[From

Brainwave-controlled skateboard is totally mental

Chaotic Moon Labs’ Kinect-controlled skateboard was pretty awesome, but the company has managed to blow our minds with its Board of Imagination. Crave talks with one of the creators to find out how it works.

by Bonnie Cha February 23, 2012

Remember the Board of Awesomeness, the Kinect-controlled motorized skateboard from CES? Well, it just got more awesome.

The creator of this high-tech board, Chaotic Moon Labs, has come up with a new version called the Board of Imagination that works by reading your brain waves. That’s right, a mind-controlled skateboard. You simply imagine where you’d like to go and how fast you want to get there, and the Board of Imagination will take care of the rest.

It’s powered by the same 800-watt electric motor and Windows 8-enabled Samsung tablet as the Board of Awesomeness, but it adds an emotive headset to read your thoughts to set the board in motion.

To wrap our heads around how it all works, Crave talked with Whurley (like Prince and Cher, it’s just Whurley), general manager of Chaotic Moon Labs, to learn more about the technology behind the Board of Imagination. Read more on A brainwave-controlled skateboard…

[From New Scientist’s Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST)]

Virtual tailor’s dummy makes designing clothes easy

31 January 2012
Duncan Graham-Rowe, contributor

Creating the pattern for a new dress design can be fiddly, so Amy Wibowo at the University of Tokyo, Japan, is using augmented reality to make it simpler.

Six ceiling-mounted cameras are trained on the dummy and on two tools held by the designer, one for creating surfaces and other for cutting them. The tools and the dummy both have markers, so the cameras can work out where in 3D space they are relative to each other. As the designer draws and works on and around the physical mannequin, this shows up on a virtual onscreen version. Read more on Virtual tailor’s dummy makes designing clothes easy…

[From

Google Glasses To Augment Gamers’ Reality

Google is in the news this week not so much for their software and search offerings, but for their hardware, and whispers of an item yet to come.

According to the New York Times, Google is developing a type of Android-based glasses that will, in some way, project content immediately into the wearer’s field of vision. The glasses reportedly include the features users have come to rely on in their smartphones, like GPS, cameras, and the ability to play and record audio. The Times reports:

Several people who have seen the glasses, but who are not allowed to speak publicly about them, said that the location information was a major feature of the glasses. Through the built-in camera on the glasses, Google will be able to stream images to its rack computers and return augmented reality information to the person wearing them. For instance, a person looking at a landmark could see detailed historical information and comments about it left by friends. If facial recognition software becomes accurate enough, the glasses could remind a wearer of when and how he met the vaguely familiar person standing in front of him at a party. They might also be used for virtual reality games that use the real world as the playground.

Like so many of our “living in the future” gadgets and connections, the possibilities are both amazingly exciting and a bit troubling all at once. Read more on Google Glasses to augment gamers’ reality…

[From ALIZ-E project is at here]

Valentine’s Day – Time To Hug Your Favourite Robot?

On St. Valentine’s Day, we want to be close to the ones we love. Researchers from Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK are testing whether one day that special person in our life could be a robot.

Source: European Commission
Published Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Experiments have shown that children, for example, can become extremely attached to a robot playmate, but can the robot in turn can develop a bond with a human being? Could we one day expect robots to develop a behaviour that resembles human attachment? That is the question being explored in the ALIZ-E project.

Emotion is central to all interactions, including the way we interact with technology. The ALIZ-E project focuses on robot-child interaction, capitalising on children’s open and imaginative responses to artificial ‘creatures,’ where children have said they want their robot-friend to help with homework, to play or even cook.

To enable such self-sustaining and constructive interactions – ones that take place between robot and human over days and weeks, rather than just a few minutes, the ALIZ-E project is looking to implement memory systems in robots. The role of memory is crucial in human social behaviour. While social relationships happen in the ‘here and now,’ they depend also on the past because our current behaviours are influenced by previous experiences of similar situations. Read more on ALIZ-E: Giving robot companions memory to enhance the human-robot bond…