[From Retail Digital] Retail Technology Tesco goes the virtual reality way in UK Partners with Red Dot Square 3 Feb 2013 Shukti Sarma Supermarket Tesco is to use virtual reality technology to plan how their category ranges appear on shelves. With the new approach Tesco will no longer require physical product specimens from each of their supplier manufacturers. This will cut the planning process enabling significant time savings for their colleagues and suppliers. Tesco is the first UK retailer to integrate the technology of virtual reality company Red Dot Square into their existing systems and ways of working. They will…

[From The Bangor Daily News, where the story includes additional captioned images and a short video] [Image: Senior mechanical engineering student, Tim McGrath puts on a virtual reality headset in the Virtual Environment and Multimodal Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maine on Friday, Feb. 8, 2013. Brian Feulner | BDN] UMaine researchers working to shape the future of virtual sight By Nick McCrea, BDN Staff Posted Feb. 08, 2013 ORONO, Maine — Boardman Hall at the University of Maine is engulfed in flames. Fire alarms blare in the background and thick, disorienting smoke impairs your vision. But with the…

[From ExtremeTech] Augmented reality robot provides physical sensations from virtual characters By James Plafke on February 11, 2013 One of the most common tropes in science fiction is the ability to apply the image of a person over the frame of a robot, thus creating a visually identical copy of a human. Now, as Japanese startup Different Dimension Inc. (DDI) gears up to market a life-sized augmented reality robot, the world is one step closer to creating visual human doppelgangers. In recent science fiction, such as Minority Report or the “I Dated a Robot” episode of Futurama, fictional technology is…

[From Singularity Hub] Recording Your Life, Allowing Others To View It As Virtual Reality World: Lifelogging Written By: Peter Murray Posted: 02/10/13 It’s called Bad Trip, and it certainly feels like one. Alan Kwan has been recording every moment of his life since November 2011 and he faces the same problem that other lifeloggers do: what to do with all that video footage? Needing a way to organize the rapidly accumulating footage and to provide a way for he and others to easily navigate the data, Kwan has made a game of it. “Bad Trip” is an immersive virtual reality…

[From CSIRO; follow the link at the end for more information, including an interactive preview] Telepresence robot for museums With support from the Department of Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy we’re creating a mobile tele-presence robot to help virtually connect school kids and visitors in regional areas with our Australian to the National Museum of Australia. 25 January 2013 The challenge For many, a visit to a museum is an eye-opener, especially those institutions that offer hands-on interactive exhibits. But for even more people living in regional communities, museums are not hands-on; they are not even accessible, because of distance…

[From ChemViews Magazine] [Image: The pen of the haptic device translates quantum calculations into force feedback to ‘feel’ what’s going on in a reaction.  © Wiley-VCH] Feel Your Molecule’s Reactions DOI: 10.1002/chemv.201300006Author: Vera Köster Published Date: 17 January 2013 Source / Publisher: International Journal of Quantum Chemistry/Wiley Periodicals Copyright: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim Learning by Touch The human being learns best by haptic sensing. This means by touching something and feeling its size, contour, surface texture, weight, etc. Small children start to explore their surrounding like this. Experiencing chemical reactions in this way would bring enormous advantages.…