[From Defence Professionals] [Image: US Marines walk through a Future Immersive Training Environment scenario. Photo: US Army, Josh LeCappelai)] Immersive Technology Fuels Infantry Simulators  Cheryl Pellerin American Forces Press Service May 16, 2011 WASHINGTON | Rocket-propelled grenades explode, villagers scream in Arabic, squad members move together through the rough streets past animal pens and bazaar stalls, and the hot air carries local sounds and smells. It’s not Afghanistan’s Helmand province. It’s a 130,000-square-foot building on Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in southern California. There, at the Infantry Immersion Trainer, a Defense Department program combines infrastructure, actors, and three-dimensional immersive technologies…

[From GigaOm; more details are in a press release here] MondoPad: A giant tablet for video conferencing and collaboration By Simon Mackie Jun. 8, 2011 Want a high-definition video conferencing system for your meeting room, but don’t have the budget for a costly room-based telepresence system? You might want to check out the MondoPad, which has been launched by Portland, Ore.-based InFocus, a company most well-known for its digital projector products. It’s a huge 55-inch, 1080p multi-touch LCD display that’s effectively a giant tablet computer designed for videoconferencing and collaboration. The MondoPad is based on Windows 7 Pro, and comes with…

[From GMA News; much more information, including more images and a 2:56 minute video, is available on Andrew Maimone’s web site here. See also this related story on Engadget.] [Image: Camera Coverage. Left: System Camera coverage (5 cameras). Right: Color-coded camera contributions.] Kinect hack allows potential 3D teleconferencing 06/05/2011 A new hack by a university professor and student on Microsoft’s popular Kinect gaming accessory may soon allow “affordable” 3D videoconferencing. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduate student Andrew Maimone said his setup uses Kinect’s depth cameras and an algorithm and filters. “Our system is affordable and reproducible, offering the opportunity to…

[From Riverside, California’s Press-Enterprise, where the story includes a podcast, a 1:25 minute video and more images; the SC Village web site is here] [Image: Tim Thai, left, and Ruffy Flores run for cover during a paintball war scenario in a mock Middle Eastern SC Village. Mark Zaleski/The Press-Enterprise] Paintball battlefield’s Mideast marketplace scrutinized Friday, June 3, 2011 By LESLIE PARRILLA The Press-Enterprise If it were a few degrees hotter, the wind-whipped sand clouds at a desert-like facility near Corona could be mistaken for a dust storm at a deserted Middle Eastern marketplace. But only if you overlooked the plywood used…

[From Hypergrid Business] [Image: Virtual windsurfing in Second Life. Courtesy Club One.] Study: Virtual health club delivers real weight loss Press release: ACSM: Weight loss success in a 3-D virtual world By Staff Sat, Jun 4 2011 Bloomington, Indiana — Participants in two weight-loss programs — one involving traditional health club sessions and the other delivered online in a 3D virtual world — lost similar amounts of weight and body fat, but the online contingent reported significantly greater gains in behaviors that could help them live healthier and leaner lives. “It’s counter-intuitive, the idea of being more active in a…

[From Technische Universität München (TUM)] [Image: Researcher in the FRAVE] FRAVE: Flexible Virtual Reality System 31.05.2011, Press releases Product developers, vehicle design engineers and trainee pilots increasingly utilize 3D worlds, operating in virtual space created by realistic images in real time. For this purpose they use a Virtual Reality System. Researchers at the Faculty of Informatics of Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) have now created precisely such a new system. The Flexible Reconfigurable Cave (FRAVE) offers a wealth of advantages over the previously established CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment). The FRAVE is flexible, features a modular structure, more favorable costs and…

[From Mediaite] Anderson Cooper Resorts To Photographic Evidence To Convince Skeptical Fan His Talk Show Set Isn’t ‘Fake’ by Mark Joyella | May 12th, 2011 Since we’ve been a bit hard on CNN’s Anderson Cooper over his troubles with Twitter (like the story we did two months ago about Cooper, who has over a million followers, having no clear idea how to speak back to any of them; or the more recent story about Cooper’s accidental butt-tweet), we wanted to make you aware the silver-haired news anchor’s getting a lot better at engaging with all of those followers.…

[From Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute] [Image: Becoming (2007), Silvia Ruzanka+Ben Chang, the avatar is one week into the transformation process. Image by Ben Chang] The New Cultural Form: Perfection versus Mortality in Games and Simulation at Rensselaer Electronic Artist Ben Chang Joins Rensselaer Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences Program Published April 18, 2011 Willy Nilly’s Surf Shack offers a cure for the idealized virtual world of Second Life. The online shop, a project of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Associate Professor of Arts Ben Chang and collaborators, endows otherwise flawless avatars with real-world foils like clumsiness. A project allowing avatars to visibly…

[From Discover magazine’s Not Exactly Rocket Science blog] The Alice Illusion – scientists convince people that they’re dolls or giants May 26th, 2011 by Ed Yong In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the titular heroine quaffs a potion that shrinks her down to the size of a doll, and eats a cake that makes her grow to gigantic proportions. Such magic doesn’t exist outside of Lewis Carroll’s imagination, but there are certainly ways of making people think that they have changed in size. There’s nowhere in the world that’s better at creating such illusions than the lab of Henrik Ehrsson in…

[From Washington state’s Enumclaw Courier Herald] WALLY’S WORLD: It’s amazing how fresh the real world sounds By Wally Duchateau Enumclaw Courier Herald Columnist May 26 2011 Today I’d like to address the younger set, if any of them happen to read these columns.  Say, those men and women younger than 25 years of age. Among the springtime deluge of rain storms, thunder storms and flash floods, you might have noticed — for the briefest instant — a trace of sunlight. During those dazzling moments, you may also have sensed a desire to get out of the house, your place of…

[From StaffNurse.com] [Image: Dartmoor National Park, UK] VR Greenery Aid to Convalescence May 25, 2011 University scientists are seeking to take virtual reality to a new level – with a view to helping sick people who cannot get access to the outside world. The researchers in Birmingham plan their new worlds to be “sensorily rich”. They are using large screen TVs, video projectors and head mounted displays to create virtual versions of soothing rural and coastal scenes. The initial development is re-creating a stretch of the coastline of south Devon and an area within Dartmoor National Park. The developers say…

[From New Scientist’s One Per Cent blog, where the post features a 1:17 minute video] Telepresence robots go airborne 12 May 2011 Jim Giles, contributor, Vancouver, Canada Picture the scene: your boss phones to say he is working from home. A calm descends over the office. Workers lean back in their chairs. Feet go up on desks – this shift is going to be pretty chilled. Suddenly, a super-sized video feed of your boss, projected onto to the front of a helium-filled balloon equipped with a loudspeaker, floats silently into the room and starts issuing orders from above your head. Not…