[From Mashable (“The Social Media Guide“)]    Augmented Reality Billboard Puts Passersby in a Street Fight Barb Dybwad May 1, 2010 We’ve seen a number of creative uses for augmented reality recently, from Iron Man to virtual pets and even tattoos. An interactive billboard in the Netherlands brings a powerful new example to the category by putting passersby in the middle of a virtual street fight. The Dutch government created the billboard to address a pressing problem for public employees, who are often the targets of aggression and outright violence when performing their daily service duties. The problem is compounded…

[From The Wall Street Journal via Yahoo! Finance] UPS Thinks Out of the Box on Driver Training by Jennifer Levitz Wednesday, April 7, 2010  Vexed that some 30% of driver candidates flunk its traditional training, United Parcel Service Inc. (UPS) is moving beyond the classroom to ready its rookies for the road. In the place of books and lectures are videogames, a contraption that simulates walking on ice and an obstacle course around an artificial village.…

[From Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog (“What’s Next in National Security”)] Pentagon: Boost Training With Computer-Troop Mind Meld By Katie Drummond April 27, 2010 The Pentagon is looking to better train its troops — by scanning their minds as they play video games. Adaptive, mind-reading computer systems have been a work-in-progress among military agencies for at least a decade. In 2000, far-out research agency Darpa launched “Augmented Cognition,” a program that sought to develop computers that used EEG scans to adjust how they displayed information — visually, orally, or otherwise — to avoid overtaxing one realm of a troop’s cognition. The…

[From the Massively blog (“Daily News about MMOs”)] The Virtual Whirl: Immersion, virtual environments, Facebook, and the conceptual hump by Tateru Nino May 15th 2010 Second Life is an immersive virtual environment. That is, it fosters attention and a quality of focus. You might subscribe to alternative definitions of the word “immersion”, but focus and attention are the sense being used when developer/operators talk about an “immersive environment”. They might intend one of the other meanings at other times – the word is a pretty slippery one. The problem is that for most general-purpose virtual environments (eg: Second Life), that…

[From MIT’s Technology Review Editors blog] Monday, May 10, 2010 Iron Man 2 Envisions the Future of Computing Interfaces Think the science in the movie is bad? The real science is in the interaction. By Erica Naone Science purists might find much to complain about in the newest installment of the Iron Man franchise, starring Robert Downey Jr. Admittedly, Tony Stark “creates an element,” and heroes and villains alike seem able to break into high-level computer systems with little more than the wave of an iPhone look-a-like. But I expect computer scientists and designers will be impressed by the movie’s…

[From TechNewsDaily]   NASA Launch Software Goes From the Simulator To the Classroom By Stuart Fox, TechNewsDaily Staff Writer 13 May 2010  NASA has converted the space shuttle simulator software used to train astronauts into an educational tool for teaching middle school students how to apply their math, science and engineering knowledge. The program, called the Kennedy Launch Academy Simulation System (KLASS), allows students to play the role of mission control engineers for a simulated space shuttle launch.…

[From The Guardian] Virtual reality used to transfer men’s minds into a woman’s body Researchers projected men’s sense of self into a virtual reality woman, changing the way they behaved and thought Ian Sample guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 12 May 2010 Scientists have transferred men’s minds into a virtual woman’s body in an experiment that could enlighten the prejudiced and shed light on how humans distinguish themselves from others. In a study at Barcelona University, men donned a virtual reality (VR) headset that allowed them to see and hear the world as a female character. When they looked down they could even…