L - bird: Internet, Science & Technology

Augmented Reality Navigation

2008-07-01T16:03:00.001+01:00

Augmented Reality Navigation from Robert Winters on Vimeo.

Capacitive SSVEP Brain Computer Interface

2008-06-22T08:49:00.002+01:00

Driving a model car by capacitive EEG helmet. System is based on steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP) in the visual cortex of the human brain. Technische Universität Carolo-Wilhelmina

TED Talk: Robert Full on How engineers learn from evolution

2008-06-20T21:13:00.001+01:00

Insects and animals have evolved some amazing skills -- but, as Robert Full notes, many animals are actually over-engineered. The trick is to copy only what's necessary. He shows how human engineers can learn from animals' tricks. - TED

Video: ted.com/talks/view/id/280

Brain-computer interface

2008-06-16T15:59:00.005+01:00

On 7th June 2008, Keio University succeeded in the world’s first demonstration experiment with the help of a disabled person to use brainwave to chat and stroll through the virtual world.

The research group led by Assistant Prof. Junichi Ushiba of the Faculty of Science and Technology of Keio University applied the technology “to operate the computer using brain images released last year and succeeds in enabling a disabled person suffering muscle disorder (41 year old male) to stroll through “Second Life®*”, a three-dimentional virtual world on the Internet, to walk towards the avatar of a student logged in at Keio University located 16km from the subject’s home, and to have a conversation with the student using the “voice chat” function.

This demonstration experiment opens a new possibility for motion-impaired people in serious conditions to communicate with others and to engage in business. This experiment is a marriage of leading-edge technologies in brain science and the Internet, and is the world’s first successful example to meet with people and have conversation in the virtual world. - Science Daily

Flicflex concept

2008-06-14T11:45:00.001+01:00

Opening a letter, unfolding it and feeling the texture of the paper is a very tactile experience compared to receiving an e-mail. On top of the content itself, the behavior and micro-interactions adds a level of engagement to the medium. Flicflex explores the possibilities of future flexible electronic interfaces that could emerge within digital products.

By minimizing the graphical interface and embodying physical interactions such as flipping, wrenching and bending, it creates more pleasurable ways of managing information.

Microsoft's vision of different users interfaces

2008-06-14T11:43:00.001+01:00

Thought controlled robot arm

2008-06-13T17:53:00.003+01:00

If these monkeys were 1970s TV stars, they would play crime-fighting cyborgs in “The Six Million Dollar Monkeys.”

Macaque monkeys with electrodes implanted in their brains learned to control a robotic arm with their thoughts, researchers report.

Scientists gently restrained the monkeys’ own arms and positioned the mechanical arm at each animal’s left shoulder as if it were a real arm. After practicing for several days, the monkeys appeared to treat the robotic arm as their own and could feed themselves with the arm using fluid, rapid motions. - Science News

NeoVisus - On Gaze Interaction

2008-06-12T09:37:00.001+01:00

Multi-Touch with 3D on Nasa World Wind

2008-06-07T16:10:00.002+01:00

We developed a multi-touch version of Nasa World Wind on a 7.9 x 6.2 feet tall FTIR (frustrated total internal reflection) based multi-touch wall. This implementation is based on the Nasa World Wind Java SDK and a multi-touch tracking library developed within the Project: Multitouch at the Deutsche Telekom AG Laboratories, which is part of the TU Berlin, Germany. The FTIR multi-touch wall was built from the scratch during a workshop on FTIR multi-touch surfaces in Münster, Germany. All the software is written entirely in Java and the interaction will be hopefully available as an open source project. Please visit the site in a couple of weeks again. Of course, the Java Nasa World Wind SDK and the Deutsche Telekom Labs Multitouch tracking lib are certainly available as open source projects. - Nasa World Wind

Albatron showcases multi-touch LCD panel

2008-06-06T14:55:00.000+01:00

In the upcoming Windows 7 operating system, Microsoft will introduce multi-touch finally that basically allows multiple input detection where as XP and Vista is still single.

Albatron had a special driver made for Vista which allows multi-touch and while it is nowhere near fine tuned at this stage, it does work surprisingly well even now.

Albatron’s Optical Touch Panel is 22-inches in size, has a widescreen resolution of 1650 x 1080, has touch accuracy up to 90 frames per second and uses DVI. - TweakTown

Physicists have 'solved' mystery of levitation

2008-06-05T09:34:00.001+01:00

Levitation has been elevated from being pure science fiction to science fact, according to a study reported today by physicists.

Beijing saleswoman demonstrates toy which levitates by magnetic force; Physicists have 'solved' mystery of levitation
In theory the discovery could be used to levitate a person

In earlier work the same team of theoretical physicists showed that invisibility cloaks are feasible.

Now, in another report that sounds like it comes out of the pages of a Harry Potter book, the University of St Andrews team has created an 'incredible levitation effects’ by engineering the force of nature which normally causes objects to stick together.

Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin, from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, have worked out a way of reversing this pheneomenon, known as the Casimir force, so that it repels instead of attracts. - Telegraph.co.uk

wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect

Panoramio

2008-06-04T09:03:00.004+01:00

We just released a new feature in Panoramio that allows you to browse photos simulating a 3D environment. You can jump from one photo to the closest one, walking virtually around the place or watching the place from many different perspectives. Enjoy the views from the top of Empire State in New York, the last floor of Eiffel Tower or the sights from the Pyramids of Teotihuacan, just by opening the “look around” link under those photos. - Panoramio

Sidney Opera House: nv0.panoramio.com/navigate.php?id=288737
Taj Mahal: nv0.panoramio.com/navigate.php?id=1975890
New York: nv0.panoramio.com/navigate.php?id=37552

What is the Grid?

2008-06-02T12:35:00.003+01:00

Well, there's a short answer, and then there's a very long answer.

The short answer is that, whereas the Web is a service for sharing information over the Internet, the Grid is a service for sharing computer power and data storage capacity over the Internet. The Grid goes well beyond simple communication between computers, and aims ultimately to turn the global network of computers into one vast computational resource.

That is the dream. But the reality is that today, the Grid is a "work in progress", with the underlying technology still in a prototype phase, and being developed by hundreds of researchers and software engineers around the world.

The Grid is attracting a lot of interest because its future, even if still uncertain,is potentially revolutionary. - GridCafé

Beaming solar energy down from space

2008-06-01T19:35:00.001+01:00

By 2030, India's Planning Commission estimates that the country will have to generate at least 700,000 megawatts of additional power to meet the demands of its expanding economy and growing population.

Much of that electricity will come from coal-fired power plants, like the $4 billion so-called ultra mega complex scheduled to be built south of Tunda Wand, a tiny village near the Gulf of Kutch, an inlet of the Arabian Sea on India's west coast. Dozens of other such projects are already or soon will be under way.

Yet Mehta has another solution for India's chronic electricity shortage, one that does not involve power plants on the ground but instead massive sun-gathering satellites in geosynchronous orbits 22,000 miles in the sky.

The satellites would electromagnetically beam gigawatts of solar energy back to ground-based receivers, where it would then be converted to electricity and transferred to power grids. And because in high Earth orbit, satellites are unaffected by the earth's shadow virtually 365 days a year, the floating power plants could provide round-the-clock clean, renewable electricity. - CNN

Google Android demonstrations

2008-05-29T16:27:00.002+01:00

Google’s latest Android prototype is miles improved over the versions we last saw. Back at CES the GUI was clunky and the whole thing looked relatively primative; Google themselves asked us to keep an open mind and instead concentrate on the OS’ potential. Now, they’ve brought out a device that you could, frankly, mistake for production hardware. - Android Community

Robots: Taking inspiration from Nature

2008-05-27T20:34:00.002+01:00

Forget traditional robots that look like humans, these days robots come in all different shapes and sizes. But it's not only their appearance that is changing - robotics researchers are also thinking very differently about how the function, as discussed in a review this week in the journal Science. Whereas the focus used to be on getting robots to perform specific tasks, like packaging chocolates in a manufacturing plant, researchers are now looking at creating more complex machines that can deal with unpredictable circumstances. - NewScientist

DimP - A Direct Manipulation Video Player

2008-05-23T09:06:00.002+01:00

DimP is a video player that allows to browse video clips by directly manipulating their content.

The idea of using direct manipulation for controlling video playback has been first exploited in NTT-AT's Dragri multimedia authoring system (Web Page in Japanese). The system dates back from 2002 but remained unnoticed by the HCI community. It required motions to be specified manually but other than that, the idea was already there.

Recently, four (yes, four) research groups, including ours, have been working independently on this topic. We did not know about NTT-AT's system and each other's work. We were all trying to achieve a fully automatic support for video browsing by direct manipulation, with technically different approaches but also striking similarities in the thought process. - Aviz

N-trig DuoSense Large Format Multi-Touch Digitizer

2008-05-21T12:08:00.002+01:00

Website: n-trig.com

Full-Screen Multitouch Mac OS X

2008-05-17T07:59:00.002+01:00

Christian Moore managed to hack together a multitouch Mac OS X system, called the "Lux free open framework", using just "a simple Intel-based MacBook." - NUI Group

WorldWide Telescope Launched

2008-05-13T07:32:00.003+01:00

The final frontier got a bit closer today as Microsoft Corp. officially launched the public beta of its WorldWide Telescope, which is now available at http://www.worldwidetelescope.org. WorldWide Telescope is a rich Web application that brings together imagery from the best ground- and space-based observatories across the world to allow people to easily explore the night sky through their computers. WorldWide Telescope has been eagerly anticipated by the astronomical and educational communities as a compelling astronomical resource for students and lifelong learners, and as a way to make science fun for children. - WorldWide Telescope

AI Goggles recognize objects and faces

2008-05-07T08:56:00.004+01:00

Called "AI Goggles", this device basically consists of a camera attached to goggles. The recorded data is sent to a computer and then analyzed in real-time, using complex algorithms. According to the researchers, these algorithms "enable the goggle to recognize not only particular objects, but also faces, similar to devices used for digital cameras -- once the faces and objects are registered on the database, the recognition time becomes even faster." - TechEBlog

Eye-tracking interface

2008-05-05T18:59:00.002+01:00

Technology is being developed to allow people with severe motor disabilities to play 3D computer games like World of Warcraft using only their eyes.

Since the 1990s, gaze technology has helped people with conditions such as motor neurone disease (MND), cerebral palsy and other "locked-in syndromes" to control 2D desktop environments and communicate using visual keyboards.

Users typically guide a cursor with their eyes, staring at objects for a time to emulate a mouse click. But that is too laborious to let users to match the speed and accuracy of real-time 3D games, says lead researcher on the project, Stephen Vickers, of De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. - NewScientist

Multitouch Pad - DIY with a webcam and cardboard

2008-05-01T09:43:00.003+01:00

Building a small portable multitouch pad will allow you to test software and experiment on a smaller scale while building your full table or when away from your multitouch screen. Have fun and make a MTmini! This uses Front Diffused Illumination, with normal ambient light (infrared not required or needed) and a normal off-the-shelf webcam (IR filter can still be in place). - AudioTouch and more

Flying, swimming robot jellyfish

2008-04-30T11:10:00.003+01:00

The robot jellyfish swimming and flying in the videos below are being shown off at the Hannover Trade Fair this week by industrial automation company Festo. We wrote before about their robotic manta ray which also moves very gracefully.

Both jellyfish designs are really just for show. But if the swimming ones could achieve the simple efficiency of real jellyfish they could provide great platforms for cheap ocean sensors. Even if they don't, they'd be a great addition to any aquarium. - NewScientist

Modular robot reassembles when kicked apart

2008-04-29T15:56:00.002+01:00

A robot developed by roboticists at the University of Pennsylvania is made of modules that can recognise each other. - NewScientist