[From 3DTV.com (important note: as of September 22, 2011 the original post at 3DTV is infected by a Trojan Horse)] MIT Develops a Panoramic 3D Motion Picture Camera System By Mike Lata on September 19, 2011 MIT continues to show interest in 3D technology in film; and has just developed a camera rig that aims to completely immerse viewers into the picture. The reason it offers such immersion is that 3D pictures being filmed with this camera will have 360-degree stereoscopic 3D. This will allow images to appear all around viewers. What is also interesting about this new camera rig…

[From Computerworld] Opinion HAL 9000 — not just in space anymore Your phone and other devices are quickly evolving into intelligent robot assistants you can talk to By Mike Elgan September 17, 2011 Computerworld – A few years ago, the Pentagon launched a program to create a fully functional HAL 9000 — the intelligent software robot depicted in the 1968 sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. If you’ll recall, the movie HAL carried on conversations in natural language, monitored the spaceship and communications from Earth and notified the crew about important events just at the right time. HAL could also…

Gamer Commute video brings gaming world to life Here’s a change of pace post: The short (2:17 minute) video Gamer Commute by FreddieW (Freddie Wong and Brandon Laatsch) provides an entertaining example of the merging of real and virtual, illustrating a form of inverse presence.…

[From PhysOrg.com] Reach out and touch 3D characters with RePro3D September 17, 2011 by Nancy Owano (PhysOrg.com) — Lonely gamers who have felt the pain of being separated by a screen from their favorite personalities now have a way to reach out and touch their game characters, and that new way is RePro3D. A group of researchers from Keio University in Japan have come up with a 3-D screen that lets the user, glasses-free, see and “touch” characters on the screen. The word “touch” is in quotes because the technology is about a 3-D parallax display with infrared camera that…

[From PC World’s GeekTech blog; more information is in a post on MIT’s Technology Review Hello World blog] Gigapixel Hack Makes Photos More Interactive By Elizabeth Fish, PCWorld    Sep 7, 2011 Have you ever looked at a particulalry stunning photograph and wished you could really immerse yourself in it? A recent project attempts to do just that, with the help of a good camera, a hacked Kinect, and an Arduino board. Samuel Cox, a university collegue of mine, recently held an exhibition for his postgraduate project, based on interactive photography. Sam invited the public to really explore the UK…

[From The Maine Campus; the VEMI Lab web site is here] [Image: Richard Corey, VEMI Lab Manager, (left) and Timothy McGrath (right) take part in a virtual world in Virtual Environment and Multimodal Integration Lab, located on the third floor of Boardman Hall. Photo by Paul Perkins] Students create virtual realities in campus lab By Rachel Curit Posted on Sunday, September 11th, 2011, 11:10 pm Several University of Maine students are escaping the tedium of school on a regular basis, although classes began only two weeks ago, by plugging in to virtual realities. Unlike students who may avoid the pressures…