[From The Chronicle of Higher Education’s College 2.0 blog] September 6, 2010 The Celebrity Effect of Scholarly Videoconferencing By Jeff Young Singapore—For some researchers in the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research & Technology, every Tuesday means another meeting by videoconference. Findings are shared, research procedures are debated, and suggestions for next steps are decided with people who in some cases are known only as an image on a screen. Maroun Khoury, a postdoctoral associate for the effort, which runs joint research projects between the two locations, recently found out that the giant high-resolution screens in the conference rooms at facilities here…

[From The Globe and Mail] Driving a message home with an optical illusion By Rebecca Lindell Vancouver – From Thursday’s Globe and Mail Published on Thursday, Sep. 02, 2010 It’s already on the big screen, but now a 3D image is being used on the streets of West Vancouver in an attempt to jolt reckless drivers into reality. Motorists travelling on 22nd Street in West Vancouver will be confronted with a 3D image of a little girl chasing a ball in the street starting next Tuesday. The girl will be an optical illusion, but the scenario is very real, according…

[From memeburn] [Image: A scene from a virtual version of Guantanamo Bay prison] Immersive journalism uses virtual gaming platforms to tell stories By Nonny de la Pena Ernest Wilson, the dean of the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism, put it like this: “What if, after receiving the home and garden section in the morning, the reader could walk right into the section and visit a garden?” This bucolic vision reflects one potential scenario for what we at the Annenberg school are calling “immersive journalism,” a new genre that utilises gaming platforms and virtual environments to…

[From NPR; the original story includes audio, video and additional information] [Image: Edward and Lavinia Fitzgerald in Savannah, Ga., have dinner while telecaregiver Denise Cady of ResCare, a camera monitoring service, looks on.] Wired Homes Keep Tabs On Aging Parents by Jennifer Ludden August 24, 2010 Part three in a four-part series The boomer generation that has grown up with e-mail, cell phones and video cameras is now using all of these things to help care for their aging parents. That’s leading to some odd dinnertime scenes, like the one that plays out every evening in the ranch house of…

[From Singularity Hub] Japan’s Augmented Reality Teleconference Room August 27th, 2010 by Aaron Saenz Get ready for teleconferencing in the round. NTT, the world’s second largest telecomm, has developed a new video room that allows users to share an overlapping virtual environment. Dubbed the t-Room, NTT’s next generation conferencing solution takes real time video of your friends and displays them on tall window-like screens surrounding you. Your image, in turn, is shown in a window in your friend’s t-Room. When you overlap in the same window you can see the other person ‘behind you’ in the screen. It’s a sort…

[From Medill Reports] [Image: “Oceans of Change,” a virtual visulatization of the passage of time.] Life – now in exciting 3D! by Jessica Krinke Aug 27, 2010 Chicago artist Ellen Sandor has been bending the dimensions of visual art since the 1980s, creating scientific visualizations of everything from fractal math to viruses. Driven originally by what she describes as “a healthy appetite for kitsch,” Sandor was fascinated by turn-of-the-century novelties such as lenticular postcards and stereoscopic films. She set out to develop ways to include similar alternative effects in her work. Sandor, a pioneer the fields of digital art and…

[From The Ski Channel Television Network] Thursday, Aug 26, 2010 @ 16:35:48 PM Skullcandy debuts virtual reality dressing room Sure pro skier Tom Wallisch looks stylish in the new Skullcandy Roc Nation headphones, but will you? That’s the age old question that once faced consumers but not anymore. Skullcandy has launched a first in the headphone space and something never before seen in the action sports world, debuting a virtual dressing room for their Roc Nation Aviator headphone. By downloading a simple plugin, and accessing the user’s webcam, the Skullcandy Virtual Room tracks the users eyes and displays live footage…

[From Big Think’s Hybrid Reality blog] Can Hollywood Redesign Humanity Parag and Ayesha Khanna on August 29, 2010 Most people do not come to Hollywood for deep conversation, but as we explained with respect to “serious games,” the entertainment universe is producing an impressive array of products that can educate youth to think more constructively about real-world problems through experimenting with solutions in online environments. There is also a new breed of film-makers who are advancing the cause of techno-optimism in ways that contradict the dystopian visions of robots taking over the earth. When we convened a salon of film-makers, online…

[From InfoWorld] August 19, 2010 HP projection technology could take a page from Star Wars Businesspeople would be projected into meetings the same way R2D2 projected a hologram of Princess Leia By Paul Krill | InfoWorld In the future, business meetings might seem like a scene out of the movie “Star Wars,” if  technology envisioned at Hewlett-Packard comes to fruition. Stars Wars-like 3-D projection technology is on the drawing board at the company, with the potential to project businesspersons at many locations into virtual reality-like meetings, reducing the need to hop on airplanes and spend significant time away from home.…

[From BLDGBLOG] Augmented Metropolis Posted August 23, 2010  Keiichi Matsuda, a recent graduate—with distinction—from the Bartlett School of Architecture, whose film Domestic Robocop was featured on BLDGBLOG several months ago, has a new project out: Augmented City. And it’s in 3D. The [2:46 minute] film “focuses on the deprogramming of architecture and the spontaneous creation of customised, aggregated spaces,” Matsuda writes. We see its central protagonist surrounded by pop-up menus and projected touchscreens, able to switch urban backgrounds—graffiti to gardens—in an instant. …

[From BizBash Hive] World’s First Scented Online Banner – Smell This! by Community on August 17, 2010 Ever heard of smell-o-vision? Back in 1960 one film was made, ironically called “Scent of Mystery,” that brought-to-life a very cool idea – pumping smells into the theatre that corresponded with scenes happening in the movie.  So when the characters on screen were eating at a restaurant the audience would smell the food. Fast forward 50 years later to Brazil and the world of KAIAK – a top selling men’s fragrance that is sold exclusively door-to-door.  The company wanted to let people know…

[From VentureBeat] HP’s Phil McKinney shows off a wide, wide, wide high-definition screen August 20, 2010 | Dean Takahashi Hewlett Packard is working on a display with a really wide screen. Phil McKinney, chief technology officer at the Personal Systems Group at HP, showed off the concept for the screen at the DisplaySearch Emerging Technologies conference this week in San Jose, Calif. The screen is so wide that you can see an entire pro basketball court at the same time. McKinney referred to the screen as a “triple wide high-definition” screen that is created by stitching together images from lots of…