[From IT Wire] Ford Australia creates the Holodeck Ford Australia engineers and designers are living in a virtual world, and loving it.  The company has unveiled its new Virtual Reality Centre, a high tech digital evaluation and design environment 31 August 2012 By Mike Bantick Years before a Ford vehicle shines on stage at a car show or arrives in dealer showrooms, Ford researchers are hard at work behind the scenes, building virtual vehicles that allow the company to design, analyse and enhance the driver experience before a physical vehicle ever exists. Known as the Powerwall (Trekers would have preferred…

[From TwinCities.com] [Image: Anoka-Hennepin school district technical support staffers interact from Andover High School with teachers at Blaine High School on the large wall monitors in a telepresence technology presentation Aug. 23, 2012. (Pioneer Press: John Doman)] Anoka-Hennepin ‘telepresence’ allows low-demand subjects to be offered By Sarah Horner horner@pioneerpress.com 8/26/2012 A handful of classrooms in Anoka-Hennepin high schools might appear equipped for surveillance rather than teaching to students returning from summer vacation next week. Six giant flat-screens span the space where a podium might otherwise be, and long, semi-circular tables outfitted with built-in microphones stand in place of traditional desks.…

[From New Scientist’s One Per Cent blog; more information, including additional images and a longer video, is available from The Vienna University of Technology] Virtual reality lets amputees train with a prosthesis 24 August 2012 Douglas Heaven, reporter Even Oscar Pistorius had to learn to walk before he could run. But learning to live with a prosthetic limb can be a difficult and frustrating experience. To help amputees get to grips with a new prosthetic arm, the prosthesis manufacturer Otto Bock has teamed up with researchers from the Interactive Media Systems Group at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria…

[From MIT’s Technology Review] [Image: The first step in the “Choose Your Robots” process on the Happiness Engines web site] Getting Your Phone to Give You a Hand A growing number of apps hope to turn smartphones into personal assistants. Rachel Metz Tuesday, August 28, 2012 Ever since last fall, when Apple introduced its genial voice-controlled personal assistant, Siri, on the iPhone 4S, there’s been a flurry of activity as other apps attempt to go beyond its limitations. Challengers include Evi (see “New Virtual Helper Challenges Siri“), which mimics some of Siri’s abilities for smartphones running Google’s Android software; Cue, an…

[From PC World New Zealand] [Image: Oculus Rift-ready Hawken, to be released 12-12-12; a promotional video in which the creators specifically refer to presence is available at Vimeo] Valve employee talks virtual reality gaming David Daw | Monday, August 27 2012 The future of video gaming may lie in virtual reality. No, that’s not 1996 calling; its Valve Software’s Michael Abrash, a game industry legend and one of the minds behind Quake and Doom. Abrash recently sat down for an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun and shared his thoughts on the future of gaming and potential for VR technology to…

[From Gizmag, where the story includes additional images; note the ‘bonus’ demonstration in the last 20 seconds of the Kickstarter video] Skype-based telepresence robot is “Botiful” to behold By Ben Coxworth July 24, 2012 Telepresence robots are definitely a neat idea – they allow users not only to interact with people in remote locations, but they also (in some cases) let those users wander around those locations from “within” the robot, its camera and microphone acting as their eyes and ears. While such robots have so far been relatively expensive, California-based inventor Claire Delaunay wants to change that. She hopes…

[From MIT’s Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35 series, which features an additional image and a 3:24 minute video] Leila Takayama, 31 Applying the tools of social science to make robots easier to live and work with Jessica Leber August 2012 People often find robots baffling and even frightening. Leila Takayama, a social scientist, has found ways to smooth out their rough edges. Through numerous studies and experiments that look at how people react to every aspect of robots, from their height to their posture, Takayama has come up with key insights into how robots should look and act to…

[From Phys.Org, where the story includes an additional image] [Image: Actual experimental results demonstrate the promise of a glasses-free 3-D theater experience. Two cars, one red and one blue, are projected onto a screen through a parallax barrier. As the light shines back through the polarizer, two offset images are created, which creates the visual cues that the brain interprets as depth. Credit: Optics Express] Next generation 3-D theater: Optical science makes glasses a thing of the past Even with current digital technology, the latest Hollywood blockbusters still rely on clunky glasses to achieve a convincing 3-D effect. New optics…

[From CarAdvice; the ad (in HD) is available on YouTube] Toyota 86 gets a reality check By David Zalstein | August 17th, 2012 A new multi-million dollar Toyota 86 ‘Real Deal’ advertising campaign launches today in the UK. The Toyota 86 (GT86 in the UK) Real Deal campaign focuses on a 60-second TV spot, and 90-second internet version, that depicts the life of a virtual man stuck in a virtual world, whose hunger for something real sees him end up in Toyota’s latest sports car. Styled in the vein of a computer game, the clip’s animated main character breaks the…

[From The New York Times’ Arts Beat blog] That’s a Big Boulder, Indy: Steven Spielberg on the Imax Rerelease of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ By Dave Itzkoff August 14, 2012, It’s the kind of revelation that would melt the face of any die-hard Indiana Jones fan (this time, with joy): “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” the 1981 adventure film that introduced that globe-trotting archaeologist, will receive a one-week Imax release next month, Lucasfilm said on Tuesday. “For me, it’s always been the bigger the screen, the better,” Steven Spielberg, who directed “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and the three…

[From Gizmag, where the story includes additional images and a 4:50 minute video; a second, shorter video is available on YouTube] [Image: Face cloning: Steps in modeling the digital face and the final result in silicone (Image: Disney)] Disney develops “face cloning” technique for animatronics By David Szondy August 15, 2012 Facial cloning sounds rather alarming, but its purpose is very straightforward. Basically, it’s a way of scanning a person’s face in 3D and then using that information to design and fabricate an artificial skin that will move much more realistically – not just in general, but as a close…

[From Time’s Techland] Double Robotics Lets You Turn Your iPad into a Telepresence Robot By Keith Wagstaff | August 14, 2012 Tired of having to go places? Do you secretly wish you were a robot? Then a telepresence robot might just be the thing for you. Previously, telepresence robots were fairly expensive and mostly aimed at wealthy tech entrepreneurs and people with disabilities who couldn’t leave their homes. Double is different. At $1,999 for pre-orders and $2,499 after that, it’s expensive but not completely out of reach and it works with a piece of technology that’s fairly popular right now…