[From The Sydney Morning Herald, where the story features an additional 1:28 minute video report] Aussie lizard has smartphone game licked Asher Moses December 16, 2011 When Australian Philip Gith realised his pet lizard was a better smartphone gamer than him, he didn’t euthanise it for embarrassing him – he whipped out his camera. And now the female bearded dragon he calls Crunch has become an internet celebrity due to its fondness for the smartphone game Ant Smasher. In the video Crunch is shown snapping up the on-screen ants and insects with her tongue to the tune of the Super…

[A press release from UgroupMedia (.pdf); a 1:30 minute teaser and other videos are available here] Naughty or Nice? Watch What PNP’s Santa and His Elves Have to Say at: www.portablenorthpole.tv MONTREAL, QUEBEC, Dec 04, 2011 — Thanks to Santa’s elves, PNP-Portable North Pole is back online for its fourth year! Create and send a magical, free, personalized video from Santa Claus to anyone you want. Santa will dazzle children and entertain friends, parents, and colleagues. This year, Santa even has a brand new Elf Machine to help him answer this very important question – have you been Naughty or…

[A press release from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute] “Virtual Operating Room” To Sharpen Surgeons’ Smarts and Skills Engineers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Awarded $2.7 Million NIH Grant To Develop Immersive, Touch-Sensitive Virtual Reality Tools To Replicate the High-Stress Environment of an Operating Room Published December 13, 2011 Even for highly trained physicians and surgeons, there’s no teacher like experience. This is the reason engineering researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are working to develop a virtual reality operating room. Similar to how fledgling pilots train on flight simulators before ever leaving the ground in an aircraft, the virtual operating room will allow…

[From The Gadget Helpline blog, which includes a 0:46 minute video; other coverage indicates that the game included sound effects and that Google has now blocked use of Google Maps for the game] Creative Ad Agency Turns Google Maps Into First-Person-Shooter Game An act of genius – or genuinely disturbing? Posted by Jay December 13, 2011 Creative advertising agency Pool Worldwide utilised the immersive Google Maps location and tour guide with photographic Street View and provided its worldly travellers with a M4A1 assault rifle turning it into a first-person-shooter called Google Shoot View.…

[From The New York Times] Oh, for the Good Old Days of Rude Cellphone Gabbers By Nick Wingfield Published: December 2, 2011 Is talking to a phone the same as talking on it? The sound of someone gabbing on a cellphone is part of the soundtrack of daily life, and most of us have learned when to be quiet — no talking in “quiet cars” on trains, for example. But the etiquette of talking to a phone — more precisely, to a “virtual assistant” like Apple’s Siri, in the new iPhone 4S — has not yet evolved. And eavesdroppers are…

[From the MIT Technology Review Hello World blog, where the post includes a 1:58 minute DigInfo TV video report] Elastic Electrical Cables for Robotic Skin The first-of-their-kind wires could take the hard edge off of robots. David Zax 12/06/2011 A Japanese company called Asahi Kasei has developed the world’s first elastic electrical cable — and has taken the liberty of christening it “Roboden” (here’s a link, if your Japanese is good). In a somewhat unsettling comparison, TechCrunch notes that Roboden can stretch by a factor of 1.5, “like the human skin.” The comparison (which Asahi Kasei actually makes itself) is…

[From The Iowa State University News Service] [Image: Judy Vance, right, demonstrates a virtual factory in Iowa State University’s METaL virtual reality facility. Working in the virtual factory are students, left to right, Leif Berg, Meisha Rosenberg and Ryan Pavlik. Photo by Bob Elbert.] Iowa State’s METaL lab develops multiple ways to experience virtual reality December 06, 2011 AMES, Iowa – Iowa State University doctoral students Leif Berg and Ryan Pavlik handed over a Wii Remote and a pair of 3-D glasses. A visitor to Iowa State’s newest virtual reality lab – METaL, the Multimodal Experience Testbed and Laboratory –…

[From The Daily Mail Online] [Image: Virtual reality: On the H&M site, every single model’s pose and proportions are the same. The only thing that differs, apart from the swimwear, is the skin-tone, which has been altered to match each girl’s face.] H&M under fire for using real models’ heads with computer-generated bodies to sell swimwear By Tamara Abraham Last updated 6th December 2011 With tiny waists, perfect bums and endless legs, many would agree that models’ bodies often look too flawless to be real. But in the case of H&M, it seems they actually are. The Swedish retailer was…

[From North Idaho College’s Sentinel Online] Virtual athletics: Reboot Future athletes will dominate cyberspace Eric Rivera December 5th, 2011 North Idaho College’s athletic department has been geared for many years now to pursue a path of excellence. But with technology changing rapidly everyday, would that ideal hold up if the sports world expanded into a virtual reality setting? Recently, I had an opportunity to watch both TRON movies, and the game concept from the new and old videos had me thinking about possibilities for the future. In recent generations, we have seen televisions transform from the clunky old cathode ray…

[A press release from Michigan State University; more information is available in TIME’s Healthland blog] Moral dilemma: Would you kill one person to save five? Published: Dec. 01, 2011 EAST LANSING, Mich. — Imagine a runaway boxcar heading toward five people who can’t escape its path. Now imagine you had the power to reroute the boxcar onto different tracks with only one person along that route. Would you do it? That’s the moral dilemma posed by a team of Michigan State University researchers in a first-of-its-kind study published in the research journal Emotion. Research participants were put in a three…

[From Internet Evolution; a condensed report from the book is available here] Book Details Potential of Virtual Reality Written by Michael Mascioni 12/1/2011 As the digital and physical worlds increasingly blend together, new opportunities to improve end-user experiences are emerging. Theorist Joe Pine and management advisor Kim Korn outline an array of hybrid physical/virtual forms that are transforming and enriching the end-user experience in their book Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier (Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc., San Francisco: 2011). Pine and Korn describe eight different combinations of virtuality and reality, which are illustrated by compelling case study examples.…

[From Creative Boom] The Virtual Hospital Posted by Katy Cowan on Wednesday 30th November 2011. Computer-generated tours of virtual hospitals can help patients with intellectual disabilities overcome fears and to understand treatments they are about to undergo, according to a new study. The research was led by Professor Val Hall, professor of midwifery at the Centre for Health Research, University of Brighton. She was one of four experts who studied the virtual hospital as a means of helping patients and providing medical staff with a toolkit to better assess a patient’s capacity to give consent to treatment. The findings, published…