[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.…

[From Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog (“What’s Next in National Security”)] Pentagon: Boost Training With Computer-Troop Mind Meld By Katie Drummond April 27, 2010 The Pentagon is looking to better train its troops — by scanning their minds as they play video games. Adaptive, mind-reading computer systems have been a work-in-progress among military agencies for at least a decade. In 2000, far-out research agency Darpa launched “Augmented Cognition,” a program that sought to develop computers that used EEG scans to adjust how they displayed information — visually, orally, or otherwise — to avoid overtaxing one realm of a troop’s cognition. The…

[From the Massively blog (“Daily News about MMOs”)] The Virtual Whirl: Immersion, virtual environments, Facebook, and the conceptual hump by Tateru Nino May 15th 2010 Second Life is an immersive virtual environment. That is, it fosters attention and a quality of focus. You might subscribe to alternative definitions of the word “immersion”, but focus and attention are the sense being used when developer/operators talk about an “immersive environment”. They might intend one of the other meanings at other times – the word is a pretty slippery one. The problem is that for most general-purpose virtual environments (eg: Second Life), that…

[From MIT’s Technology Review Editors blog] Monday, May 10, 2010 Iron Man 2 Envisions the Future of Computing Interfaces Think the science in the movie is bad? The real science is in the interaction. By Erica Naone Science purists might find much to complain about in the newest installment of the Iron Man franchise, starring Robert Downey Jr. Admittedly, Tony Stark “creates an element,” and heroes and villains alike seem able to break into high-level computer systems with little more than the wave of an iPhone look-a-like. But I expect computer scientists and designers will be impressed by the movie’s…

[From TechNewsDaily]   NASA Launch Software Goes From the Simulator To the Classroom By Stuart Fox, TechNewsDaily Staff Writer 13 May 2010  NASA has converted the space shuttle simulator software used to train astronauts into an educational tool for teaching middle school students how to apply their math, science and engineering knowledge. The program, called the Kennedy Launch Academy Simulation System (KLASS), allows students to play the role of mission control engineers for a simulated space shuttle launch.…

[From The Guardian] Virtual reality used to transfer men’s minds into a woman’s body Researchers projected men’s sense of self into a virtual reality woman, changing the way they behaved and thought Ian Sample guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 12 May 2010 Scientists have transferred men’s minds into a virtual woman’s body in an experiment that could enlighten the prejudiced and shed light on how humans distinguish themselves from others. In a study at Barcelona University, men donned a virtual reality (VR) headset that allowed them to see and hear the world as a female character. When they looked down they could even…

[From MIT’s Technology Review; a 3:04 minute video is here]  May/June 2010 TR10: Mobile 3-D Smart phones will take 3-D mainstream By Annalee Newitz This article is part of an annual list of what we believe are the 10 most important emerging technologies. See the full list here. The Samsung B710 phone looks like a typical smart phone, but something unexpected happens when the screen is moved from a vertical to a horizontal orientation: the image jumps from 2-D to 3-D. The technology that produces this perception of depth is the work of Julien Flack, CTO of Dynamic Digital Depth,…

[A press release from Umea University via expertanswer]   New technology helps visually impaired to ‘see’ emotions 27/04/10 Without vision it’s impossible to interpret facial expressions, or so it’s believed. Not any more. Shafiq ur Réhman, Umeå University, presents a new technology in his doctoral thesis – a Braille code of emotions. “It gives new opportunities for social interactions for the visually impaired,” he says. Lacking the sense of vision can be very limiting in a person’s daily life. The most obvious limitation is probably the difficulty of navigation, but small details in everyday life, which seeing people take for…

[From Wired’s GadgetLab blog (“Hardware that rocks your world”)]   New Graphics Tech Promises Speed, Hyperrealism By Priya Ganapati April 22, 2010 Chipmakers have spent billions of dollars over the decades to create specialized processors that can help make computer graphics ever more realistic and detailed. Now an Australian hobbyist says he has created a technology that can churn out high-quality, computer-generated graphics for video games and other applications without the need for graphics chips or processor-hungry machines. “Major companies have got to a point where they improve the polygon-count in graphics-rendering by 22 percent a year,” says Bruce Dell,…

[From The Wall Street Journal blog Digits (“Technology News and Insights”)] May 4, 2010 Q&A: A Real Study of Virtual Worlds By Alice Truong Students of Ulrike Schultze might know her better by her Second Life avatar, Uskla. That’s because the Southern Methodist University Cox School of Business professor utilizes the online game to connect to her students in an unusual way. Ms. Schultze, who teaches management and information technology, leads both an online and physical classroom — students have the option of attending either or both. But for her, Second Life goes beyond being a teaching tool. Ms. Schultze…

[From Netimperative (“Intelligence for Digital Business”)] Dabs’ augmented reality ad puts virtual laptop in users’ hands May 04, 2010 Dabs.com has launched its first augmented reality campaign, which allows users to see a virtual Acer 3D laptop ‘in their hands’ – without the need for 3D glasses.…