[From The New Zealand Herald News] Technology brings Santa to his fans at Starship By Lincoln Tan Wednesday Dec 16, 2009 Just hours after surgery, 6-year-old Tabitha Monk rushed to put on her Sunday best for a chat with Santa from his North Pole grotto. “It’s really so cool to talk to Santa,” Tabitha said, and nodded in agreement when asked if this was an easier way to be asking Santa for presents. “I’ve asked Santa for a laptop, printer, clothes and shoes, and also to get better.” Tabitha, a Year 2 student at Buckland School, has pancreatitis (inflamed pancreas)…

[From Gizmag; the blog entry includes an image gallery and a 3:23 minute video; the Inspector Bots web site is here] ROBOTICS SWAT BOT has trouble-makers in its sights By Jeff Salton December 14, 2009 The Robotic Weapon or SWAT BOT is what you get when you cross a paintball gun and pepper spray with a remote-controlled RV whose parents were a laptop computer and the Road Runner. Designed for law enforcement situations like riot control, hostage scenarios, building security, bomb threats or other hostile or covert situations, this all-aluminum, lithium polymer battery powered unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) is equipped…

[From The Displayground, Microvision’s ‘official’ blog; the press release for this prototype is here and a short video of it in action is here] PicoP Gaming Applications hit Intel® Extreme Masters December 10th, 2009 by Ben Averch Hi all, I’m here in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada where the people are warm and the weather is…not! For the next three days, Microvision will be showcasing some innovative new uses of the PicoP display engine for gaming applications at the Intel® Extreme Masters North American Championships, taking place at the enormous West Edmonton Mall. Intel Extreme Masters is classed as the biggest gaming tournament…

[From The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog; the iLabCentral site is here] December 10, 2009 New Project Promotes Virtual Science Labs, Despite Skepticism By Jeff Young Atlanta — Can online science laboratories replace the experience of sitting at a lab bench with beaker in hand? No way, say many professors. But Kemi Jona, director of Northwestern University’s Office of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Education Partnerships, argues that virtual labs are at least as good, and in some cases better, at teaching students concepts to prepare them for modern laboratory research. He’s a leader of iLabCentral, an effort…

[From Broadcasting & Cable] NFL’s Cowboys Plan Texas-Size 3D Demo Will use giant stadium display to show HDLogix technology By Glen Dickson — Broadcasting & Cable, 12/8/2009 4:00:00 AM The National Football League’s Dallas Cowboys plan to demonstrate this Sunday how conventional two-dimensional HD video can be converted to 3D HD through sophisticated software processing, using technology from Edison, N.J. start-up HDLogix. During their game against the San Diego Chargers at Cowboys Stadium, the Cowboys will use the giant (160 by 72-foot) video wall that hangs 90 feet above the field to show 3D “anaglyph” images that will be created…

[From The Vancouver Sun] Mingleverse creates virtual meeting spots Vancouver startup company rents out rooms on the Internet for events By Gillian Shaw, Vancouver Sun December 5, 2009 The Vancouver Canucks are among the organizations turning to the technology of Vancouver startup Mingleverse to create virtual meeting spots where fans can wander around and chat in 3-D sound. Up to 50 people can convene in virtual meeting spots — that could be anything from the Canucks’ dressing room to a boardroom or a soccer stadium — and interact with 3-D voice, audio and visual telecommunications as though they were meeting…

[From The Sydney Morning Herald] The future before your eyes KELSEY MUNRO December 6, 2009 Imagine a world where your contact lenses double as a personal computer display, superimposing information in front of you. That virtual-reality dream, a staple of sci-fi movies, is a step closer thanks to the work of Seattle scientists who have been developing a prototype to generate images inside a contact lens. The information would appear about 50 centimetres from the user’s eye. The technology is some years off, but a researcher, Babak Parviz, and his colleagues at the University of Washington last week unveiled a…

[From Associated Press)] Scientists, lawyers mull effects of home robots BROOKE DONALD Published: December 5, 2009 PALO ALTO, Calif. (AP) – Eric Horvitz illustrates the potential dilemmas of living with robots by telling the story of how he once got stuck in an elevator at Stanford Hospital with a droid the size of a washing machine. “I remembered thinking, ‘Whoa, this is scary,’ as it whirled around, almost knocking me down,” the Microsoft researcher recalled. “Then, I thought, ‘What if I were a patient?’ There could be big issues here.” We’re still far from the sci-fi dream of having robots…

[From AlphaGalileo (“Europe’s leading source of research news”)] News Release Virtual solution to driving phobias 19 October 2009 The University of Manchester Nervous drivers are being helped to overcome their road phobias by donning Cyclops-style goggles that transport them to a three-dimensional virtual world. Researchers at The University of Manchester have recruited volunteers with a variety of driving phobias to test whether virtual reality can be used alongside conventional psychological therapies to help tackle their fears. The Virtual Reality Exposure Treatment (VRET) will allow participants to drive on virtual roads and confront their fears, whether they might be driving over…

[From the web site of the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin] Avatars Can Surreptitiously and Negatively Affect User in Video Games, Virtual Worlds, Research Shows AUSTIN, Texas-Nov. 10, 2009-Although often seen as an inconsequential feature of digital technologies, one’s self-representation, or avatar, in a virtual environment can affect the user’s thoughts, according to research by a University of Texas at Austin communication professor. In the first study to use avatars to prime negative responses in a desktop virtual setting, Jorge Peña, assistant professor in the College of Communication, demonstrated that the subtext of an…

[From The Birmingham (Alabama) News] UAB virtual enterprise turns 3-D simulations into teaching, rehabilitation tools By Anna Velasco — The Birmingham News November 30, 2009, 11:50AM Virtual reality has gotten a lot more real. It has, at least, at the UAB department of mechanical en­gineering, where faculty and students are working on a three-dimensional lab that will allow simulation of everything from surgery to skiing snow­covered slopes. The University of Alabama at Birmingham got the hardware — known as VisCube — for the lab earlier this fall, and engineers are writing software for use in many disciplines, including medicine, dentistry,…

[From the New York Times blog The Moment; a 2:12 minute video is available here] Food July 20, 2009, 2:12 pm Now Online | Air Yakiniku, Food for Thought By ROCKY CASALE When the virtual restaurant Air Yakiniku appeared online last January, it became both an instant success in Japan (where else?) and one of the more curious signs of these globally lean times. The “restaurant,” a Korean barbecue, works like this: once you´re on the site, you´re given an apron to print out and wear to keep “grease” from splattering on your computer. I´m not joking. Then you´re asked…