[From 1UP.com (“Where Gamers Call Home”)] New Company to Make Full Body Exoskeleton Game Controller XIO will debut at E3, offering movement tracking and physical feedback. By Frank Cifaldi, 06/03/2010 In 2006, Nintendo’s Wii stripped down the concept of a virtual reality interface to an affordable plastic peripheral, finally bringing the VR promise of the early 90s into the home. Microsoft is simplifying things even further this year with Project Natal, which takes away controllers entirely in favor of a camera that senses your body’s movement. But Forcetek USA, a new player in the game interface market, wants to bring…

[From MIT’s Technology Review Invited Guests blog]   Friday, May 28, 2010 The Challenges of Virtual Hairstyling New system uses haptics to allow designers to comb hair just like they would in real life. By Christopher Mims Imagine that you had to design a virtual hairstyle by painstakingly defining the position and shape of every single hair on a character’s head. It sounds like a joke, but modeling hair in this way – with a heaping helping of post-processing for added realism – remains the industry standard for creating virtual 3D hairstyles. If you were an animator at Pixar or…

[From Business Insider; follow the links for pictures and video]   Google Powers Awesome Iron Man Flight Simulator (GOOG, NTDOY) Nick Saint Tuesday, June 1, 2010 A team of virtual reality enthusiasts working in Israel has built a simulator that recreates the experience of flying in the Iron Man suit. Via the Google Earth Blog, the system is built around the Google Earth Flight Simulator, which lets you fly around Google’s 3D representation of the world. This program is fed into a set of virtual reality goggles, controlled by a motion-sensitive Nintendo WiiMote attached to the wing off of an…

[Exceprt from a PressDoc press release; a 2:19 minute video news story about the display is here, a 1:18 minute video of the full display is here, and more building projections are available via the video here] Samsung gives famous historic Dutch building a new dimension with 3D Projection On Thursday the 20th of May 2010, Samsung was the first to introduce a large-scale commercial 3D-Outdoor projection in the Netherlands, at the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam. The public was able to view the addition of a new dimension to this historic building. On the adjacent square, visitors are able to…

[From The Huffington Post]  Couple Let Baby Starve To Death While Raising Virtual Baby Online 03- 5-10 A Korean couple allowed their child to starve to death because of their addiction to raising a ‘virtual’ child in a Second-Life-style game online known as Prius, reports say. Kim Yoo-chul, 41, and Choi Mi-sun, 25, would feed their three-month-old baby only when not at 12-hour-online sessions in a local internet café. The pair were obsessed with raising their internet child, called Anima, resulting in the neglect of their unnamed real daughter.…

[From the UK’s Telegraph]   Gamer stabs rival who killed his avatar Video game fanatic hunts down and stabs rival player who killed character online A French video game fanatic hunted down and stabbed a rival player who had killed his character in an online war game. Published: 27 May 2010 Julien Barreaux, 20, told police he wanted to see his rival player “wiped out” after his character in the game Counter-Strike died in a virtual knife fight.…

[From Businessweek]   Ford assembly line optimized by gaming technology May 24, 2010 By Nick Barber When Glenn Harrington donned a motion capture suit complete with more than 40 reflective spheres he wasn’t being turned into the latest video game character, but helping to design car manufacturing jobs that are less physically stressful on workers. At the Ford Motor Company Assembly Ergonomics Lab in Dearborn, Michigan, the company uses technology typically found in the gaming industry to reduce on-the-job and repetitive stress injuries on its assembly lines. For a video report on the technology, click here. “The cameras pick up…

[From LiveScience]   Image: The third-person shooter game “Alan Wake” stars a suspense-thriller author in a surreal, horror novel setting. Video Gamers Can Control Dreams, Study Suggests By Jeremy Hsu, LiveScience Senior Writer posted: 25 May 2010 09:53 am ET Playing video games before bedtime may give people an unusual level of awareness and control in their dreams, LiveScience has learned. That ability to shape the alternate reality of dream worlds might not match mind-bending Hollywood films such as “The Matrix,” but it could provide an edge when fighting nightmares or even mental trauma. Dreams and video games both represent…

[From Fierce ContentManagement (“a weekly content management news update, which focuses on best practices for creating, storing and managing documents and information”); a scene from the film is here]  What if content management were 3D? February 22, 2010 — 4:17pm ET | By Ron Miller I recently saw the Michael Douglas/Demi Moore 1994 movie called “Disclosure.” In the movie (which explores sexual harassment in the workplace), Michael Douglas was working for a computer company that created a 3D virtual reality database. The user would put on special glasses and he was literally inside the database with the data.…

[From MedCity News (“Innovation, influence and business in America’s medical cities”)] 5.21.10 | Thomas Lee | Rochester, Minnesota Mayo Clinic explores the virtual world of Second Life Mayo Clinic is a world famous hospital and research institution. But owning a tropical island seems a bit excessive, especially for a non-profit organization. Alas, “Mayo Clinic Island” isn’t real, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. The island only exists in the virtual 3D world of Second Life, where avatars, online personas of real people around the world, freely mingle and attend lectures on cancer and heart disease. Once…

[From Mashable (“The Social Media Guide“)]    Augmented Reality Billboard Puts Passersby in a Street Fight Barb Dybwad May 1, 2010 We’ve seen a number of creative uses for augmented reality recently, from Iron Man to virtual pets and even tattoos. An interactive billboard in the Netherlands brings a powerful new example to the category by putting passersby in the middle of a virtual street fight. The Dutch government created the billboard to address a pressing problem for public employees, who are often the targets of aggression and outright violence when performing their daily service duties. The problem is compounded…

[From The Wall Street Journal via Yahoo! Finance] UPS Thinks Out of the Box on Driver Training by Jennifer Levitz Wednesday, April 7, 2010  Vexed that some 30% of driver candidates flunk its traditional training, United Parcel Service Inc. (UPS) is moving beyond the classroom to ready its rookies for the road. In the place of books and lectures are videogames, a contraption that simulates walking on ice and an obstacle course around an artificial village.…