Situated Research's Blog

When Australian Philip Gith realised his pet lizard was a better smartphone gamer than him, he didn’t euthanise it for embarrassing him – he whipped out his camera.

And now the female bearded dragon he calls Crunch has become an internet celebrity due to its fondness for the smartphone game Ant Smasher. Read more »

A research group at the University of Tokyo are creating a new paradigm in Human Computer Interaction. Dubbed ‘Invoked Computing’ the idea is to turn everyday objects into computer interfaces and communication devices.

“For example, if you make a gesture, the computer should be able to recognize this as “I want to use the telephone”. So with an iPhone for example, you have everything in a small device and you have to learn how to use it, here we want to do the opposite, the computer will have to learn what you want to do.” Read more »

Patent approved for Motion Recognition Clothing(TM)

Medibotics’ U.S. patent 7,980,141 for Motion Recognition Clothing™ (MRC) has been approved. MRC is an innovative technology for translating body motion into computer-readable signals that could power the next generation of full-body game controllers. The market for translating body motion into computer-readable signals is already very large. For example, over 10 million units of an existing camera-based full-body game controller system have been sold. With further development, MRC could be used for a variety of applications including not only computer gaming, but also virtual reality in general, sports training, medical therapy, virtual exercise, weight management, and telerobotics. Read more »

Sony is talking crazy, indicating that games may be able to tell if you’re lying or depressed just ten years down the road. We’ll stick with growing crops, thanks.

Seriously, when do games stop being games and cross over into virtual reality? This was the question I asked Nvidia months ago at ECGC 2011, and was told there will always be a market for the high-end PC gamer with the rig nearly the size of a bookcase. But putting visual realism aside, what will happen when games suddenly stop acting like games, and become more like a self-aware super AI that could possibly one day sing you happy birthday or annihilate the human race? Read more »

Designers Michaël Harboun, Fabien Chancel and Akki Reddy Challa have been working in collaboration with Dassault Systems to explore augmented reality inside vehicles. In the future, when our cars are autonomous and can drive themselves, Harboun and his colleagues have been questioning what we’ll be doing while travelling along. The Aeon Project features three levels the user can select from the heads up display (HUD): augmented reality, mixed reality and virtual reality. So they can choose from text information, 3D integration and complete virtual immersion. Read more »

Maxence Parache’s experimental augmented-reality system lets you detach your point of view from your body.

We take our first-person visual perspective for granted every second of the day — we have to, because our eyeballs are attached to our heads. But what if you could detach your personal “camera angle” at any moment and float away from your own body while still inhabiting it, like an on-demand out-of-body experience? Designer Maxence Paranche has created the next best thing in his HyperReality system, which uses a Microsoft Kinect to scan your physical environment and display it inside a virtual-reality helmet, so you can rotate the visual angle any way you like. Read more »

Image: The interactive experience at UNSW’s iCinema Centre. Source: The Australian

Lost in cyberspace

You only have to be the parent of a child over the age of seven to know what I’m talking about: the vacant eyes so preoccupied by what’s on screen that they can’t focus on your face for more than a few seconds before being drawn back into the cyberworld.

As you talk, your little darling types or toggles. “Are you listening to me?” you ask, only to be told in a precocious tone: “Yeahhhh. I’m multitasking, Mum.” Read more »

Image: The avatar for Dr. Brian Ross welcomes participants to an online training session using Xbox chat technology (Stephen Brashear photos/PSBJ)

The sight of a surgeon playing “Grand Theft Auto” in the operating room might raise eyebrows, but it’s one example of how consumer technology is being repurposed to advance the practice of medicine.

Rising medical costs — bloated by expensive, complicated machines — are wrecking the nation’s economic health, while off-the-shelf consumer gadgets keep getting cheaper and more powerful. So the health care industry has discovered it can tap into the innovative wonders of an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 or an Android smartphone app. Read more »

Not content with attempting to usher in the advent of 3D console gaming, it seems Sony now has its sights set on the next quantum leap – virtual reality.

Speaking in a video interview to promote next month’s b.tween 3D event in London, SCE Studios exec Mike Hocking explained that Sony’s recently announced HMD device could represent the future of 3D gaming by allowing users access to a full ‘virtual’ world. Read more »

A new augmented reality shopping platform for Xbox Kinect will allow users to try on clothes in true 3-D, share photos with friends, and store wish-listed items on smartphones for shopping on-the-go.

Virtual reality shopping just got a lot more real–and could soon become a lot more mainstream. “KinectShop” (working title), an augmented reality shopping platform for the Xbox Kinect, exploits the system’s new finger-recognition technology to allow shoppers to grab items from an unlimited shelf of clothes, see how accessories look at multiple angles, and share the photos with friends on Twitter and Facebook for a quick thumbs-up or down. Read more »

You are playing a video game, and your avatar is creeping into a haunted house at the dead of night. Suddenly, you freeze in your chair. Something is crawling up your back…

Whether this idea appeals or not, researchers at Disney have made such sensations possible by inventing a system that fools players into thinking that objects are moving against their skin. Read more »

New Nintendo Wii, Star Wars Game Using Microsoft’s Kinect, and PlayStation Vita Portable

Coverage update from the world’s leading video game conference: the E3 Expo in Los Angeles

Situated Research is bringing you the hot news from the world’s largest annual video game conference, the E3 Expo, which began this week in Los Angeles. So far, Nintendo has announced it’s next-generation console, called the Wii U, and Sony has launched a new handheld called the PlayStation Vita. Microsoft has announced some interesting new games for the Kinect, including Star Wars, Disneyland Adventures, and Halo 4. Read more »

Imagine you could drive your car using only your thoughts. German researchers have just made that possible – and they have the video to prove it. Following his recent interview on the Robots Podcast about autonomous vehicles, Raul Rojas, an AI professor at the Freie Universitat Berlin, and his team have demonstrated how a driver can use a brain interface to steer a vehicle. Read more »

You don’t have to look very far to realize that technology is becoming more natural and intuitive. In a typical day, many people use touch or speech to interact with technology on their phones, at the ATM, at the grocery store and in their cars. The learning curve for working with computers is becoming less and less of a barrier thanks to more natural ways to interact. Read more »

IBM’s Supercomputer Has Implications for Healthcare, Information Tech and More

Wouldn’t it be nice to have your very own supercomputer in your pocket?

If your laptop crashed while you were working on a major presentation, you could ask your portable expert to help diagnose the problem. If you wanted to bone up on Middle Eastern history, you could ask it to comb every document available and then wrap it all up in a simple summary (annotated, of course). Read more »