[From Fast Company]   Nov 15, 2010 Almost Genius: An Interface That Responds to Poking, Pushing, and Tilting Is this a taste of the way touchscreens might evolve? The video [here] might just offer a taste of what mobile interfaces will become in the near future. Tangible, designed by Georg Reil and Christoph Döring, is simply a device whose onscreen images change in response to tilting, pressure, and movement. Which sounds simple, but think about it: Touchscreens like the one on iPad might respond to tilting, but they do so in an effort to keep the image static.…

[From The Los Angeles Times Technology blog] Japanese pop star Hatsune Miku takes the stage — as a 3-D hologram November 10, 2010 Pop princess Hatsune Miku is storming the music scene. With her long cerulean pigtails and her part-schoolgirl, part-spy outfit, she’s easy on the eyes. Yes, her voice sounds like it might have gone through a little –- OK, a lot –- of studio magic. Legions of screaming fans and the requisite fan sites? She’s got ’em. And, like many of her hot young singer peers, Miku is extremely, proudly fake. Like, 3-D hologram fake.…

[From the DLR Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics; the original story includes additional images and a 3:51 minute video] [Image: Five metres above the ground, Andreas Knoblach from the DLR Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics starts a virtual flight in the Robot Motion Simulator. The 10-metre-long track along which the robotic arm moves permits larger manoeuvres. The ‘pilot’ communicates with the team on the ground via radio and a camera. During the virtual flight he experiences the same forces as would affect his body during an actual flight.] Virtual flight on a robotic arm 2 November 2010 By Manuela Braun Only Andreas Knoblach’s…

[From Telepresence Options] The Immersive Technology Summit – A Review November 10, 2010 | Howard Lichtman Two weeks ago I spoke at the Immersive Technology Summit in Los Angeles, an event put together by the non-profit ImTech, which is supporting the development and adoption of immersive technologies.  The one-day summit, emceed by Ken Rutowski of KenRadio,  drew hundreds of participants from around the world with tens of thousands more watching the live streams.  The summit took place at Los Angeles Center Studios in the heart of Hollywood and created a hot tub atmosphere that brought together luminaries from technology and the arts…

[From the MIT Technology Review blog Mim’s Bits, which contains an additional image and reader comments] [Image: Google Trend shows the steady decline in searches for “Virtual Reality”] Whatever Happened to … Virtual Reality? Remember the movie Lawnmower Man? Here’s why we’re not even close. Christopher Mims 10/22/2010 The early 90’s were awesome. Bill Watterson was still drawing Calvin and Hobbes, the tattered remnants of the Cold War were falling down around our ears, and most of Wall Street was convinced the Macintosh was a computer for effete graphic designers and Apple was more or less on its way out.…

[From PC World; more information is in a news story here; the Intellitar web site is here] Digital Afterlife Beckons From Cloud-based Service By Stephen Lawson, IDG News People who die in Hollywood movies often find themselves floating around on a cloud as angels. Now a startup in Huntsville, Alabama, will let you go to a different kind of cloud after you die: the computing kind. The two-year-old company, called Intellitar, lets people create intelligent avatars or “intellitars” of themselves now, so they can spend time with their ancestors forever. The avatars are designed to look and talk like their…

[From iPhone World] Apple’s new patent for multiplayer GPS enabled interactive iPhone games November 5, 2010 by iPhoneWorld A newly unveiled Apple patent (USPTO #20100279768) reveals Apple’s plans for multiplayer, location-aware interactive iPhone games. In a nutshell the patent describes how iPhones could be used for real-world cooperative gameplay, using the iPhone’s sensors, camera, GPS module and WiFi/wireless internet connection.…

[From The Express] VOYAGE TO MARS? WE’RE ALREADY THERE! As a one-way trip to the Red Planet is mooted, we reveal how, deep in the most inhospitable places on Earth, astronauts are already living as if they were actually colonising Mars. Saturday October 30,2010 By Jane Warren The idea of making a new life on Mars is strangely hypnotic. It may be famously inhospitable – there’s hardly any oxygen and if you step out unsuited your lungs will explode due to the thin atmosphere – but these drawbacks don’t seem to stop the allure of the Red Planet in the…

[From Wired, which features a 1:40 minute video] Holographic Telecommuting May Soon Be Possible By Lisa Grossman November 3, 2010 A new holographic display can transmit three-dimensional movies from one location to another almost in real time. If Princess Leia had to send her “Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope” message from Earth today, it would now be technologically possible. “We can take objects from one location and show them in another location in 3-D in near real time,” said optical scientist Nasser Peyghambarian, and project leader from the University of Arizona in a press conference Nov.…

[From New Scientist, where a 0:33 minute video is available; the Stoll et al article is available here] Game characters to get authentically rumpled clothes 17:30 24 October 2010 by Shanta Barley Computer game developers use sophisticated algorithms to inject real physics into virtual worlds – painstakingly mimicking the way that light reflects off objects, for instance. But there’s something unrealistic about the citizens of those virtual worlds: their clothes barely register a crease or crumple, no matter how much running and jumping they perform. That could soon change, thanks to software which ensures that a game character’s clothes ripple…

[A press release from Mechdyne via HPCwire (High Productivity Computing); a description of the episode from the Sci Fi Science web site follows below]   November 01, 2010 Mechdyne CAVE To Be Featured on Discovery Science Channel MARSHALLTOWN, Iowa, Nov. 1 — The CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment integrated by Mechdyne Corporation in March 2009, at Rowan University in Camden, NJ, will be featured in and episode of Sci Fi Science–Physics of the Impossible airing on the Discovery Science Channel beginning November 3, 2010, at 9 p.m. (CDT.) Dr. Michio Kaku serves as host of the program and was on site…

[From PhysOrg, which features a 1:15 minute video (many other videos are available at the popcode web site)] New mobile phone app ‘Popcode’ adds virtual reality to real world objects (w/ Video) October 20, 2010 Have you ever struggled to follow a set of assembly instructions for flat-pack furniture? Simon Taylor, a PhD student in Dr Tom Drummond’s group, and Connell Gauld, a graduate of the MEng course in 2010, have been working on a framework for adding virtual content to real world objects. They can bring written instructions to life using a technique called Augmented Reality (AR). Augmented Reality has…