[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…

[From ZDnet’s Tech Broiler blog] Retail in 2021: When clicks have buried bricks Summary: Ten years from now, virtually all shopping will take place at home. By Jason Perlow | November 29, 2011 Edgewater, New Jersey. Mindy Konsumer was in waking sleep when she heard the sound of birds tweeting. They progressively got louder, and louder and louder. She pulled the covers over her head. “Ugh. Why did Josef set it to those horrible birds again instead of my wind chimes?” “Bitch, deactivate the alarm. I’m up.” YES MINDY. GOOD MORNING. IT IS MONDAY, 8:30AM, THE 29TH OF NOVEMBER, 2021.…

[From Transportation Nation] Choose Your Own Rail Adventure By Matt Dellinger | 11/28/2011 “I remember the first time I saw a train go by,” a choked-up grown man says in the video trailer for Railworks’s Train Simulator 2012. He goes on, with a weepy nostalgia that rivals the treacliest Chevy commercial. “My dad took me to the crossing one hot summer evening….. I could see the engineer in his cab. Gotta be the best seat in the world.” Though Amtrak ridership reached a record high, and House Transportation Chairman John Mica has recently warmed to the idea of Amtrak-led high…

[From The New York Times’ Media Decoder blog, where the post includes two videos including the ad and additional images] The Blogger Who Found Jenny Not on the Block By Noam Cohen November 24, 2011 A new ad featuring the pop star Jennifer Lopez behind the wheel of a Fiat 500 as she reflects on her Bronx upbringing may have done the impossible – shock a jaded public well accustomed to fakery in TV advertising. The ad uses a body double for the scenes in the Bronx, which have been carefully spliced with material shot with Ms. Lopez in Los…

[From The University of Maine’s Maine Campus] [Image: Rob Stigile, Maine Campus features editor, tries on the Head Mounted Display at the VEMI lab. Photo by Jesse Scardina] Get plugged in UMaine virtual reality lab creates something from nothing By Robert Stigile Thursday, November 10th, 2011 Imagine you are in a Boston hotel room on the 20th floor when all of a sudden an explosion rocks the building, shattering glass and activating alarms of various kinds throughout the neighborhood. This emergency scenario presents a multitude of barriers on the path to safety: blocked exits, hallways engulfed in flames, streets closed…

[From IT World’s CoreIT blog; a related story can be found in New Scientist] Researchers build computer monitor into contact lens It’s only one pixel, but it gets the image and power wirelessly, and didn’t hurt the rabbit By Kevin Fogarty November 22, 2011 There have been a million science-fictioney stories, movies, photos and late-night caffeine-psychosis-induced hallucinations imagining how super-mobile, universally connected and unrealistically convenient computing will be in 10 years, or 20 or 50. None of them quite got past [the] barrier posed by the one component of any computer system that can’t shrink in size to a nanoparticle…

[From DigInfo TV, where the story includes a 2:51 minute video; more information is available at the researchers’ web site] [Image: ‘Invoked Computing’ at home] Invoked Computing – Device-free Ubiquitous Augmented Reality 18 November 2011 A research group at the University of Tokyo are creating a new paradigm in Human Computer Interaction. Dubbed ‘Invoked Computing’ the idea is to turn everyday objects into computer interfaces and communication devices. “For example, if you make a gesture, the computer should be able to recognize this as “I want to use the telephone”. So with an iPhone for example, you have everything in…