The $350,000 scientific display device and its twin backscreen projectors are packed with software designed to impart three-dimensional form and even “feel” to virtual objects, whether a string of molecules seeming to swirl in mid-air, a hovering swath of DNA, or a simulated diseased organ about to be removed.
The 3D objects - which leap off the screen with such forcefulness that first-time observers often flinch or hop backward - can be manipulated to perform flip-flops and other twists and turns. It’s illusion, sure, but not just the scientific version of a parlor trick. The virtual forms enable researchers to scrutinize things they would not be able to easily view or handle otherwise.
“You can go deep into the structure of a chemical, an organism, or even a natural event,” said Zupan. “It is getting interest from researchers into everything from particle physics to how a caterpillar locomotes.”
The 8-foot high by 14-foot wide screen at the Tufts Center for Scientific Visualization, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation and built by the Illinois firm Visbox Inc, is among the most sophisticated such devices in use on any US campus. Boston University and Brown University also have visualization systems, but the Tufts model uses an advanced German-designed filter to sift out “ghost” images and is equipped with twin projectors - as opposed to multiple projectors - for smoother images.
Let’s get this out of the way first — in the next 10 years, no one will travel to work by jet pack or have robot maids that serve dinner. But technology will continue to transform the rituals of everyday life — sometimes in startling ways.
Imagine televisions that project 3-D images into the middle of the living room, for a theater-in-the-round experience. And while we won’t get those robot maids, our appliances might start “talking” to us through email alerts, letting us know when a part is getting worn down and needs to be replaced.
I ran across this video on YouTube that was created by a small group of students for their MIS project. They present an interesting and well thought out argument that looks at both the pros and cons of Teleliving.
This story is not a prophesy. It is not a prediction. Nor is it a prescriptive.
This story is a warning.
Reality is changing. Cheap, widely distributed bandwidth and advanced networking technologies are divorcing an ever-growing segment of the population from traditionally “real” constraints like geography and socio-economic status.
At work, your closest colleagues could be sitting in the next cubicle…or on the next continent. Cutting-edge simulation techniques will soon bridge even the visual divides, making you feel like you’re sitting across the table from someone thousands of miles away. Millions of people are already choosing what “reality” they inhabit.
At the moment, online multiplayer games are the most dramatic example of these constructed realities. According to economist Edward Castronova, at least 10 million people worldwide subscribe to an online world like World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies or WWII Online. While the vast majority of these worlds are centered around a videogame (kill the dragon, blow up the Death Star, shoot the Nazis), people are doing far more than just “playing” in them. They are making friends, discussing the weather and politics, getting (virtually) married, even making real money.
How “real” are these places? Plenty—at least to the people who live in them. According to Castronova’s book, Synthetic Worlds, fully 20% of the people who subscribe to EverQuest, a pioneering online game from Sony, consider its virtual world to be where they “live.” They travel elsewhere “occasionally.”
If you ever participated to some virtual reality (VR) experiments, you know that the environment is quite expensive and not always user-friendly. In fact, in some immersive environments, it’s even possible to feel bad because of motion sickness. This is why researchers from Germany and Sweden have developed a new VR environment where the participants believe they’re moving while being seated. This approach, which relies on visual and auditory illusions, could lead to commercial low-cost VR simulators in the near future.
Here is the introduction of this IST Results article.
Creating close to real-life virtual reality (VR) experiences has proven to be costly and has had rather poor results. In response, a European research team has explored how exploiting visual and auditory illusions can possibly lead to low-cost virtual reality simulators of the future.
So the goal of the POEMS project (short for “Perceptually Oriented Ego — Motion Simulation”) was to move the environment instead of moving the persons. And the researchers presented their prototype at the 8th Annual International Workshop on Presence which was held in London in September 2005.
Developed by the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, the Tactical Language Training Program is different from interactive language programs of the past, which focus solely on spoken language. In Tactical Iraqi, players navigate a set of real-life scenarios by learning a set of Arabic phrases, culturally relevant gestures and taboos. Other titles include Tactical Levantine and Tactical Pashto.
Following each lesson, the player is asked to interact with other characters using speech and gestures, while a speech-recognition system records and evaluates the responses. Accurate responses allow the soldier to build a rapport with other characters and advance to the next level.
The Army and Marine Corps have trained about 300 soldiers using the system, says Lewis Johnson of USC’s Information Sciences Institute. Some of them traveled to Iraq with the game to continue their own training and share the knowledge with other troops. Johnson expects several thousand soldiers will have used the game by the end of the year.
Misunderstanding nonverbal cues such as proximity while speaking, handshakes and subtle gestures like bowing the head or placing one’s hand over the heart can create or destroy trust, says Hannes Vilhjalmsson, the project’s technical director. “There is a whole sequence of things that has to happen in connection with what you are saying, and it’s that kind of rich context of interaction that we are trying to re-create in the virtual environment,” he says.
The widely hyped merging of the PC and TV is finally taking shape in a way that only a few people imagined in the late 1990s Internet boom.
From independent producers like Mondo Media to big media companies like MTV, and even kids who post videos on community sites like YouTube.com, the World Wide Web is becoming a sort of worldwide TV network for audiences seeking offbeat entertainment not shown on mainstream television.
Mondo’s cartoon characters, “Happy Tree Friends,” survived the dot-com bust of 2000 and are now a thriving, worldwide phenomenon. And this week a little-known British rocker named Sandi Thom signed a record deal with Sony BMG after building an audience by Webcasting her own concerts from her basement.
“I still don’t think people have a handle on the fact that, for all intents and purposes, we have a TV network working for us, essentially free, that is worldwide,” said John Evershed, co-founder of Mondo Media, which owns “Happy Tree Friends.”
An open-standards group has created a framework that could facilitate the global exchange of information among organizations. The naming system could benefit a wide range of disciplines, from disaster response to medical research.
The Open Group’s Universal Data Element Framework (UDEF) has the potential to hasten information exchange by indexing the world’s datasets — from e-commerce services to government registries and medical research databases — in one universally shared semantic repository.
And evidence shows that UDEF works. In October 2005, Open Group officials demonstrated the framework for members of the information technology community.
Bill Gates was the keynote speaker on the last day of Microsoft Convergence 2006, held this year at the Dallas Convention Center.
Demonstrating what he believes will be popular future uses, Gates showed off a screen for the home that merged a TV and computer monitor. Touching the screen to view news segments from different channels, he found a story he was interested in and touched a button labeled “track topic.” Developments in the story throughout the day would then be sent to him at work or on a wireless device, he said.
At a work scene, Gates approached a desk surrounded on three sides by glass panels. Gates dazzled the crowd when the panels turned out to be one big computer monitor.
“Screens like this will be very common,” Gates said.
Microsoft’s moves to bring software to the Web are seen as an attempt to catch up with dot-com heavyweights such as Google and Yahoo.
“We’re taking the best elements of the online world,” Gates said.
One of the elements he cited was mashups — an increasingly popular way of merging two separate Web applications. The most popular mashups have involved Google’s mapping software, such as a site that combines it with online real estate listings to show users a map of where homes are for sale. Gates called mashups “grassroots programming.”
Gates also touted Vista, the next version of Microsoft’s operating system. Gates said users will be amazed by how well-designed Vista is. Microsoft, he said, has tested ideas with focus groups to find out what users want out of the next generation of Windows.
He cited speech-recognition software as a technology that would transform the world of electronics in the next 30 years.
“Everyone knows when that really really works, it’s going to be a huge deal,” he said.
U.S consumers bought more Windows Media Center-equipped PCs than the standard edition of Windows XP last month and sales of Media Center will reach 10 million by the end of March, a Microsoft executive said Tuesday.
Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Windows eHome Division, disclosed the sales numbers at a keynote speech here at Mix ‘06, a Microsoft conference aimed at Web developers and designers.
Belfiore also demonstrated the upcoming enhancements to Media Center, which will come out with Windows Vista at the end of this year, saying it will “blur the line between television and interactive video content.”
Sales of Media Center, a higher-end version of Windows XP for handling multimedia content, were sluggish in the first few years of its life, but have picked up as Microsoft has cut prices and dropped a requirement that PCs that run Media Center come with a built-in TV tuner.
Belfiore said that sales of Media Center are now running at 1 million units per month and that the company is “highly confident” total sales will top 10 million by the end of the month.
Teleliving