[From Slate, where the story includes a 4:21 minute video; more information including images and another video are available from the web site of The MERGE Festival] How Robots Saved an Artist’s Sanity The greatest artist of his generation is named Paul. By Torie Bosch | Posted Thursday, Nov. 15, 2012 For much of his life, Patrick Tresset has been torn between art and technology. The child of an artist and an engineer, Tresset dabbled in both during his youth in France and enjoyed tinkering with the “primitive” computer his family got when he was 10. In college, he eschewed…

[From Diginfo TV] Change the size of food and your appetite with AR system from Tokyo U. 2 November 2012 Posted By Don Kennedy and Ryo Osuga At the University of Tokyo, the Hirose Tanikawa Group has developed an AR system that can manipulate the user’s feeling of having eaten enough, by changing how big the food appears. This system features a head-mount display with a camera, and uses image processing to make food look bigger than it actually is. The size of the food in the hands can be changed in real time, while keeping the size of the…

[From Stony Brook University; a 2:12 minute video is available here] [Image: Image of Dubai, United Arab Emirates viewed in the Reality Deck] SBU Demonstrates Largest Resolution Immersive Visualization Facility Ever Built “Reality Deck” designed to assist scientists, engineers and physicians in tackling modern-age problems requiring vast amounts of data STONY BROOK, NY, November 15, 2012 – Stony Brook University unveiled its latest engineering feat, a 1.5 billion pixel Reality Deck, at a demonstration held at the University’s Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology (CEWIT) on November 15. The Reality Deck, a 416 screen super-high resolution virtual reality…

[From Uwishunu; some of us walked over to see the Experience Wall during the recent ISPR 2012 conference] [Image: The Comcast Holiday Spectacular, a unique-to-Philadelphia high-tech holiday show screened on the world’s largest four-mm LED video display, opens for the 2012 season on Thanksgiving Day. (Photo by Joseph Kaczmarek courtesy Comcast Center)] The Comcast Holiday Spectacular, A Festive Film Experience Screened On The World’s Largest Four-Millimeter LED Screen, Returns For The 2012 Holiday Season On Thanksgiving Day Posted by Allison Stadd November 15, 2012 Other cities have ice skating rinks, festooned store windows and soaring Christmas trees. But Philadelphia has…

[A story about presence with animals from NBC News; the article in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface is available here] [Image: Comparison of the robotic-fish to a zebrafish individual] With a wag of its tail, robo-fish draws attention of real thing Convincing droids may one day help lead fish from danger, scientists say By Charles Choi 11/14/2012 Robotic fish can make real fish like them simply by waving their artificial tails in a special way, researchers say. These droids could lead real fish away from perils such as underwater turbines, and help scientists learn more about how real…

[From The University of Toronto Scarborough] [Image: A volunteer takes part in a virtual reality test designed to determine if a cognitive impairment will affect a person’s ability to function in the real world. (Credit: Ken Jones/U. Toronto)] Virtual reality could spot real-world impairments Sep 25, 2012 Kurt Kleiner A virtual reality test being developed at UTSC might do a better job than pencil-and-paper tests of predicting whether a cognitive impairment will have real-world consequences. The test developed by Konstantine Zakzanis, associate professor of psychology, and colleagues, uses a computer-game-like virtual world and asks volunteers to navigate their ways through…

[From Bdaily] [Image: Emma-Jane Alexander, Coordinator at HIVE] University to develop 3D virtual reality wind turbine 14 Nov 2012 Miranda Dobson A virtual reality 3D “cave” created by the University of Hull has been commissioned to provide training for wind turbine engineers and green energy industries. The Higher Education Funding Council has awarded £240,000 to the University to develop the training facility in the Hull Immersive Visual Environment (HIVE), which will be used to simulate the most extreme and hostile conditions that workers in the green power industry face. Hull’s scheme is part of a multimillion pound investment in the…

[From Gamasutra] The Holodeck may be possible, but it’s going to need game designers November 13, 2012 | By Mathew Kumar Science fiction for many is mere fantasy and escapism, but Lee Sheldon—a writer and producer on Star Trek: The Next Generation and now an associate professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute—sees the fantasy of Star Trek’s Holodeck as entirely possible. With a seed grant, he and his team are working towards creating the Emergent Reality Lab, using modern technologies to create a “first-generation Holodeck.”…

[From Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; note that Mei Si presented her work at ISPR 2012] Rensselaer Launches Center To Explore Intersections of Science and Humanities Nov. 13 Launch of Center for Cognition, Communication, and Culture Features Demonstrations of Current Research Published November 12, 2012 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute today launched the Center for Cognition, Communication, and Culture (CCC) with a series of multimedia presentations and demonstrations of research in the initial core research areas: cross-modal displays, mixed reality, and synthetic characters. Now one of the 10 Institute-wide research centers at Rensselaer, CCC will focus on the intersections and interdependency of cognition, communication, and…

[From CONTROL; more information is available in the press release from Invensys] [Image: Field operators in the EYESIM environment can interact with simulated incidents like the gas leak shown here. And because both the simulated plant environment and control room are linked to the same underlying DYNSIM model, operators on both ends can be trained in effective communication.] Immersive Simulator Boosts Operator Preparedness SimSci-Esscor Solutions Help Train Clean-coal Plant Operators 10/22/2012 Operator training took on a new sense of realism this summer, when the U.S. Department of Energy started up its new immersive simulator at the National Energy Technology Laboratory’s (NETL)…

[From Religious Dispatches magazine] [Image: Apartment building on 8th Avenue between 14th and 15th Street. Credit: Gilad Lotan, @gilgul] Escape From Manhattan: Tech, Tragedy and Storytelling in Sandy’s Wake By Rachel Wagner November 2, 2012 Two weeks ago, I attended the New York Comic Con, braving the crowds of thousands to get a taste of what drives so many to invest so much in costume construction, role-play, and fan devotion to popular media franchises. And, because the convention ended not long before Halloween, I decided to compose a retrospective on America’s two favorite modes of imagination-driven investment in other worlds.…

[From Phys.org, where the story includes additional images and a 1:36 minute video] Build your own home theater for full-blast entertainment with ‘Virtual Sound Ball’ November 5, 2012 Watching a 3 dimensional (3D) film at home can be just as real and fun as going to a movie theater. Professor Yang-Hann Kim and Research Professor Jung-Woo Choi from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, KAIST, have succeeded in building an audio rendering system that will considerably improve the current 3D audio effects technology. 3D audio effects can be produced by stereo speakers, surround-sound speakers, speaker-arrays, or headphones, which essentially give an…