Via Digital Urban comes word of this heavily branded zombie shooter for NVIDIA’s new hand-held. The tech is impressive, but why the hell do you have to shoot Skittles?

From gizmag:

Students at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany are developing a pair of interactive data eyeglasses that can project an image onto the retina from an organic light-emitting diode (OLED) micro-display, making the image appear as if it’s a meter in front of the wearer. While similar headwear only throws up a static image, the students are working on eye-tracking technology that allows wearers, with just the movement of the eyeball, to scroll through information or move elements about.

via Mac Tonnies

Link via textually.org:

From telegraph.co.uk.

The system works by monitoring electroencephalography – or EEG – which is the electrical activity produced on the scalp by the movement of neurons within the brain.

The user of a BCI wears a cap, which is studded with electrodes and connected to a computer. The electrodes detect the electrical signals caused by thoughts.

Mr Wilson’s Twitter set-up contains an onscreen alphabet. The letters flash in turn, and when the letter that the user wants to type flashes, the system detects a spike in their brain activity, and selects that letter.

Slow, slow progress – but progress.

Created by Bruce Branit, who shot in it a few days.World Builder involved two years of post-production work to bring it to this moment.

Sent to me via twitter by heresybob.

We mentioned MIT’s Sixth Sense project earlier. The full TED talk introducing and briefly demonstrating it is now online:

Via WIRED, here’s two more quick demo videos:

I want this now. Please! (Yes, a HUD would make this perfect.)

From Blorge:

Researchers combined a mobile projector with a webcam and mobile phone to create a device that draws information from the environment. The wearer can also interact with the sixth sense device using touch gestures on nearly any surface.

..

The sixth sense gadget’s projector can turn anything into a touch screen and captures input via the webcam. The wearer can draw a circle on his or her wrist and the device will project a digital clock face.

The gadget can also take pictures of the wearer’s surrounding with very simple prompts. All the user has to do is frame out an area and the webcam will snap a frame.

MIT’s latest device can also provide additional information about a wearer’s surroundings. The gadget recognizes products on store shelves and can provide product and price comparison information.

The device can also retrieve flight information simply by viewing a plane ticket to let the wearer know about delays. When reading magazine articles, the device automatically pulls up related information from the Web.

The sixth sense device was cobbled together from common parts costing just $300. At the heart of the device is a smartphone that uses an Internet connection to retrieve information.

In addition, the device turns nearly any surface into a touch screen. If nothing else is available, the wearer can even project a screen onto a hand.

thanks to John English for the tip-off!

It’s never too early to get the children to move things with their minds:

Mattel’s keeping mum about the technology behind its Mindflex game, but – according to several online sources – the game requires the user to wear a headset equipped with sensors that measure brainwave activity.

This ‘activity’ is then used to guide a small foam ball through an obstacle course of hoops, which can be customised by the gamer.

It’s still unclear how the ball is kept in the air throughout its journey around the obstacle course. Some reports have claimed that a fan’s used, whilst other sources have said that Epoc-esque technology is the key to Mindflex’s power.

What we do know is that Mindflex will be paraded by Mattel at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, which is about to kick-off in Las Vegas.

Link and photo via reghardware.co.uk.

See also:

• Stanford presents everything you need to know about the emotiv mind control device
• Emotiv epoc neuroheadset update
• Humanmachine interaction

Via gizmodo.com:

Apparently, the Wrao 920AV will be “the first to actually function as sunglasses or portable video eyewear. It’ll combine virtual reality (VR) capabilities as well as augmented reality (AR) features.” Holy crap that is awesome.

Spotted on makezine.com, each dress uses sensors to responding to proximity or the wind.

Proximity:

Wind:

Breathe into a wind sensor and the garment opens and expands, mimicking you by appearing as if it’s taking its own breath:

Videos via bot-lab.com.

- photo via nextnature.net

Constructed of a soft, flesh-like gel, the remote appears cold when off. Once turned on, however, it seems to come to life. A soft light emanates somewhere from within as the center of the device begins to slowly rise and fall, mimicking the tranquil motions of breath. Left undisturbed, the remote will slumber peacefully. Buth should a human hand approach, sensors inside alert it to the imminent touch. It stops breathing, grows rigid – the light from within is extinguished. A remote is the ideal meaphor for the disturbance electronic distration poses to life. If we had to interrupt its life before it could interrupt ours, we may think twice before picking it up.

It’s ALIVE!

Link and photo via nextnature.net

Using binary thinking as the basis, this concept ooze helps you determine whether to add or drop people on social networking sites. A virtual robot takes over your online identity, and each spike in the ooze represents an online friend. Interaction with the spikes creates interaction in the online world.

Link and photos via yankodesign.com.

- image via yankodesign.com

As communication becomes increasingly reliant on social media experiences i.e., email, IM, and text messages – valuable information woven subtly in physical interaction are lost. Communicate by Remote Concepts isn’t the first of its kind. The idea is simple. A user wears a small device with an integrated camera. This real time image is then translated into an abstract representation.Therefore the receiver gets (at least a part) of the visual stimuli the remote person encounters throughout the day. So you can get a glimpse of the kind of visual context the other person is in. This allows for a feel of connectedness and empathy with the remote user.

In this manner two or more people can always share experiences even from a distance. The receiving unit is a series of modular triangles one can set up however they like. It becomes a dynamic wall sculpture personalized by the abstraction of experience.

- image via yankodesign.com

Link and video via yankodesign.com.

Stanford University presents this hour long video featuring everything you need to know about the coming Emotiv mind-reading device. The first twenty minutes is mostly background, so skip forward if you get bored, but don’t switch off because it gets seriously cool. Can.not.wait for this!

via MAKE

Previously:

• Emotiv EPOC Neuroheadset Update
• Human/Machine Interaction

You can fly planes like a professional, even if you have no training as a pilot, thanks to another development in virutal reality.

Let’s be honest: Aerial acrobatics are about as badass as it gets. Unfortunately, they’re not too accessible for the average person without the thousands of dollars and years of training it takes to get a pilot’s license in a high-performance plane. But New Zealand company Air Sports Ltd. envisions a world where we’ll all get to duke it out on our computers with actual pilots — and those pilots will be flying real planes in the open air.In the first test flight of Air Sports Ltd.’s Sky Challenge, gamer Ernest Artigas sat on the ground and faced off against two airborne flyboys, completing a virtual obstacle course that was projected into their cockpits.

Airsports has plans to project the images of the course map onto the pilots’ retinas.

Link and video via io9.com,

So one of my things to do in Japan was going hunting for HUD tech. Like a good little cyberpunk, I head straight for Akihabara and start asking around.

Despite the best efforts of my buddies that were translating for me, all I got was blank stares from the shop clerks. The best advice I got was to try Hong Kong, which is apparently now the home of edgy, crazy tech?!

Disappointed, I skulked off, and had idle thoughts about sneaking over to HK. The next day, what do I see on the train? A very HUD looking ad from Nikon, for the Media Port UP, which:

…incorporates display, headphones, mobile A/V player, Wi-Fi capability, high-capacity memory, and power source in a single compact unit is the first of its type. The UP allows users to easily enjoy high-quality images, videos, and music anywhere.

While it’s far from Clatter, this is available to buy right now. Sure, it isn’t on a contact lens, but “viewing with a sensation equivalent to that of viewing of a 50-inch large screen from a distance of three meters” isn’t too shabby either.

I’ll be curious to see what the take up rate on this is. As this photo from Akihabara News shows, they don’t actually look that bad on:

From seattlepi.nwsource.com, comes the article on a researcher who is making robotic arms more human like:

“A finger has three joints,” said Matsuoka, and each joint functions in three dimensions. Seven muscles and more than 20 tendons control the finger, she said, with multiple, varying cross connections that quickly add up mathematically to describe an incredibly complex system.

That’s one reason why you still don’t see any truly humanlike robots these days. We’re much more complex, elegant and mysterious than we thought. The last quarter-century of attempts to build robots, Matsuoka contends, has largely ignored the wisdom of biology and arrogantly assumed we could engineer a better, mechanical version of Homo sapiens. As a result, there hasn’t really been that much progress.

“So we’ve decided to take a different approach focused on trying to figure out why we evolved the way we did,” she said. In 2001, she shifted her approach from trying to build mechanical “improvements” of the hand to trying to build a mechanical hand based on biology — with an eye to also making the “neurorobotic” connection to our brain.

One of the first things Matsuoka and her team discovered upon taking this more anatomically governed approach is that the rough surface of the bones in the fingers was an essential, functional feature rather than an unimportant side effect of bone development.

“It turned out that when we made our (mechanical) bones smooth, the routing cables (i.e., the artificial tendons and muscles) didn’t work,” she said. “So we made the bones bumpy again, and they worked.”

Nobody would have guessed that the rough surface of the finger bones would have had some kind of necessary function, Matsuoka said, which proved the value of coming at this problem by trying to mimic biology.

Thanks to eschatonic.water for link!

- photo voa yankodesign.com

Place both elbows to the railing, place hands to skull, hear airplanes, bombs, and air-raid horns fill your eardrums the same as if you were there, Dresden Germany, 1945. Markus K has designed a different kind of memorial, one that allows the person visiting to not only stand in the place where history happened, but to hear and experience it as well.

Markus Kison designs a new kind of memorial: “‘Touched Echo’ is a minimal medial intervention in public space. The visitors of the Brühl’s Terrace (Dresden, Germany) are taken back in time to the night of the terrible air raid on 13th February 1945. In their role as a performer they put themselves into the place of the people who shut their ears away from the noise of the explosions. While leaning on the balustrade the sound of airplanes and explosions is transmitted from the swinging balustrade through their arm directly into into the inner ear (bone conduction).

“The sound is not transmitted in air and throught the middle ear but instead through the skull bone. To send the sound over the arm and hand to the skull bone, the railing of the Brühlsche Terasse is equipped with several custom made sound conductors and set into a vibration.”

- photo via yankodesign.com

Link and photo via yankodesign.com.

Outdoor, interactive lighting display:

- photo via restaurantandbardesignawards.com

Link via mocoloco.com.

An interactive touchscreen artwork display, about the people that disappear:

Passage Oublié is an interactive artwork allowing the public to send messages to a touchscreen kiosk located in Pearson’s International Airport. Messages received are animated along flight trajectories on a map featuring airports involved in rendition flights. A rendition flight is a detainee-transfer practice where people, currently mostly Muslim men, are transported in rented commercial jets to interrogation sites around the world known as black sites. Although there exists a legal form of rendition to hand suspects over to another country, the procedure is also conducted outside any legal system, hence offering no protection for the detainees.

- photo via blogto.com

Passage Oublié invites Citizens of the World in transit at Pearson’s International Airport to send text messages relating to these questions: Are rendition flights an acceptable means of dealing with new terrorism threats? How does their use affect a country’s credibility as a defender of liberty? Does the end justify the means when it comes to pre-emptive war on terror? Are we compromising on the liberal democracies’ cherished principle of innocent-until-proven-guilty?”

Link via spaceandculture.org.

From textually.org:

Japan’s NTT DoCoMo mobile carrier is working on new technology for its next generation mobile phones that will quite literally predict your every move. Their next gen phones will be stuffed full of senors that will be able to identify the movement that you’re making.

“Based on your actions you make when you move in a particular way (all of which the phone records via its sensors), sophisticated software will predict what your next actions wil be and will provide recommendations in advance. In other words, the phone will attempt to guess what you’re doing, and the predict what you’re about to do, which sounds just a little bit freaky if it works too well!

The work is part of Japan’s “Information Grand Voyage” research project, in which they’re trying to capitalize on the untapped data that can be harnessed through a world of sensors. Japan recognizes that Google effectively owns the Web’s information, and so cannot compete with existing digital info.”