[From The Verge’s Vox Games] Creating the illusion of emotion or why you care about ones and zeroes By Brian Crecente on March 12, 2012 As much as you may love video games and the stories they help you tell, it’s impossible to escape the fact that much of your experience is a trick of the mind. The thing that separates video games from other forms of media, the ability to interact with and perhaps shape a virtual world, is mostly powered by the artificial intelligence of the characters that populate that experience. But at its best gaming artificial intelligence systems,…

[From Voice of San Diego; more information, including a comparison of answers by the virtual candidate and the iPhone’s Siri, is available here] The Tragic and Fascinating Life of Carl DeMaio Posted: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 | Updated: Wed Mar 14, 2012 by Liam Dillon Carl DeMaio’s favorite color is blue. He usually eats dessert before his dinner. He’s afraid of heights, loves zombie movies and one time, when he was a high school freshman, he caught his tie in a newspaper vending machine. DeMaio freed himself from the machine by surrendering his neckwear. He still remembers how the tie…

[From Ars Technica] [Image: Forth Dimension’s display technology packs all the pixels of a new iPad into a display less than an inch across, diagonally] Virtual reality that doesn’t suck: My time inside Half-Life 2 By Kyle Orland | Published March 13, 2012 For decades now, the futuristic dream interface for video games has been some sort of head-mounted display (HMD) that removes the world around you and projects an all-encompassing, head-tracked 3D environment across your entire field of vision. But this dream has been largely dead in the water since the mid-’90s, when everyone from Nintendo and Sega to…

[From Boston.com; much more information is available in an article in Eurgamer] ‘Heavy Rain’ game creator debuts high-tech ‘Kara’ March 08, 2012 | Derrik J. Lang, AP Entertainment Writer The future of performance-capture technology is right around the corner, and its name just might be “Kara.’’ David Cage of video game developer Quantic Dream unveiled a new way to simultaneously capture and digitize an actor’s performance — including voice, face and body — during a presentation Wednesday at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The innovation came in the form of a 7-minute non-interactive demonstration titled “Kara.’’…

[From The Times Union in Albany, New York] [Image: RPI doctoral student, Yiming Gao wears a motion capture suit in a room as an array of 12 3D motion capture cameras with infrared LEDs capture his movement which is seen on the computer screen at the RPI Nuclear Engineering Lab on Thursday, March 8, 2012 in Troy, NY. Members of the Rensselaer Radiation Measurement & Dosimetry Group have been working on the virtual reality and motion capture systems for use with radiation dose analysis. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union)] Virtual practice for real disasters RPI research centers on how to…

[From O’Reilly Radar] [Image: Screenshot from Apple’s trackpad tutorial.] Buttons were an inspired UI hack, but now we’ve got better options Josh Clark on the future of touch and other types of UI. by Jenn Webb | @JennWebb | +Jenn Webb  | 7 March 2012 If you’ve ever seen a child interact with an iPad, you’ve seen the power of the touch interface in action. Is this a sign of what’s to come — will we be touching and swiping screens rather tapping buttons? I reached out to Josh Clark (@globalmoxie), founder of Global Moxie and author of “Tapworthy,” to…

[From AlphaGalileo; more information is available on the BrainAble Project web site] Enhanced brain-computer interface promises unparalleled autonomy for disabled 28 February 2012 CORDIS Features, formerly ICT Results In the 2009 film Surrogates, humans live vicariously through robots while safely remaining in their own homes. That sci-fi future is still a long way off, but recent advances in technology, supported by EU funding, are bringing this technology a step closer to reality in order to give disabled people more autonomy and independence than ever before. From wheelchair-bound victims of car accidents to people suffering full-body paralysis or locked-in syndrome, millions…

[From AsiaOne via Telepresence Options; more information is available from Ctrl Works] Robot to help doctors work remotely By Josephine Price my paper Monday, Mar 05, 2012 A robot will soon help doctors at one hospital check on patients. Called the Telepresence Puppet, it could let doctors interact with their patients without having to be physically present. A doctor can guide the robot, which runs on wheels, to the patient and communicate with him through the machine. The doctor can see and hear the patient using the robot’s camera and microphone, and the patient can see and listen to the…

[A press release from Cisco via Zawya] Bridging Peace: Cisco Empowers Al Fakhoora Students in Gaza to Share their Experiences and Engage in Global Dialogue Cisco TelePresence Technology is at the Heart of Al Fakhoora’s Virtual Majlis Program Facilitating Cross-Cultural Communication Between Students in Gaza, Qatar and the United States DOHA, Qatar – March 6th, 2012: Cisco announced today that Al Fakhoora, an international campaign committed to raising awareness of the plight of students in Gaza, has officially launched its Virtual Majlis initiative based on Cisco TelePresence technology to connect university students from Doha, Gaza and the US to create…

[From The Daily Mail, where the story includes several more pictures] [Image: The world as seen through the LifeClipper helmet – it mixes the ‘real’ as seen through cameras with hallucinations created by computers] ‘A living dream’: The ‘augmented reality’ helmet that turns walk in the park into an encounter with alien creatures under a psychedelic sky By Damien Gayle Last updated on 5th March 2012 Most ‘virtual reality’ helmets plunge users into an unreal video-game world – but a new version mixes the unreal into the real world in a ‘living dream’. The helmet only works in St Johann’s…

[From AP via 3News; more information and a video of Eric Schmidt’s keynote are available at VentureBeat] Google: Technology is making science fiction real Wed, 29 Feb 2012 By Alan Clendenning Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt has predicted that rapid advances in technology will soon transform science fiction into reality – meaning people will have driverless cars, small robots at their command and the ability to experience being in another place without leaving home. Schmidt said the introduction of books available online, internet translation of languages and voice recognition for computers all happened much faster than anyone envisioned and that…

[From PhysOrg, where the story includes three videos] Microsoft demos three new whiz-bang technologies it’s working on (w/ video) February 29, 2012 by Bob Yirka (PhysOrg.com) — Microsoft isn’t really known for giving the world at large much of a clue regarding what it’s working on regarding future products (other than Windows) thus it came as rather a surprise when the head of its research and strategy group, Craig Mundie, gave a presentation at TechForum recently, showing off three new technology products the company has in the works.…