[From The Atlantic Magazine, where the long article includes sidebar features]

[Image credit: Bryan Christie]

Mind vs. Machine

In the race to build computers that can think like humans, the proving ground is the Turing Test—an annual battle between the world’s most advanced artificial-intelligence programs and ordinary people. The objective? To find out whether a computer can act “more human” than a person. In his own quest to beat the machines, the author discovers that the march of technology isn’t just changing how we live, it’s raising new questions about what it means to be human.

By Brian Christian
March 2011 ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

Brighton, England, September 2009. I wake up in a hotel room 5,000 miles from my home in Seattle. After breakfast, I step out into the salty air and walk the coastline of the country that invented my language, though I find I can’t understand a good portion of the signs I pass on my way—LET AGREED, one says, prominently, in large print, and it means nothing to me.… read more. “Playing the role of human in the Turing Test”

[From The Oxford Mail; more information including pictures is available here]

It’s Google earth for RAF jumpers

Friday 8th April 2011
By Dan Hearn

RAF recruits are using a state-of-the-art simulator to learn how to parachute safely.

Students at RAF Brize Norton’s parachute training school use harnesses and virtual reality goggles to ‘jump’ in a range of different environments.

Instructors can simulate rain, fog and snow, and choose any time of day or night. Wind speed and direction can also be adjusted to make the descent more challenging.

Last night instructors praised the new £500,000 system at the Carterton RAF base.… read more. “RAF’s new state-of-the-art simulator trains parachute jumpers”

[From Fast Company; more information including images and videos is available here]

It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s … a New Seagull-Like Robot Spy Drone!

By Kit Eaton Fri Mar 25, 2011

A new robotic flying drone, styled like a seagull, has arrived on the scene. It doesn’t squawk, poop or steal french fries from your hand, but it’s an example of incredible bio-mimicking design that could be the future of airborne robots.

We’ve met a Festo robot before–a robotic manipulator/gripper arm with a design that’s heavily inspired by elephant trunk muscles–and so we know about the company’s penchant for using bio-inspired thinking in its robot engineering. Festo actually has a whole suite of innovations under its Bionic Learning Network umbrella, but the Smart Bird is the most eye-popping among them.

In fact the robot is so astonishingly convincing in flight it really could pass for a genuine seagull from a distance–a feat of biomimicry that Festo is clearly proud of.… read more. “Festo’s new SmartBird robot spy drone mimics real seagull”

[From The New York Times’ Bits blog, where the story includes a 1:03 minute video]

Augmented Reality Comes Closer to Reality

By John Markoff
April 7, 2011

Last week I wrote about how cyber politics and crime on the Internet had been foreseen with eerie accuracy by science fiction writers. For example, the computer scientist Vernor Vinge’s classic 1981 novella “True Names” described the impact of the Net long before most people had personal computers, let alone an Internet connection.

But it’s not just the dark side of the Internet that Mr. Vinge got right.

In his 2006 “Rainbows End,” he sketched a compelling description of the societal impact of augmented reality in which technology evolves to the point where high-resolution displays are integrated into contact lens worn by just about everyone. Combined with powerful lilliputian computers and broadband wireless networks, it becomes possible to customize visual reality by displaying a personalized world by transforming what the wearer is gazing at.… read more. ““Aurasma” iPhone app: Augmented reality that embeds moving imagery”

[From The Stanford Report, where the story includes a 1:56 minute video also available here]

New virtual reality research – and a new lab – at Stanford

Cutting down a virtual redwood with a virtual chainsaw may lead you to save trees by recycling more paper. That finding is an example of how real-world behavior can be changed by immersing people in virtual reality environments – a notion that is at the heart of work under way in Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab.

By Adam Gorlick
April 8, 2011

If a tree falls in a virtual reality forest, will anyone hear an environmental message?

They will, as long as they were the ones who cut down the make-believe redwood.

New findings from Stanford researchers show that people who were immersed in a three-dimensional virtual forest and told to saw through a towering sequoia until it crashed in front of them later used less paper in the real world than people who only imagined what it’s like to cut down a tree.… read more. “Cutting down a virtual tree may lead you to save trees by recycling more paper”