Forget hi-def TV. That technology is as old as the internet. The next generation of digital entertainment could bring entertainers into your living room as full-sized 3D holograms, bring cell phone voicemails to life with tiny images of callers or bring you face-to-face with Super Mario himself.

It’s an exciting time for physicists and other researchers who have spent decades trying to expand the applications of holography, the creation and manipulation of 3D images made by bouncing laser light around.

Last month, a team of researchers at the University of Arizona unveiled a critical breakthrough toward the elusive goal of holographic video, developing a technology that allows holograms to be rewritable for the first time. This allows 3D images to be changed many times per second, just like the frames in a movie.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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Abstract
Personal Communication with mixed voice and data can be offered as a very rich set of applications, which can be rapidly introduced at low cost. Wireless and positioning technologies in combination with Internet’s demonstrated capability to integrate voice and data are further leveraged by the use of software agents. Our work clearly demonstrates the benefits of providing context-aware personal communication in terms of its potential to bringing about the rapid introduction, at low cost, of a rich communication space where artifacts, people, and non-physical entities are integral parts.

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The Web was designed as an information space, with the goal that it should be useful not only for human-human communication, but also that machines would be able to participate and help. One of the major obstacles to this has been the fact that most information on the Web is designed for human consumption, and even if it was derived from a database with well defined meanings (in at least some terms) for its columns, that the structure of the data is not evident to a robot browsing the web. Leaving aside the artificial intelligence problem of training machines to behave like people, the Semantic Web approach instead develops languages for expressing information in a machine processable form.

This document gives a road map – a sequence for the incremental introduction of technology to take us, step by step, from the Web of today to a Web in which machine reasoning will be ubiquitous and devastatingly powerful.

It follows the note on the architecture of the Web, which defines existing design decisions and principles for what has been accomplished to date.

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A virtual human, Santos may save corporations big money and help the military save lives.

“Human modeling technology today is so refined, we can use it to test products before they’re ever produced,” said Karim Abdel-Malek, professor of biomedical engineering and director of the Virtual Soldier Research program at Iowa.

Because just about every manufactured product begins its life in the form of CAD data, a reduced prototype version can be loaded into the system, where it appears onscreen in three dimensions. With a mouse click on a control panel that resembles a PDA, an operator can command Santos to interact with the digital prototype, replicating how a human would engage with it in the real world. A physical prototype becomes unnecessary, saving manufacturing and materials costs.

Santos is so good at what he does that Caterpillar has hired him to make sure its heavy equipment is not only ergonomic but easy to service.

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A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities.

The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. The first steps in weaving the Semantic Web into the structure of the existing Web are already under way. In the near future, these developments will usher in significant new functionality as machines become much better able to process and “understand” the data that they merely display at present.

The essential property of the World Wide Web is its universality. The power of a hypertext link is that “anything can link to anything.” Web technology, therefore, must not discriminate between the scribbled draft and the polished performance, between commercial and academic information, or among cultures, languages, media and so on. Information varies along many axes. One of these is the difference between information produced primarily for human consumption and that produced mainly for machines. At one end of the scale we have everything from the five-second TV commercial to poetry. At the other end we have databases, programs and sensor output. To date, the Web has developed most rapidly as a medium of documents for people rather than for data and information that can be processed automatically. The Semantic Web aims to make up for this.

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