by Tilt Displays. However, we need to establish whether users can relate to the new experiences and advantages of using such a device."

via Eurekalert

Credit: Bristol University

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Armband Could Teach Williams' Backhand

Any athlete will tell you that training involves a lot of repetition -- doing something until it's in the "muscle memory" and doesn't need to be consciously recalled.

For visually impaired athletes, though, it can be harder to train, because they can't see well enough to know what movement they are supposed to imitate. That got Benedict Copping, an engineering student at Imperial College, London, thinking: how to transmit what a coach is feeling when they demonstrate a movement. This is especially true in swimming, where getting motions precisely right can shave an extra fraction of a second from the swimmer's time. 

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Copping and a group of friends, Jason Cheah, Idrees Rasouli and Shruti Grover, designed the Ghost, a device that tracks the movement of the wearer's arm and allows him or her to repeat the motions precisely. It also has sensors that detect the twisting and flexing in the arm.

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For example, a trainer might guide a swimmer through the motions of a stroke. The Ghost notes certain "waypoints" and stores them. When the athlete moves her arm, the Ghost will vibrate to give feedback to show whether the movement is correct. Repeating the motion helps the athlete get it right and also develop the unconscious memory.

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Copping told Discovery News he envisions one day connecting the Ghost to a computer via Bluetooth, which could then store the information and even create a kind of "virtual arm." With further development, Copping said the Ghost could even be built into the  tape that was popular among Olympic athletes this year.

While it was designed for paralympic athletes, Ghost could also be used by able-bodied people in sports such as tennis. Imagine Roger Federer or the Williams sisters storing their own racquet technique, and aspiring players downloading it from the Internet. Or perhaps R. A. Dickey and Tim Wakefield could finally explain how to throw a knuckleball.

Copping added that he came up with the idea while thinking about gymnastics. There's no paralympic gymnastics, and he started considering how people orient themselves. "I was struck by the story of somoene losing their sight, and how they lost confidence and the ability to orient themselves in space. It can be harrowing." That got him thinking about how people learn movement.

The Ghost is was developed at Imperial College London in the Sports Innovation Challenge, funded by Rio Tinto (which provided the metal used in the Olympic medas this year). It is also a finalist for the James Dyson award, which will be announced on Nov. 8.

via The Telegraph, Cargo Collective

Credit: Cargo Collective / Jason Cheah

 

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Sexy Microphone Dress Doubles as a Hearing Aid

When you think "sexy," you usually don't conjure up images of hearing aids. In an attempt to give assistive technology a hotter vibe while empowering the user, computer scientists created a prototype for a high-tech party dress that flutters when it detects loud noises from a particular direction.

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Appropriately named "Flutter," the the sculptural dress was developed by Halley Profita, a PhD student and research assistant in the University of Colorado-Boulder's Wellness Innovation and Interaction Lab, Nicholas Farrow and computer science assistant professor Nikolaus Correll. Hat tip to Ubergizmo's Tyler Lee.

The dress is equipped with numerous microphones embedded inside the bodice that pull in sound from different directions. The hidden system of microphones can determine the frequencies and amplitude of incoming noise, according to the researchers description.

"The microphones collectively agree on the direction of sound and, in turn, actuate small vibration motors in the leaflets to simulate fluttering in the direction of the auditory cue," they write. When those wings flutter a certain way because of a loud horn honk or fire truck blare, it signals danger. Small vibratory motors placed inside the back also help. The louder the sound, the more intense the haptic feedback.

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While hearing impaired women might still want to pair this dress with other assistive tech, depending on how they feel most comfortable communicating, it certainly does express confidence. It would be awesome if the dress could also subtly convey other info, guiding the wearer toward partygoers who are good conversationalists and away from jerks. For the moment, that might be asking too much from the microphones.

Photos: The Flutter dress prototype vibrates in the direction of loud noises. Credit: Halley Profita, Nicholas Farrow, and Nikolaus Correll

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Your Houseplant Is the Remote

Some of us talk to our plants. But what about touching them to turn on or off a television set? An emerging technology unveiled at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles this week lets users control electronic devices by touching their plants in different ways. We're about to know our houseplants extremely well.

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Dubbed "Botanicus Interacticus," the system is the brainchild of a group of digital media experts led by Ivan Poupyrev, a senior research scientist at Disney Research in Pittsburgh. Poupyrev and his colleagues were seeking new ways to interact with plants, and even give them a voice. Personally, I've always wanted to spend more quality time with my jades.

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Botanicus Interacticus isn't a regular touchscreen interface, though. An electrode connected to a special wire is placed in the soil and runs along the plant. This allows precise gestures to be detected and then mapped on a computer. The researchers say this won't harm the plant, especially not a fake one.

The setup comes from technology created at Disney Research that can detect touch and gestures with any conductive material, according to research producer Jason Hintz Llopis. The wire running along the plant uses a technique called Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing so the plant can recognize more complex gestures like hand sliding and varying amounts of pressure.

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Suddenly plants aren't just plants. They can be used as remote controls to change the channel or increase the volume on the TV. Or waving at it could adjust the room temperature. The entertainment possibilities seem endless. Your philodendron could even get in on a Wii game.

When all our yuccas and ferns get hooked up, plastic remotes and keyboards are going to be passé. Just don't try this with a cactus.

Photo: Botanicus Interacticus gives living plants touch and gesture sensitivity. Credit: Disney Research

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