[From DVICE]

Watch live sports from on the field with Japan’s 3D VR tech

By Evan Ackerman
Jan 8, 2011

For their 2022 FIFA World Cup bid, Japan promised us that they’d have 3D fields that we could watch live games on while flying around in virtual reality. Japan didn’t get the 2022 World Cup, but they’re making the technology a reality anyway, and here’s what it’s going to look like.… read more. “Watch live sports from on the field with Japan’s 3D VR tech”

[From TechNewsWorld; a 2:46 minute video is available here]

Avatar Kinect Puts Your Best Face Forward

Avatar Kinect allows for richer virtual interactions by tracking the actual facial expressions and gestures of users and letting their avatars express them on screen — or not. “With an avatar, people can choose which visual details they want to transmit,” observed UVa prof Kamin Whitehouse. The technology could go way beyond gaming — bringing dramatic changes to business teleconferencing, for example.

By Mike Martin
TechNewsWorld
01/06/11 2:50 PM PT

“Avatar” movie director James Cameron couldn’t have scripted a better keynote speech for Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer, who announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Wednesday that Kinect and Xbox will connect with consumers via avatars, transporting Xbox Live Gold subscribers into the chatty, motion-savvy, virtual world of Avatar Kinect.… read more. “Miscrosoft previews motion-savvy, virtual-world interactions of Avatar Kinect”

[From iSmashPhone]

They Work For Scale: Old-School Optical Illusion Propels Animated Fish Pond

It’s interesting that the current 3D/CGI boom is not only pushing technological advances in the screening room AND the living room — it’s also resurrecting a scad of old-fashioned, low-tech tricks.  If your last name isn’t Cameron, you probably can’t afford to design your own stereoscopic HD videocamera rig and shoot a gazillion-dollar sci-fi blockbuster.  However, as we’ve seen on this very blogeroo, you can get “3D” on your iPhone with a brace of mirrors, or make ghostly text float in mid-air with your iPad.

Now say hello to John Leung of AARIVE Design, who (in conjunction with ClarkeHopkinsClarke Architects) has ditched iDevices entirely, via the “Magic Carp-pet” (their pun, not ours!).  Using a fish-imprinted rug and a slatted coffee table (and the same moire-pattern technique as the aforementioned iPad text trick), Leung has created a virtual koi pond for your living room: walk around the table/rug combo, and the fish appear to be swimming placidly underneath the table. … read more. “Old-school optical illusion propels virtual koi pond for your living room”

[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 fighter that was programmed to respond to human thoughts. The Eastwood character controlled the fictional high-performance jet by thinking in Russian. Today, however, avionics designers are exploring touch screens, virtual worlds, 3-D moving maps, and even voice control in all types of cockpits.… read more. “Designs for avionics and synthetic vision link pilot with environment”

[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 one of the last great frontiers of science, and the trailblazers who helped to explore it were the victims of stroke, trauma or neurodegenerative disease. That is because the brain’s functioning systems become most apparent when they fail to work.… read more. “The Mind’s Eye: How our brains bring us a fragile virtual reality”