omnispace

Qrio

In January 06, on the same day as it announced its discontinuation of AIBO and other products, Sony announced that it would stop development of QRIO. Before it was cancelled, QRIO was reported to be going through numerous development, testing and scalability phases, with the intent of becoming commercially available within three or four years. QRIO is capable of voice and face recognition, making it able to remember people as well as their likes and dislikes. A video on QRIO's website shows it speaking with several children. QRIO can run at 23cm/second, and is credited in Guinness World Records as being the first (and fastest) bipedal robot capable of running (which it defines as moving while both legs are off the ground at the same time).

Quadracci Pavilion

Seen as a complete folly by some local Milwaukee residents, this has to be one of the most captivating contemporary buildings ever realised.

With the Quadracci Pavilion, the boundaries between engineering, sculpture and architecture have simply disappeared. If any Santiago Calatrava building deserves the description of ‘poetry in motion’, the Quadracci Pavilion is certainly it.

The Selfish Gene

Richard Dawkins is the world's most controversial evolutionary biologist. Publication of his 1976 book, "The Selfish Gene," thrust Dawkins into the limelight as the handsome, irascible, human face of scientific reductionism. The book provoked everything from outrage to glee by arguing that natural selection worked its creative powers only through genes, not species or individuals. Humans are merely "gene survival machines," he asserted in the book. Dawkins stuck to his theme but expanded his territory in such subsequent books as "The Blind Watchmaker," "Unweaving the Rainbow" and "Climbing Mount Improbable." His recent work, "The Ancestor's Tale," traces human lineage back through time, stopping to ponder important forks in the evolutionary road. Currently, Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, a position created for him in 1995 by Charles Simonyi, a Microsoft millionaire.

Ubiquitous Computing

A Japanese government sponsored research consortium that include five chip makers and 17 other Japanese high-tech firms has announced that the T-Engine, a ubiquitous computing platform is ready for prime time. T-Engine is a platform that developers can use to build ubiquitous computing solutions from commercially available products. The platform includes four different types of T-Engine boards:

• Standard T-Engine are used for smart phones and other portable information gadgets;
• Micro T-Engine are used for devices with relatively basic user interface functions like a toaster or microwave oven;
• Nano T-Engine are used for for small home electronic appliances like a stereo receiver; and
• Pico T-Engine for adding ubiquitous computing to the smallest of components such as valves, sensors, switches, and so forth.

Mood Recognition

In an interview with the Australian Financial Review, SCEE vice president Phil Harrison has made a number of comments regarding the PlayStation 3 and the inclusion within it of new motion sensor technology. Citing EyeToy as a “signpost for things in the future” Harrison went on to describe a somewhat Orwellian future where consoles would “be able to extrapolate eye movement and gestural [sic] recognition, more complicated finger movement, and the logical next step of that is to deduce from a person's facial expression and demeanour what their emotion state is.” Harrision also indicated that the company is working on a user interface that would work in a similar manner to the computers in the movie Minority Report, which were controlled directly by the user’s hands.

Human Area Networking

RedTacton is a new Human Area Networking technology that uses the surface of the human body as a safe, high speed network transmission path. It uses the minute electric field emitted on the surface of the human body. Technically, it differs from wireless and infrared in that a transmission path is formed at the moment a part of the human body comes in contact with a RedTacton transceiver. Physically separating ends the contact and thus ends communication. Communication starts when terminals carried by the user or embedded in devices are linked in various combinations according to the user's natural, physical movements. Communication is possible using any body surfaces, such as the hands, fingers, arms, feet, face, legs or torso. RedTacton works through shoes and clothing.

Digital Orchestra

At Princeton University's faculty of music, the students are as happy to tickle a Powerbook's plastics as a piano's ivories. They have their own wireless-networked orchestra: a 15-piece band that can play anything from electropop to avant garde on instruments specially designed to interface with their laptops. A virtual conductor keeps them on the beat. The Princeton Laptop Orchestra, or PLOrk as it is known, has caused something of a sensation in academic circles, and avant-garde musicians are queueing up to compose for them.

Neuroengineering

EEG Pattern Recognition
This project aims to improve performance of NASA missions by developing brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies for augmented human-system interaction. BCI technologies will add completely new modes of interaction, which operate in parallel with keyboards, speech, or other manual controls, thereby increasing the bandwidth of human-system interaction. The research will extend recent feasibility demonstrations of electromyographic (EMG) methods for neurocontrol to the domain of electroencephalographic (EEG) methods of neurocontrol. These methods will bypass muscle activity and draw control signals directly from the human brain. BCI technologies will provide powerful and intuitive modes of interaction with 2-D and 3-D data, particularly for visualization and searching in complex data structures, such as geographical maps, satellite images, and terrain databases.

EMG Pattern Recognition
Electromyogram (EMG) signals are representative of the electrical energy present during muscle activation. These signals are may be sensed non-invasively by placing sensors on the skin which form a low impedance electrical connection with the tissue. These sensors can be either wet or dry, where the wet sensors use a conductive gel between the electrode and skin. We have developed pattern recognition software which can recognize EMG signals resulting from specific hand gestures. Examples of these gestures include pretending to move a joystick and pretending to type. We are thus able to "type" and use joysticks without having the mechanical joystick and keyboard devices physically present. Our future work includes developing improved electrodes, and further research and development into algorithms intrinsic to adaptive time-series analysis.

Robodock

The 9th Robodock Festival will be at the NDSM-Wharf in Amsterdam-Noord from 20-23th Sep 06. The theme of this festival edition is alchemy. This will be the leading thread within the program and a source of inspiration for the participating artists. Robodock is a unique international festival with a main core of technology, spectacle theatre, multi-media and industrial installations. In cooperation with artists, technology students and theatre makers the festival is styled by re-using scrap and other industrial left-overs.

Genetic Architecture

Sydney based architect Chris Bosse's latest work, the Genetic Pavilion (above), is on show at the Entry2006 exhibition at the world heritage site Zeche Zollverein in Germany. “The phenomenology and structure of micro-organisms like coral polyps or radiolarians are the basis of the computer simulation of naturally evolving systems. In the field of ‘genetic architecture’, algorithmic codes are created. These codes trigger chains of commands that are similar to organic growth. In this way, the process of design is replaced by the process of discovery and selection.”