[From The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog] In Japan, Rescue Robots Are Poised to Go From Lab to Quake Scene March 15, 2011 By Ben Wieder Last Thursday night, Robin R. Murphy, director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue at Texas A&M University, held a goodbye party in College Station for Japanese robotics researchers who had come to the center for workshops on using their creations in an emergency. The next day, the workshops became reality. The massive earthquake and tsunami that ravaged Japan that Friday meant the scientists, already booked on a plane, were rushing home to…

[From MIT’s Technology Review blog Mims’ Bits] Don’t Expect Mobile 3D Movies to Look the Same Film buffs and video game junkies could be surprised by how media look on the Nintentdo 3DS and 3D-equipped mobile phones. Christopher Mims 03/04/2011 Viewing 3D movies on small screens could lead to radically different perceptions of relative depth when compared to seeing them in the theater or on a television, conclude Nokia engineers. In a paper published in the Proceedings of Stereoscopic Displays and Applications, Jukka Hakkinen and colleagues tested three short animations on viewers. What they discovered is a direct consequence of how…

[From TV Squad; more videos and information are here] TV’s Green Screen Revolution Is Here by Ryan McKee, posted Feb 19th 2011 As savvy television fans already know, many shows do not shoot on location. Seeing TV characters walk down Broadway in New York does not mean they were actually there. In fact, chances are they weren’t even in the Big Apple, or even within thousands of feet of it. It’s getting even easier for television studios to create locations or backdrops thanks to green screen technology, and TV is taking as much (if not more) advantage of green screen as…

[From Fast Company, where the story includes a video and additional images] Will the Human, Non-Geminoid Henrik Scharfe Please Stand Up? By Kit Eaton Mar 7, 2011 How would you feel if you met Danish Professor Henrik Scharfe and then moments later were introduced to another Henrik Scharfe, this time an almost identical android? You can now actually do this, courtesy of a new Geminoid bot that points the way to our robotic future. A product of Japanese scientist Hiroshi Ishiguro, the Geminoid series robots have always been a weird headline-grabbing affairs due to their incredibly convincing human “skins,” but…

[From Whatsonstage.com; more information about the reviewed work is available here and here] Jo Caird Blog: Truly Involving Theatre 8 March 2011 In the past couple of years I’ve spent far too much time on Twitter, so I’ve been aware of some of the interesting theatre-related events that have taken place there, such as the RSC’s Such Tweet Sorrow, which saw an online cast improvise a story based on Romeo and Juliet over the course of five weeks, and American playwright Jeremy Gable’s The 15th Line, a four-hander which took place entirely on Twitter (you can read its script here).…

[From MIT’s Technology Review] A Laptop that Knows Where You’re Looking Eye-tracking cameras offer a new way to control your computer. Friday, March 4, 2011 By Tom Simonite A camera over the screen is a standard feature for laptops. But only Lenovo’s new model has a pair of cameras below its display to track the movements of a user’s eyes. The prototype laptop can be controlled with eye motions, reducing the need to use the mouse and making it faster to navigate through information such as maps or menus. The laptop can notice when its user has read to near…

[From PennLive, where the story also features a 1:14 minute video] [Image: Harrisburg University senior Todd Baker prepares to try the Virtusphere, a virtual reality device, for the first time. Students are working with companies to create virtual worlds for real life training. Credit: Christine Baker, The Patriot-News] Harrisburg University’s Virtusphere has potential for experimentation, education and revenue March 08, 2011 By Kourtney Geers, The Patriot-News Crawl inside this 10-foot human hamster ball and you’ll be able to go just about anywhere. The ball, called a Virtusphere, allows the person inside to wander around unhindered, exploring virtual environments seen through…

[From The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog] [Image Courtesy of Lori Foster Thompson] Online, People Learn Best from Virtual ‘Helpers’ That Resemble Them March 3, 2011 By Ben Wieder Turns out looks and personality still count in online learning. That’s the finding of a study on how people’s perception and performance in online training is affected by the appearance and communication style of online learning “helpers,” or virtual agents that pop up on a screen and guide people through a program. Some of the earliest uses of such programs have been with younger students. One program used an online…

[From the MIT Technology Review blog Mims’ Bits] Are Physical Interfaces Superior to Virtual Ones? Humans have enormous capacity for spatial memory. Why don’t our user interfaces take advantage of that? Christopher Mims 03/02/2011 Something’s been bothering me ever since I started reading books, especially non-fiction, on my Kindle: I can’t remember where anything is. Physical books are full of spatial reference points; an especially beloved book is a physical topography in which we develop a vague sense of which chapters contain relevant information; even where, on a page, a particularly striking sentence or diagram lies. Ebooks have none of these…

[From Engadget, where a 7:34 minute video and two other videos are available] Emotiv EEG headset hacked into VR trapeze act, lets you fly like Superman (video) By Sean Hollister posted Mar 1st 2011 Last year, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute students built a virtual reality contraption that let them soar through the sky, held aloft by a trapeze harness and seeing through HMD-covered eyes. This year, they’re controlling it with the power of their minds. For his master’s thesis, project leader Yehuda Duenyas added an Emotiv headset — the same one controlling cars and the occasional game — to make the…

[From Gizmag] [Image: Edwina Portocarrero from Bove’s group, decked out in tunic and wig, stood in for Carrie Fisher and re-enacted the famous holographic message, which was captured and displayed in real-time.] Consumer holographic TV creeps closer to reality By Paul Ridden January 30, 2011 Despite a relatively tepid consumer take-up, the buzz surrounding 3D television is still quite intense. But even the viewing improvements offered by stereoscopic technology may pale by comparison to the holographic goings-on at MIT. Researchers are taking the first steps toward making holographic technology a reality for consumers. Using primarily off-the-shelf components, the team has…

[From CanadaEast’s New Brunswick Business Journal] [Image: Darren Piercey in UNB Fredericton with a screen shot from his phobia app. Photo: Keith Minchin/For the Telegraph-Journal] Professor’s app helps allay fears Innovation: Phobia sufferers benefit from NBIF Breakthru finalist’s work Published Monday February 28th, 2011 Jennifer Campbell For the Telegraph-Journal For some, a spider is a source of amazement – the way it weaves its beautiful web – and for others, a spider is a source of sheer horror. It’s estimated that half of women and 10 per cent of men have some level of arachnophobia, or fear of spiders. Three…