[From The New York Times] This Lady Liberty Is a Las Vegas Teenager By Kim Severson and Matthew Healey Published: April 14, 2011 As if further proof were needed that New York is not the center of the universe. The United States Postal Service has issued a new stamp featuring the Statue of Liberty. Only the statue it features is not the one in the harbor, but the replica at the New York-New York casino in Las Vegas. You might think that the post office would have just gone with the original, the one off the tip of Lower Manhattan…

[From The Independent] Augmented reality projects transform Boston into a digital cyberland Monday, 18 April 2011 Areas of Boston will be transformed into interactive digital landscapes as a series of augmented reality artworks come to life during the Boston Cyberarts Festival, which begins April 22. With an open mind and smartphone in hand, people traveling from one area of the festival to another will look on as aliens invade the public space around them in an art project titled Occupation Forces. The artwork, created by Mark Skwarek, is made possible through a technology called augmented reality (AR for short).…

[From MIT’s Technology Review; a summary of past, present and future computer interfaces is available here] Business The Struggle to Spread the Minority Report Interface Economics and user expectations are bigger hurdles than the technology Friday, April 22, 2011 By Paul Boutin In the 2002 film Minority Report, Tom Cruise’s cop of the future made use of a mind-blowing computer interface—a holographic wall of images and data floating before him, which Cruise manipulated by donning special gloves and making sweeping gestures to call up, move, zoom, combine, and discard far more information than fits on any PC screen, far more quickly.…

[A press release from Novint; more detailed information, including a 7:00 minute video, is available from Nonpolynomial Labs] Novint Technologies and ForceTek Enterprises Merge ForceTek Brings Capital and Stunning New Exoskeleton Technology, Giving Motion Control a Sense of Touch (Albuquerque, NM – April 6, 2011) – Novint Technologies, Inc. (OTCBB: NVNT) today announced the completion of Novint’s merger with ForceTek Enterprises, LLC. Novint will be combining ForceTek’s XIO exoskeleton controller with Novint’s high fidelity 3D touch technology to create the world’s first consumer 3D touch exoskeleton device. Users will wear the XIO exoskeleton on their arm, and XIO itself will…

[From The Montreal Gazette, where the story includes additional images] Scientists take steps to making “bionic” leg By Julie Steenhuysen, Reuters April 20, 2011 CHICAGO — As 20-year-old Hailey Daniswicz flexes muscles in her thigh, electrodes attached to her leg instruct a computer avatar to flex its knee and ankle — parts of Hailey’s leg that have been missing since 2005. Daniswicz, a sophomore at Northwestern University who lost her lower leg to bone cancer, is training the computer to recognize slight movements in her thigh so she can eventually be fitted with a “bionic” leg — a robotic prosthesis…

[From MSNBC’s Cosmos Log blog, which features more links and a 0:26 minute video] Control the cosmos with your fingers By Alan Boyle What do you get when you cross a WorldWide Telescope with a Kinect motion-sensing game controller? You get the “universe at your fingertips,” according to Microsoft Research’s Curtis Wong, who demonstrated the gesture-controlled cosmos today at the MIX11 conference in Las Vegas. Actually, having the universe at your fingertips is how Wong has thought of the freely available WorldWide Telescope project since it was first unveiled in 2008. The software, which is freely available through a Web-based interface…