[From the Cheraw Chronicle] Virtual Reality School applies for charter by Special to the Chronicle August 4, 2013 Can you imagine a school where students visit the Sistine Chapel and are back home by the bell? Or a school where students learn to operate lasers on the moon or explore sea life on the bottom of the ocean floor? Or a school where students travel back in time to meet Beethoven, Davy Crockett or Alexander the Great? Soon such a school might exist in South Carolina if the proposed NOBLE Virtual School, based upon interactive 3D virtual world technology, is…

[From XConomy, where the story includes an image slideshow; for an evaluation of the video walls for conferencing, see a post on Inrich Consulting’s web site] Prysm Eyes Telepresence as Next Application for Video Walls Wade Roush 8/6/13 One sign that your company has arrived is that you can afford telepresence suites from Cisco or Polycom—you know, those rooms equipped with a trio of 1080p flat-panel displays and special cameras, microphones, and lighting so that chief executives in New York can see tiny droplets of sweat on the faces of vice presidents in Los Angeles. The cost of building and…

[From Fast Co.Exist; more information is available from Shigeo Yoshida’s web site] A Portrait Of Your Face As A Happier Person This camera-powered mirror projects an image back to you where you’re happier than you are in real life. Can it actually make you happier? Sydney Brownstone August 6, 2013 Interacting with incessantly optimistic people can be one of the most depressing experiences on Earth, if you’re wired that way. Being told to “visualize success” can be good advice if it weren’t rendered meaningless by overuse (or cynicism). But with a new tool out from a team of graduate students…

[From Road to VR] VR Researcher Flips the Script, Augments Virtual Reality with Actual Reality August 6, 2013 | Posted by Ben Lang In what seems like a total reversal of the usual paradigm, a VR researcher is showing the benefits of augmenting the virtual world with the real world. In ‘traditional’ augmented reality, we take a scene from real life and overlay it with useful digital information that in some way enhances the experience. Oliver Kreylos, a VR researcher from UC Davis, has turned the tables by bringing the real world into the virtual world for the same purpose.…

[From Engadget, where the story includes a 1:10 minute video] NASA JPL takes a VR tour of Mars with Oculus Rift and Virtuix Omni (video) By Nicole Lee posted Aug 5th, 2013 NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory likes to dip its feet in cutting edge consumer hardware from time to time, as evidenced by its trial use of the Leap Motion to remotely control a Mars rover. Well, you can’t get much more cutting edge than virtual reality, which is why the team was so intrigued by the Oculus Rift when they first saw it at PAX last year. They signed…

[From the Washington Post’s The Switch blog; for more on this topic see “State of Virtual Reality Based Disaster Preparedness and Response Training” in PLOS Currents] [Image: CDC staff undergo a pilot phase of virtual reality training in 2009. The agency is increasingly turning to virtual reality to help train emergency responders.] The CDC just spent $626,000 on virtual reality. Here’s why. By Brian Fung, Published: August 2, 2013 You push past the flap of the command hut and instinctively shield your eyes from the brightness of the sun outside. As they adjust to the light, your eyes start to…

[From The Conversation] [Image: The courtroom in the County Court of Victoria as used for the study’s experiment. Credit: Emma Rowden] Higher quality court videolinks will improve justice outcomes: study Jul 03, 2013 Alexia Attwood Editor, The Conversation Poor lighting, bad camera angles and technical glitches in videolink testimonies can affect justice outcomes in court, a new study has found, with researchers urging courts to adopt standardised videoconferencing guidelines.…

[From TechCrunch; for more information and a 1:58 minute video visit the Globacore project page] Old Enough To Remember Paperboy For NES? Now You Can Live It With Oculus Rift July 31, 2013 Old school gamers will remember Paperboy, an arcade game — later ported to home systems like the NES and Atari ST — that let you savour the pleasure of virtually breaking your neighbours’ windows by tossing a rolled up newspaper through their front room as you powered past on your bike. Because that’s what passed for entertainment in 1984. Well, time and technology has moved on but…

[From the Telegraph, where the story includes additional images; for more information including images and two videos, see the project’s Kickstarter page] Virtual insanity: the rise and rise of the digital pet Could Looksi Pups become the Tamagotchi for the iPhone generation? Rhiannon Williams investigates By Rhiannon Williams 29 Jul 2013 Digital pets have long been big business for video game developers and toy manufacturers – they’ve been cashing in on the hopes and dreams of children worldwide for over 20 years.…

[From the Daily Mail, where the story includes many more images] Vorsprung durch tech drink! Carl the robot bartender serves customers at German bar The humanoid robot measures out spirits at the Robots Bar and Lounge Nine customers can take a seat at the bar in Ilmenau, eastern Germany 27 July 2013 He’s handy with a shot glass and customers travel from far and wide to admire him at work. The only strange thing about Carl the bartender is that he’s not quite human. The humanoid robot mixes drinks for guests at the Robots Bar and Lounge in Ilmenau, eastern…

[From MobiHealthNews] Orlando Health explores telemonitoring as an alternative to hospital admissions By: Neil Versel | Jul 23, 2013 While other hospitals are trying to comply with a new Medicare policy by assuring recently discharged patients don’t have to be readmitted, Orlando Health is trying to prevent inpatient admissions in the first place by sending some patients home from the emergency department with telemonitoring equipment. The Central Florida health system is a month into a planned four-month pilot of home-based videoconferencing units tied to simple vitals monitors and a visiting nurse program, in hopes of lowering costs and boosting patient…

[From Yahoo! News] [Image: Using an Oculus Rift with Atlas to play a shooting game. On the bottom right hand corner is what you see through …] The Atlas looks like the most insane home video-gaming experience ever Jason Gilbert July 25, 2013 As video games have become more and more realistic over the past few decades, we are quickly approaching the dream of the movie Tron: to be able to actually physically exist within our games, to bring a new level of immediacy to the act of playing. Improvements in graphics have made this partly possible; innovative systems like…