AR for Blind People

Software written for augmented reality glasses creates and projects images for the healthy eye, giving a wearer the feeling of depth. Being able to see with both eyes comes with a perk: the ability to judge distance in 3D. People who’ve lost sight in one eye can still see with the other, but they lack binocular depth perception. Some of them could benefit from a pair of augmented reality glasses being built at the University of Yamanashi in Japan that artificially introduces a feeling of depth in a person’s healthy eye. The group, started out with a pair of commercially available 3D glasses, the daintily named Wrap 920AR, manufactured by Vuzix Corporation (Vuzix is also building another AR headset called the M100 that on first sight looks like quite the competitor to Google Glass). The Wrap 920AR looks like a pair of regular tinted glasses, but with small cameras poking out of each lens. The lenses are transparent and the device, Vuzix explains on its website, both captures and projects images, giving the wearer of the device front-row seats to a 2D or 3D AR show transmitted from a computer.

The group at Yamanashi created software that makes use of the twin cameras. When a person puts the glasses on, each camera scopes out the scene that each eye would see. The images are funneled into software on a computer, which combines the perspective of both cameras and creates a “defocus” effect. That is, some objects to stay in focus while others stay out of focus, resulting in a feeling of depth. That version of the scene in front of them is projected to the single healthy eye of the wearer. 8 volunteers with two healthy eyes each tested the setup. They had one task, to pick up and place a cylindrical peg in a groove in front of them. All but one of the volunteers did this quicker when a composite image was projected into one lens. The system isn’t quite ready to be taken for spin around town yet. It’s bulky still, the creators write, and needs a computer by its side, creating and projecting images in real time. But the creators admit such computing power is likely to be found on mobile devices soon, and when it is, they’ll be ready.

More information:

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/510096/ar-goggles-restore-depth-perception-to-people-blind-in-one-eye/

Pressure Sensing Floor

A prototype floor that senses your every step and displays interactive video could one day bring strange sights and new possibilities into your home. This mirror world is one of the applications researchers at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, developed after building an 8-square-metre pressure-sensing floor that can recognise people by their weight, track their movements and display video for them to interact with. The idea is that the pressure-sensing technology could lead to a raft of ways to control objects in your home, play games, or assist older or disabled people.

 

For instance, to play a version of indoor soccer, the floor generates a CGI football that can be kicked about by the people in the room. Or if someone sits on the floor, the system recognises who they are by their precise weight and flips a TV on to their favourite channel. Similarly, an elderly person's activity levels could be monitored. The team's prototype consists of a slab of 6.4-centimetre-thick glass installed in a hole cut into a standard floor, and an infrared camera and high-resolution video projector in the room below that tracks footprints and beams video up onto the glass.

More information:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21729015.800-touchsensitive-videoscreen-floor-is-in-step-with-you.html

VR for Heart Defect

A virtual heart, developed at The University of Manchester, is revealing new information about one of the world's most common heart conditions. Researchers at the School of Physics and Astronomy used cutting edge technology to build an advanced computational model of an anatomically correct sheep's heart. It was made by taking a series of very thin slices of the heart, imaging them in 2D and then using a computer programme to render them into a 3D model.

The reconstruction includes details of the complex fibre structure of the tissue, and the segmentation of the upper chambers of the heart into known distinctive atrial regions. Single-cell models that take into account information about the electrical activity in different atrial parts of regions the heart were then incorporated into the model. The virtual heart was then used to investigate the condition atrial fibrillation (AF).

More information:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130116090652.htm

Why We Lose at Games

If you have ever wondered why you never seem to win at skill-based games such as poker or chess, there might be a very good reason. A University of Manchester physicist has discovered that some games are simply impossible to fully learn, or too complex for the human mind to understand. Researchers ran thousands of simulations of two-player games to see how human behaviour affects their decision-making. In simple games with a small number of moves, such as Noughts and Crosses the optimal strategy is easy to guess, and the game quickly becomes uninteresting. However, when games became more complex and when there are a lot of moves, such as in chess, the board game Go or complex card games, the academics argue that players' actions become less rational and that it is hard to find optimal strategies.

This research could also have implications for the financial markets. Many economists base financial predictions of the stock market on equilibrium theory -- assuming that traders are infinitely intelligent and rational. This, the academics argue, is rarely the case and could lead to predictions of how markets react being wildly inaccurate. Much of traditional game theory, the basis for strategic decision-making, is based on the equilibrium point -- players or workers having a deep and perfect knowledge of what they are doing and of what their opponents are doing. Equilibrium is not always the right thing you should look for in a game. Preliminary results suggest that as the number of players increases, the chances that equilibrium is reached decrease. Thus for complicated games with many players, such as financial markets, equilibrium is even less likely to be the full story.

More information:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130107151259.htm

VR for Neurological Disorders

An Indiana University proposes an innovative treatment for developmental coordination disorder, a potentially debilitating neurological disorder in which the development of a child's fine or gross motor skills, or both, is impaired. DCD strikes about one in 20 children, predominantly boys, and frequently occurs alongside ADHD, autism spectrum disorders and other better known conditions. Like ADHD, DCD has broad academic, social and emotional impact. It can severely affect reading, spelling and handwriting abilities; and insofar as children with DCD both struggle with and avoid physical activity, it can also lead to problems with self-esteem, obesity and injury. Severity of the disorder varies, and as the researchers explain, it is sometimes called the ‘hidden disorder’ because of the way those with milder cases develop coping strategies that conceal the disorder, such as using computers to avoid handwriting tasks, and wearing shirts without buttons, or shoes without laces. But children with DCD have been generally thought unable to learn or improve their motor skills. After training the children over a five- to six-week period, one day a week for 20 minutes at a time, the differences between children with DCD and typically developing children were all but obliterated.  Key to the training was a unique technology: a three-dimensional virtual reality device, the PHANTOM Omni from Sensable Technologies, developed for the visualization of knots by topologists, who study geometric forms in space. Holding a stylus attached to a robot, participants in the study developed their fine motor skills by playing a game in which they traced a three-dimensional virtual path in the air, visually represented on a computer screen.

 

Forces such as magnetic attraction and friction can be applied to the path and adjusted so participants could actually feel a surface that changed as the parameters were altered. The study compared the progress of a group of eight 7- to 8-year-olds with DCD to a group of eight 7- to 8-year-old typically developing children in a three-dimensional tracing game. The task was to push a brightly colored fish along a visible path on a computer screen from the starting location to the finish point while racing a competitor fish. The training started with the highest level of magnetic attraction, slowest competitor and shortest path. The goal of the training was to allow the children to progress at their own pace through the different combinations and levels of attraction, paths and competitors. Children must first be able to approximate a movement by actively generating it themselves before they can improve it through practice and repetition. But because children with DCD have been unable to produce this initial movement, they have been unable to improve their skills. The technology provided the tool needed to overcome this impasse. It gave both the support needed to produce the movement, as well as the flexibility to let children actively generate the movement themselves. It allowed the children to do what they otherwise could not do: produce the requisite initial movements that could then be practiced to yield quantitative improvements. Researchers say the technology could potentially be widely accessible: It can be used without a therapist and is portable enough to be put in clinics, classrooms or the home. It can also be adjusted to suit the needs of children across the spectrum of DCD severity.

More information:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121126110925.htm

Advanced Humanoid Roboy

Roboy, one of the most advanced humanoid robots, is developed by researchers at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the University of Zurich. Their 15 project partners and over 40 engineers and scientists are constructing Roboy as a tendon-driven robot modeled on human beings (robots usually have their motors in their joints, giving them that robot break-dance look), so it will move almost as elegantly as a human. Roboy will be a ‘service robot’, meaning it will execute services independently for the convenience of human beings, as in the movie Robot & Frank.

And since service robots share their ‘living space’ with people, user-friendliness and safety, above all, are of great importance, roboticists point out. Which is why ‘soft robotics’ — soft to the touch, soft in their interaction, soft and natural in their movements — will be important, and Roboy will be covered with ‘soft skin’, making interacting with him safer and more pleasant. Service robots are already used in a wide variety of areas today, including for household chores, surveillance work and cleaning, and in hospitals and care homes.

More information:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/advanced-humanoid-roboy-to-be-born-in-nine-months

Smartphones as Keys

It’s already possible to open doors using an app – but we are a long way from seeing widespread acceptance of this in the market. Now, researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology SIT in Darmstadt have developed a piece of software that will make the technology even more secure and versatile. Smartphones and tablets have become an integral part of our daily lives so researchers developed ShareKey, a software solution which will make the key app concept even more versatile and secure.

ShareKey offers two new functions: users can issue digital keys remotely and assign these keys certain user permissions. For instance, users can grant the building superintendent access to their apartments for a short period so that they can open the door for the gas meter to be read while they are at work. The solution is built around modern security technologies and can be easily integrated into existing access control systems. ShareKey sends electronic keys directly to the user’s mobile phone, in the form of a QR code attached to an e-mail or MMS.

More information:

http://www.fraunhofer.de/en/press/research-news/2013/january/turning-smartphones-into-secure-and-versatile-keys.html

Home of the Future

From outside, the futuristic house looks like something from a Disney production, an immaculately sterile structure from the not-too-distant future. On Microsoft's sprawling, rustic campus, this home is a maze of futuristic rooms, a digital kitchen and interactive walls. Recipes are projected onto the kitchen counter, children can play video games from a table's surface, and bedrooms have interactive wall posters that can be changed daily, based on the occupant's mood. No one lives there, but it is a template for the future.

The rise of intelligent devices, ongoing breakthroughs in robotics, cloud computing and other newfangled technology promise to usher in a new phase in luxuriant and wired home living. Hyperbole of years past has quickly melted away as a pantheon of tech titans — ranging from Apple and Google to Samsung and Microsoft — vie for home-field advantage. Home increasingly is where billions of dollars are expected to be spent on technology as consumers nest in their living rooms and bedrooms on smartphones, tablets and gaming consoles.

More information:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/01/03/apple-google-microsoft-nest/1725311/