[From Military & Aerospace Electronics; also see an article in Flying magazine in which a pilot describes his experience using Honeywell’s Smartview system] Designs for avionics and synthetic vision rely heavily on human factors research Jan 4, 2011 By John McHale People interact with machines in different ways — with their eyes, touch, voices, and even their brain waves. These human factors are important when designing cars, home theaters, and especially commercial and military aircraft cockpits. Telepathic flight control still resides in fictional realms such as the 1982 Clint Eastwood movie FireFox — in which a pilot stole a Soviet jet…

[From The Guardian] The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks – review Oliver Sacks’s study of optical dysfunction is a real eye-opener, says Tim Radford Tim Radford The Guardian, Saturday 1 January 2011 All reality is virtual: we reconstruct the outside world with a virtual reality headset pre-installed at birth and tuned by experience so perfectly that most of the time we are barely conscious of it. The optic nerve delivers data from a blitz of electromagnetic wavelengths: the brain filters the information, selects the focus, interprets the imagery and projects it on to an interior screen. This unthinking process is…

[From The University of Derby Connected Online] [Image: A 3D image produced by the VisiDeck system] Games Technology ‘Virtually’ Advances Architecture 7 December 2010  Architects’ two-dimensional plans are set to be turned into highly realistic three dimensional (3D) virtual worlds you can walk through and interact with, thanks to a joint hi-tech project between the University of Derby and one of its graduates. Tony Coates, a student on the University’s BSc (Hons) Architectural Technology and Practice degree course, and software consultant Andy Yelland, who worked on the popular computer game Spiderman 2 among others, established company VisiDeck Ltd. The company…