[From Whatsonstage.com; more information about the reviewed work is available here and here] Jo Caird Blog: Truly Involving Theatre 8 March 2011 In the past couple of years I’ve spent far too much time on Twitter, so I’ve been aware of some of the interesting theatre-related events that have taken place there, such as the RSC’s Such Tweet Sorrow, which saw an online cast improvise a story based on Romeo and Juliet over the course of five weeks, and American playwright Jeremy Gable’s The 15th Line, a four-hander which took place entirely on Twitter (you can read its script here).…

[From MIT’s Technology Review] A Laptop that Knows Where You’re Looking Eye-tracking cameras offer a new way to control your computer. Friday, March 4, 2011 By Tom Simonite A camera over the screen is a standard feature for laptops. But only Lenovo’s new model has a pair of cameras below its display to track the movements of a user’s eyes. The prototype laptop can be controlled with eye motions, reducing the need to use the mouse and making it faster to navigate through information such as maps or menus. The laptop can notice when its user has read to near…

[From PennLive, where the story also features a 1:14 minute video] [Image: Harrisburg University senior Todd Baker prepares to try the Virtusphere, a virtual reality device, for the first time. Students are working with companies to create virtual worlds for real life training. Credit: Christine Baker, The Patriot-News] Harrisburg University’s Virtusphere has potential for experimentation, education and revenue March 08, 2011 By Kourtney Geers, The Patriot-News Crawl inside this 10-foot human hamster ball and you’ll be able to go just about anywhere. The ball, called a Virtusphere, allows the person inside to wander around unhindered, exploring virtual environments seen through…

[From The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog] [Image Courtesy of Lori Foster Thompson] Online, People Learn Best from Virtual ‘Helpers’ That Resemble Them March 3, 2011 By Ben Wieder Turns out looks and personality still count in online learning. That’s the finding of a study on how people’s perception and performance in online training is affected by the appearance and communication style of online learning “helpers,” or virtual agents that pop up on a screen and guide people through a program. Some of the earliest uses of such programs have been with younger students. One program used an online…

[From the MIT Technology Review blog Mims’ Bits] Are Physical Interfaces Superior to Virtual Ones? Humans have enormous capacity for spatial memory. Why don’t our user interfaces take advantage of that? Christopher Mims 03/02/2011 Something’s been bothering me ever since I started reading books, especially non-fiction, on my Kindle: I can’t remember where anything is. Physical books are full of spatial reference points; an especially beloved book is a physical topography in which we develop a vague sense of which chapters contain relevant information; even where, on a page, a particularly striking sentence or diagram lies. Ebooks have none of these…

[From Engadget, where a 7:34 minute video and two other videos are available] Emotiv EEG headset hacked into VR trapeze act, lets you fly like Superman (video) By Sean Hollister posted Mar 1st 2011 Last year, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute students built a virtual reality contraption that let them soar through the sky, held aloft by a trapeze harness and seeing through HMD-covered eyes. This year, they’re controlling it with the power of their minds. For his master’s thesis, project leader Yehuda Duenyas added an Emotiv headset — the same one controlling cars and the occasional game — to make the…