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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Sinful Robot: XXX Virtual Reality

If news of the impending apocalypse has you bummed that you won't get to sow your wild oats at Yub-Yum, Amsterdam's android sex club of the future, here's something else you're going to miss out on: Sinful Robot. Hyped as the "world's most immersive virtual reality erotic encounter," Sinful Robot, created by a California startup of the same name, is being designed for the forthcoming Oculus Rift virtual reality headset.

In what I imagine to be a cross between the Batsignal and the Mudflap girl, Sinful Robot put out a call for 3D programmers, artists and animators on Reddit, also known as the Gotham of the Internet.

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Among a lascivious list of, ahem, open positions at Sinful Robot is a 3D character artist. Applicants should be engorged with "expert knowledge of creating realistic female models" and have the ability to create orgasmic "organic models." For those with expert knowledge on the male anatomy, it's not yet clear where you measure up.

Reddit user Illusionweaver69, who claims to be Sinful Robot's co-founder Jeroen Van den Bosch, is giddy about what Oculus Rift and the future holds.

"I have been waiting for many years for technology to become immersive enough so it [can] trick your brain to accept the virtual reality as reality, but the Rift does really do that," he wrote. "So now we can finally make an erotic adventure game that will actually be exciting!"

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However, if the Earth does open up like a split piece of fruit on Friday, only to reveal a fiery chasm of magma and crumbling rock, here's a good soundtrack to usher in the end of days. "You Don't Know What's Going On," so take your best friend's hand, shrug, and leap into the great beyond.

via Gizmag

Credit: Sinful Robot

 

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Contact Lenses Could Send Texts to Your Eyes

Belgian technologists just created curved liquid crystal display for contact lenses, a novel step toward having augmented reality literally right before our eyes. They've got an eye on displaying text messages this way.

Unlike previous developments in contact lens displays, University of Ghent researcher Jelle De Smet focused on creating a curved LCD that would be incorporated into a contact lens rather than embedding LED technology into one. This approach means De Smet and his colleagues at the Center of Microsystems Technology have a larger display area, according to the university.

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The group achieved their curved display by using extremely thin conductive polymer films that were integrated into a smooth spherical cell. Resembling an old-school calculator display, their first prototype can show basic patterns like a dollar sign that recalls cartoon characters thinking about money.

While onlookers could potentially see the symbols being displayed in someone else's contacts, the wearer would still have problems viewing them. As University of Washington's Babak Amir Parviz explained to me last year while describing his computerized contact lens development, humans have a mimimum focal distance for even seeing a single pixel.

The Belgian team seems to understand that limitation, indicating in a university press release that the initial applications for their liquid crystal-based contact lens display might be to help control light transmission in people with damaged irises or replace colored contacts, allowing wearers to change the color or pattern on the go. They also imagine these contacts working as adaptable sunglasses.

Here's a video from De Smet that shows the thin, curved display working in the lab:

Since the lenses can project images sent to them wirelessly, the potential is there for these displays to show directions or even texts from a smart phones. "This is not science fiction," De Smet told The Telegraph's Bruno Waterfield recently, adding he expects commercial applications will be available within five years.

Being so myopic myself, I'm cautious about the prospect of extra functionality in my contacts. At least if there's a problem with your phone you can restart it. Removing contacts would get really annoying, especially if you're on the road.

Virtual Reality Contact Lenses Offer 3D Panorama

I admire De Smet's enthusiasm about one day getting text sent straight into our eyes. Whether we'll actually be able to read them remains to be seen.

Photo: A prototype contact lens display shows dollar signs over the eyes, like a cartoon. Credit: University of Ghent.

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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.

Beamatron Turns Everything Into a Game

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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Beamatron Turns Everything Into a Game

Forget being stuck standing directly in front of a gaming console for some interactive fun. Steerable augmented reality called Beamatron can turn a whole room or space into a game.

Microsoft Research first started showing off its Beamatron system earlier this year. With a fairly simple setup and wireless controller, players can drive virtual, projected cars around a room. In a paper presented this week at the Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) in Cambridge, Mass., the researchers discuss using gestures and speech to move the virtual objects.

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The projected graphics react in physically appropriate ways, according to Microsoft.com editor Steve Clayton, who interacted with Beamatron last spring. "A virtual car can be driven around the floor of the room bumping into actual obstacles and running over real ramps," he wrote at the time.

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Instead of a mounted spotlight like the kind that moves around a nightclub, Microsoft researchers mounted a projector and a Kinect camera. The setup can pan and tilt, and as it does will build up a 3-D model of the environment in the room. Then when a tiny red projected car comes into play, if you're not careful with the wireless controller, you might make the 3-D vehicle fall off a real ramp or drive into a real wall.

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Much though I've enjoyed playing games that involve standing in front of a video console to navigate imaginary obstacles, bowl strikes, and mimic silly poses for points, there were usually friends stuck on the couch. Tech like Beamatron could draw even the most reluctant wallflower into the action.

Photo: Beamatron lets you steer this car all over the room -- and your friends. Credit: Microsoft Research

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Disney Patents Augmented-Reality Food

In the not-so-distant future, we'll be able to have our cake and eat it too. Disney recently outlined patent plans for augmented-reality cakes and other food products. This means the ability to watch interactive videos projected onto the icing just before guests dig in. Though Disney's plans are still on the drawing board, two methods are outlined for bringing this tech to life.

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The first involves a small projector incorporated into a cake topper equipped to store and display digital images across the cake's surface. Imagine a montage of photos or video clips from the birthday boy or girl's favorite Disney movie and you get the picture. Developers also suggest adding motion-tracking sensors so users could interact with the images. For example, users could wave a wand over the cake to make images of flowers bloom.

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However, for an even more mind-blowing experience that may make you think twice about eating the cake, Disney plans to role out the big guns: a computer connected to an overhead projector with depth sensors and motion trackers.

The added equipment may make the birthday cake look more like a science experiment, but the added sensors allow for added interactive elements on cakes that don't have flat surfaces. Entire digital worlds could then be mapped over the cake's rugged surface where waterfalls, snow-capped mountains and flowing volcanoes could be brought to life. Anyone could manipulate the landscape by using certain props to trigger stimuli. For example, a tree placed onto a field could cause a digital forest to grow.

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Disney envisions the augmented reality tech turning the surface of cakes into digital coloring books or story books where narratives are advanced by remote-controlled figurines. The patent mostly describes concepts using cakes, but explains that the tech could be applied to almost any other food.

Augmented reality shepherd's pie, anyone?

via Gizmag

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Home Automation On The Cheap Wins Demo

Does the world need yet another video-chat service, yet another app to share footage from your phone, and yet another site to find out where to go tonight? Most likely not, but that didn't stop many of the 78 startups making six-minute presentations at the DEMO Fall conference in Santa Clara, Calif., this week.

Fortunately, DEMO -- the fall's other big launchpad for startups after TechCrunch Disrupt SF -- offered more substantive fare. These four in particular caught my eye.

Ube: This Austin firm won the conference's prize of a million dollars in free advertising on tech publisher IDG's sites for its smartphone-controlled home-automation system. Instead of you running wires through the house and attaching controller modules to existing appliances, Ube will sell $55 replacement power outlets, plugs and $60 light switches and plans a Kickstarter campaign to raise more funds.

Each includes a small Android computer and all can talk to each other and an elegant-looking mobile app via WiFi for easy remote control and monitoring. They say their system will also talk to Internet-linked appliances like "connected" TVs and Blu-ray players, which sets this apart from Belkin's less-ambitious, but already available WeMo.

bandu: Boston-based Neumitra introduced this stress-monitoring system, which links a chunky-looking watch that measure's your galvanic skin response for anxiety with an iPhone app that tracks these measurements and indexes them on the map (presumably, TSA security checkpoints rank high). When you start to freak out, the app tries to put you at ease by sending reminders to the watch's screen to do things like practice breathing exercises, call your mom or look at photos or listen to songs that make you happy.

The company's taking pre-orders on the crowdfunding site IndieGoGo at $189 a pop, but its target market is health care for veterans and other high-stress populations.

MoveEye: Twin Cities-based Tarsier had the conference's strangest eyewear: a set of glasses that use two off-the-shelf Logitech webcams to track the movements of your hands and fingers (and make the wearer look like a complete dork). Tarsier's software allows those gestures to control the action on a computer or TV screen.

I gave it a test drive by playing a racing game with my hands held out as if they were gripping a steering wheel. It worked, although the system got confused when I tilted my head as the car went around a turn. Tarsier says this is two years from shipping (when the glasses will be lighter and smaller than the prototype I donned). By then, though, connected TVs with webcams for living-room video chats may get smart enough to use them for the kind of no-remote control I saw Oblong Industries show off last month.

Passboard: Passwords can look awfully frail as a way to secure our important accounts, but what can we use instead of them? The San Francisco startup Passban takes an all-of-the-above approach, allowing you to choose and combine different forms of authentication on an Android or iOS device: recognizing your voice, recognizing your face, checking to see if you're in a designated location, or entering an old-fashioned password, among others. This flexible setup also gets around the problem of you being in a place that's too noisy or too dark for voice or facial recognition.

Or people may be content to continue wrestling with passwords, with only a minority opting to augment them with measures like Google's two-step verification.

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Glasses Turn Face Into Avatar: DNews Nugget

Glasses Turn Face Into Avatar: At this week's CEATEC conference in Japan, researchers from Docomo unveiled a pair of video glasses that map the wearer's face and produce an on-screen avatar in real time.

A rear-mounted camera captures the background and projects it so that the avatar appears to be immersed in a a real environment. Most likely, the device won't be ready for the market for another five years. Check out the video below to see just how cool it is. via DVICE

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Hand Waves Control Wall-Sized Games

I took a break during a recent trip to San Francisco to control a computer with my hands. Not with a keyboard, a touchpad or a mouse, but by waving them in the air -- and not just in front of one screen, as you would with an Xbox Kinect setup, but in front of a wall's worth.

The occasion was a demo set up by Los Angeles company called Oblong Industries that spun out of MIT's Media Lab in 2006. Its chief scientist John Underkoffler had earlier designed the gesture-driven user interfaces that showed up in the 2002 film Minority Report, and now the company sells commercial versions of them.

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Using this "g-speak" system, which Underkoffler demonstrated before I tried it, requires donning special gloves dotted with targets for the motion-capture cameras lining the room. (The gloves get a little sweaty.) This allows the system to track not just your hand, something I thought impressive enough when I first tried Microsoft's Kinect, but individual fingers.

So, for example, you point a finger with your thumb up to steer the cursor around the screen, then lower your thumb to select something. Thumb-forefinger circles serve as a "select all" command.

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You can then toss items from one screen to another, making the data seem something that lives outside any one monitor. As Underkoffler put it: "Every device is a workspace where work might flow onto."

We used this to browse an interactive panorama of downtown L.A., select actors from a movie clip and drag them to another screen, and inspect a visualization of flight traffic across the nation.

The next demo combined lower-resolution gesture tracking via a Kinect-style camera with position data sent from the accelerometers in smartphones to let us play a Breakout-style video game.

After that came a simpler system still, in which a camera determined my hand's position so I could browse an onscreen map showing earthquake intensity. This had a different grammar (if this technology takes off, we'll all need to agree on a new language of gestures): make a fist to click, then move your hand to pan or zoom in or out.

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My last stop was a look at Oblong's Mezzanine video-conferencing system. Its least-fascinating aspect was using gyroscope-enabled sensors to play with 3D models onscreen. Its most fascinating: dragging any one object, from a Web page to deck in a slide show, to the foreground on one monitor and having it show up on all of the dozen or so other screens in the room -- including an iPhone and an iPad--almost instantly.

Underkoffler called this "a natural fit for the living room," which may be true on a sufficiently large budget. The closest anybody got to naming a price was to suggest Mezzanine's costs' lined up with those of high-end "telepresence" video systems -- $300,000 or so from vendors like Cisco. Even substantial discounts would keep this a toy for the rich.

But I could see why this company has been fascinating techies for a while, in addition to getting business from Boeing and other industry and government clients. It also got me thinking, again, about how we could make more use of all the location and position data our devices gather.

And then I exited to a world in which people try to inform others by stepping through PowerPoint presentations, one tap of a keyboard at a time.

Credit: Rob Pegoraro/Discovery

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