[From The New York Times’ Wheels blog]   August 11, 2010 Recreating a Classic Video Game With Radio-Controlled Cars By JONATHAN SCHULTZ With apologies to “Gran Tursimo,” “Forza Motorsport,” “Project Gotham” and any number of hyperrealistic, console-based racing simulators and video games, arguably no title channels the visceral thrill of hurtling around a course like the futuristic “Wipeout” series. Now, a German art collective has rendered that thrill tactile, using defiantly analog components: cardboard, glue and vintage-video-arcade kitsch. Called (with a wink) Racer 0.2, the project is the creation of three media artists collectively known as Sputnic.…

[From the MIT Technology blog Mims’s Bits] Friday, July 30, 2010 Brain Scans Teach Humans to Empathize with Bots Mirror neurons light up when we’re put in their shoes. When we watch a human express a powerful emotion – anger, fear, disgust – big sections of our brains light up, including so-called “mirror neurons,” which are unique because they fire both when we produce a given action and when we perceive it in others. They are the basis of what neuroscientists call Resonance. Resonance describes the mechanism by which the neural substrates involved in the internal representation of actions, as…

[From The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET)] Life in a Virtual World Mike Treder Ethical Technology Posted: Jul 24, 2010 If you could live in a world that was just the way you wanted it to be, with specifications you’d chosen, customized and personalized to meet your every need and fulfill your fondest desires, would you spend all your time there? Or would you prefer to stay here, in the real world? As computers continue to gain speed and power at the rate of

[From The Wall Street Journal; more information about the AR Drones, including videos, is available here] [Image: Electronics-show attendees watched a demonstration of Parrot’s helicopter in January.] JULY 13, 2010 Reality Gets a Makeover With Jumps in Processing Power, Apps Adding Data to Cellphone Images are Taking Flight By KIMBERLY PETERSON PARIS—French electronics company Parrot SA plans next month to release a toy helicopter with a twist. The AR Drone has a pair of cameras to relay video to iPhones or iPads, which function as the remote control. The device also recognizes certain objects, such as other AR Drones, and…

[From The New York Times, where the story includes a 3:23 minute video and other multimedia supplements] [Image: Andrea Thomaz, right, and Nick DePalma in 2009 with Simon, a robot being developed at Georgia Tech. Above left, Simon evaluating objects.] Students, Meet Your New Teacher, Mr. Robot By BENEDICT CAREY and JOHN MARKOFF LOS ANGELES — The boy, a dark-haired 6-year-old, is playing with a new companion. The two hit it off quickly — unusual for the 6-year-old, who has autism — and the boy is imitating his playmate’s every move, now nodding his head, now raising his arms. “Like…

[From Discovery News] What Does Your Avatar Say About You?  Analysis by David Teeghman Thu Jul 29, 2010 The website Second Life lets users create a completely new identity in virtual reality. Tall people can become short and animals can pretend to be humans, because on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. But even with the range of possibilities to completely change your online personality and become all you ever dreamed of, you won’t. Researchers at Concordia University in Canada report in the journal Psychology and Marketing that online avatars usually reflect the personality of their creators.…

[From The Montreal Gazette] Age now, save more for later By DOROTHY LIPOVENKO, Freelance Shortly before the Great Bull Market of the 1990s topped out, advance warning came of a most unusual birthday gift. A television makeup artist with a deft hand for special effects agreed to sit me in her chair, dip into her pots of magic, and “age” me. Turns out a sneak preview of version 70.0 is more prescient than anyone could have imagined. New research suggests that showing someone how they’ll look when they’re old (through digital tinkering of the face) can add up to extra…

[From CNN] The robot that visits your cubicle By John D. Sutter, CNN July 30, 2010 (CNN) — When Trevor Blackwell, CEO of a company called Anybots, wants to know what his employees are up to, he sends a robot to their cubicles. “I can see if people are busy on something — and then won’t interrupt them,” he said this week. “Or, you know, if they’re doing something that looks interesting, or if they look stuck, I’ll have a conversation with them.” This isn’t your standard “Office Space” conversation. Blackwell boots up a “telepresence robot” — which looks like…

[From Christopher Mims’ Mims’s Bits blog at MIT’s Technology Review] Wednesday, July 28, 2010 Adding Temperature to Human-Computer Interaction An experimental new game controller adds the sensation of hot and cold to users’ experience of a simulated environment Touch interfaces and haptic feedback are already a part of how we interact with computers, in the form of iPads, rumbling video game controllers and even three-dimensional joysticks. As the range of interactions with digital environments expands, it’s logical to ask what’s next: Smell-o-vision has been on the horizon for something like 50 years, but there’s a dark horse stalking this race: thermoelectrics.…

[From DigInfo TV; a 1:35 minute video is available here] Head-mounted Mobile Video Communication System 28 July 2010 At Wireless Japan 2010, the Nakajima Laboratory at the University of Electro-Communications exhibited a mobile videophone that enables truly effective communication, using a head-mounted display and various sensors. “We think that a weakness of ordinary videophones is, they don’t let people make eye contact. That’s a big defect in terms of effective communication. We’ve created something that overcomes that defect.” This system has acceleration and position sensors built into a head-mounted display. A microcomputer detects the vertical and horizontal motion of the…

[From TechNewsDaily; more information is available here]   Real Cookies Butt Heads With Virtual Ones By Stuart Fox, TechNewsDaily Staff Writer 28 July 2010 LOS ANGELES — Between the crunch, the buttery feel in your mouth and the rich taste, cookies seem pretty perfect already. But they’re not quite perfect enough for Takuji Narumi of Tokyo University. Here at the SIGGRAPH computer animation and interactive technology conference, Takuji and his team unveiled their Meta Cookie system, which uses virtual reality to try to control the flavor of a cookie. The Meta Cookie system takes advantage of a principle that any…

[From Coolest Gadgets; more information and a 0:38 minute video are available at Helium and Japan Trend Shop] ChouChou Electric Butterfly by Mark R [July 28, 2010] I saw this the other day, and I’m not certain why I didn’t report on it then. Normally, I’m all over the cool robot gadgets. I then watched the video […]. Not to be a spoiler, but it features a butterfly in a jar. If you’ve ever put a butterfly in a jar, then you know how it moves when you strike the top. That is what you will see in this video, except…