[From TechNewsDaily; more information is available in an article in USA Today] Mars Rover Curiosity Tells Her Story on Twitter by Leslie Meredith, Senior Writer, TechNewsDaily 03 August 2012 “I’m in good health & on course for landing. Countdown to Mars: 3 days!,” said NASA’s Curiosity Rover on Twitter. Okay, so the rover is not really tweeting from space. The voice of Curiosity is the combined effort of three women, led by NASA’s social media manager Veronica McGregor, who told TechNewsDaily that they work as a “hivemind” to communicate on behalf of the rover. All three refer to Curiosity as…

[From Goldsmiths, University of London] Video game characters with natural responses to human body language Published: 06 August 2012 Researchers at Goldsmiths, University of London have been using theatre performers to design computer software capable of reading and replicating the way in which humans communicate with their bodies. Dr Marco Gillies from the Department of Computing has made virtual characters more believable by enlisting actors to teach them body movement. The actors interact with members of the public through a screen, and their responses to specific body language are memorised as algorithms by the software.…

[From The Lost Remote] Logitech launches TV Cam HD for living room video chats: Built-in Skype, 720p, $200 By Sharif Sakr posted Aug 3rd 2012 If Cisco’s ill-fated Umi video conferencing system had been more like this, would it have survived? Logitech is about to find out, one way or the other, once its TV Cam HD — recently spotted at the FCC — arrives in the US this month. The $199.99 device hooks up to your TV and contains all the processing power needed to run Skype and transmit wide-angle, 720p footage of your couch over WiFi or Ethernet.…

[From Wired, where the story includes two videos] Ikea’s Augmented Reality Catalog Will Let You Peek Inside Furniture By Roberto Baldwin July 20, 2012 Ikea prints 211 million copies of its product catalog every year. That’s more than 20 times the population of Sweden, the home of the build-it-yourself furniture empire. These are impressive numbers for a print catalog in a digital world, but Ikea is now changing with the times with a head-first dive into augmented reality. “A lot digital stuff becomes very interesting when you mash it up with the tangible items of the real world,” said Andreas…

[From Kotaku Australia, where the post includes a 1:11 minute video; more information is available from The University of Illinois at Chicago] [Image: Individuals in the circular CAVE2 navigate 3D Mars. Image provided by Luc Renambot, UIC/EVL (data NASA & European Space Agency)] I’d Kill To Play Games On This 72-Screen, 36-Computer Virtual Reality System Luke Plunkett August 6, 2012 Later this year, the University of Illinois at Chicago will take the wraps off something it’s calling CAVE2. You, however, will most probably call it “that badass virtual reality system”. CAVE2 is big. It’s 24-feet in diameter and 8 feet…

[From The New York Times, where the story includes an additional image] [Image: A drone pilot at the base at Hancock Field, near Syracuse, working the controls of a craft flying over Afghanistan. Heather Ainsworth for The New York Times.] A Day Job Waiting for a Kill Shot a World Away By Elisabeth Bumilller July 29, 2012 HANCOCK FIELD AIR NATIONAL GUARD BASE, N.Y. — From his computer console here in the Syracuse suburbs, Col. D. Scott Brenton remotely flies a Reaper drone that beams back hundreds of hours of live video of insurgents, his intended targets, going about their…