[From PC Magazine] iRobot’s AVA is an App-Ready Robot A new telepresence robot combines mobility smarts, location awareness and even apps. By: Lance Ulanoff 01.06.2011 LAS VEGAS–Imagine your iPad. Imagine it on a robot. Now imagine that robot is a 5-foot-tall, self-navigating bot that can use the interface and app capability of your favorite portable device to create a new kind of telepresesence automaton. Roomba manufacturer iRobot has gone beyond imagining to developing a working prototype called AVA, perhaps the first practical mobility platform.…

[From DVICE] Watch live sports from on the field with Japan’s 3D VR tech By Evan Ackerman Jan 8, 2011 For their 2022 FIFA World Cup bid, Japan promised us that they’d have 3D fields that we could watch live games on while flying around in virtual reality. Japan didn’t get the 2022 World Cup, but they’re making the technology a reality anyway, and here’s what it’s going to look like.…

[From TechNewsWorld; a 2:46 minute video is available here] Avatar Kinect Puts Your Best Face Forward Avatar Kinect allows for richer virtual interactions by tracking the actual facial expressions and gestures of users and letting their avatars express them on screen — or not. “With an avatar, people can choose which visual details they want to transmit,” observed UVa prof Kamin Whitehouse. The technology could go way beyond gaming — bringing dramatic changes to business teleconferencing, for example. By Mike Martin TechNewsWorld 01/06/11 2:50 PM PT “Avatar” movie director James Cameron couldn’t have scripted a better keynote speech for Microsoft (Nasdaq:…

[From iSmashPhone] They Work For Scale: Old-School Optical Illusion Propels Animated Fish Pond It’s interesting that the current 3D/CGI boom is not only pushing technological advances in the screening room AND the living room — it’s also resurrecting a scad of old-fashioned, low-tech tricks.  If your last name isn’t Cameron, you probably can’t afford to design your own stereoscopic HD videocamera rig and shoot a gazillion-dollar sci-fi blockbuster.  However, as we’ve seen on this very blogeroo, you can get “3D” on your iPhone with a brace of mirrors, or make ghostly text float in mid-air with your iPad. Now say…

[From Military & Aerospace Electronics; also see an article in Flying magazine in which a pilot describes his experience using Honeywell’s Smartview system] Designs for avionics and synthetic vision rely heavily on human factors research Jan 4, 2011 By John McHale People interact with machines in different ways — with their eyes, touch, voices, and even their brain waves. These human factors are important when designing cars, home theaters, and especially commercial and military aircraft cockpits. Telepathic flight control still resides in fictional realms such as the 1982 Clint Eastwood movie FireFox — in which a pilot stole a Soviet jet…

[From The Guardian] The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks – review Oliver Sacks’s study of optical dysfunction is a real eye-opener, says Tim Radford Tim Radford The Guardian, Saturday 1 January 2011 All reality is virtual: we reconstruct the outside world with a virtual reality headset pre-installed at birth and tuned by experience so perfectly that most of the time we are barely conscious of it. The optic nerve delivers data from a blitz of electromagnetic wavelengths: the brain filters the information, selects the focus, interprets the imagery and projects it on to an interior screen. This unthinking process is…