[From 1UP.com (“Where Gamers Call Home”)] New Company to Make Full Body Exoskeleton Game Controller XIO will debut at E3, offering movement tracking and physical feedback. By Frank Cifaldi, 06/03/2010 In 2006, Nintendo’s Wii stripped down the concept of a virtual reality interface to an affordable plastic peripheral, finally bringing the VR promise of the early 90s into the home. Microsoft is simplifying things even further this year with Project Natal, which takes away controllers entirely in favor of a camera that senses your body’s movement. But Forcetek USA, a new player in the game interface market, wants to bring…

[From MIT’s Technology Review Invited Guests blog]   Friday, May 28, 2010 The Challenges of Virtual Hairstyling New system uses haptics to allow designers to comb hair just like they would in real life. By Christopher Mims Imagine that you had to design a virtual hairstyle by painstakingly defining the position and shape of every single hair on a character’s head. It sounds like a joke, but modeling hair in this way – with a heaping helping of post-processing for added realism – remains the industry standard for creating virtual 3D hairstyles. If you were an animator at Pixar or…

[From Business Insider; follow the links for pictures and video]   Google Powers Awesome Iron Man Flight Simulator (GOOG, NTDOY) Nick Saint Tuesday, June 1, 2010 A team of virtual reality enthusiasts working in Israel has built a simulator that recreates the experience of flying in the Iron Man suit. Via the Google Earth Blog, the system is built around the Google Earth Flight Simulator, which lets you fly around Google’s 3D representation of the world. This program is fed into a set of virtual reality goggles, controlled by a motion-sensitive Nintendo WiiMote attached to the wing off of an…

[Exceprt from a PressDoc press release; a 2:19 minute video news story about the display is here, a 1:18 minute video of the full display is here, and more building projections are available via the video here] Samsung gives famous historic Dutch building a new dimension with 3D Projection On Thursday the 20th of May 2010, Samsung was the first to introduce a large-scale commercial 3D-Outdoor projection in the Netherlands, at the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam. The public was able to view the addition of a new dimension to this historic building. On the adjacent square, visitors are able to…