Hasta La Gadget!

If your Wii boxing buddy or Star Wars light saber duel partner moved to a different town, technology can help bring you together for just one more game. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Intel have created a system that can support collaborative physical activities from different geographical locations.

“We can capture motions of the human body in real time and bring them together on a big screen,” says Ahsan Arefin, a doctoral student currently involved with the project.

The project called ‘Tele-immersive Environment for Everybody’ or TEEVE hooks up two off-the-shelf 3D cameras to a PC with a Firewire port. A gateway server at each site sends and receives the different video streams using standard compression techniques. A renderer is used to project the virtual interactions on a big screen monitor, creating a real-time virtual 3D effect. It’s like web conferencing, but with a virtual reality twist.

The system was on display Thursday at an Intel Labs “research day” in Mountain View, California. At the event Intel showcased technologies the company is working on.

In their demonstration of the TEEVE idea, Arefin and his colleague stood in two opposite corners of a room with light sabers in hand. They had 3D stereo vision cameras called BumbleBee 2 pointed at them. As the duo dueled, they could see their 3D images captured and reflected on screen.

The idea has applications beyond gaming. It can be used in business, sports and medicine, says Arefin. An experiment by the University had two dancers from different locations dancing together on a large screen.

The system is part of the quest towards more visual computing, says Jack Gold, principal analyst with consulting firm J. Gold Associates.

“Moving to a visual environment, from the text heavy one we are in right now, is one of the most important issues that we have to deal with in computing,” he says. “As they say, sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.”

The biggest challenge in the application for the researchers comes from the demand on computational and network resources that the system imposes. TEEVE uses real-time 3D reconstruction algorithms that are necessary to convert 2D frame images to 3D frame that also includes the depth information. To optimize it, researchers have used multi-threaded computation and Arefin says TEEVE can work on PCs with high-end Intel processors.

“Our goal is to make the system portable and easily deployable because of its use of off-the-shelf components,” he says.

Leave it the mad scientists at Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft to concoct this one. Rather than just figuring out a way to read back information in one-way fashion on one’s glasses (think Sixth Sense, but with eyewear), these folks are diving right in to the real stuff: bidirectional communication. In essence, their goal for the interactive data eyeglasses is to track eye movement in order to allow ones retinas to scroll through menus, flip through options and zoom in / out on a map. Obviously, a microdisplay will be necessary as well, but that’s just half the battle. We’ll confess — we’re still not humble enough to take our Vuzix HMD out in public, but we just might swap our Transitions[TM] for a set of these.

[Via OLED-Display]

Filed under: Wearables

Interactive data eyeglasses could bring the PC to your face, won’t fix nearsightedness originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Jun 2009 08:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s kind of strange, really, how we can see just how near the end is, yet these so-called geniuses employed within the realm of academia are totally oblivious to their own evil deeds. Take cognitive science professor John Long, for instance, who is currently conducting a Preyro robot experiment in a Vassar College lab that intends to “allow robots to mimic animals far better than before.” To him, he’s just hoping to study evolutionary patterns in order to better understand how certain tweaks to things like fins and tails affect performance in the place we call reality. Though, there’s a very real possibility that this research could accelerate the impending robot apocalypse by at least a score. Oh, what we’d give to be incognizant of the truth.

Filed under: Robots, Science

Preyro robot experiment could enable robots to better mimic animals, kill us all originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Jun 2009 06:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Man, the mad scientists are really on a roll of late. First we hear that Li-ion cells are set to magically double in capacity, and now we’re learning that a new form of invisibility cloak is totally gearing up for its Target debut. As the seemingly endless quest to bend light in such a way as to create a sheath of invisibility continues, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Nicholas Fang has reportedly developed a metamaterial that acts as a type of acoustic superlens. In theory, at least, this approach would rely on phreaking with sound rather than light in order to intensely focus ultrasound waves; by doing so, one could hypothetically “hide ships from sonar.” To be fair, this all sounds entirely more believable than hiding massive vessels from human sight, but we’re still not taking our skeptic hat off until we see (er, don’t see?) a little proof.

[Via Slashdot]

Filed under: Science

Acoustic superlens could mask ships from sonar… in theory, anyway originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 31 May 2009 21:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s funny, really. We’ve figured out how to put men an women on the moon and repair an orbiting telescope, but we can’t concoct an AA battery that lasts more than four days inside a Teddy Ruxpin. Thanks to a revolutionary new design from the labs at the University of St Andrews, all that could be well on the way to changin’. Researchers at said institution have teamed up with partners at Strathclyde and Newcastle in order to design an air-fuelled STAIR (St Andrews Air) cell that could theoretically last up to ten times longer than current batteries. Put as simply as possible, this design utilizes oxygen in the air as a re-agent instead of heavy, costly chemicals; the result is a lighter, cheaper battery with loads more capacity. Needless to say, gurus within the project are already dreaming of a prototype to fit in small gizmos such as cellphones or MP3 players, though we wouldn’t expect one anytime soon — after all, there’s still two years of research left to complete.

[Thanks, Khattab]

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Science

Air-fuelled STAIR battery could last ten times longer than traditional cells originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 23 May 2009 11:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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