Epic VR setup

Amazing omnidirectional treadmill which allows you to walk and it uses paintball guns FFS! :)

UPDATE: The full video has been posted:

The hosts are kind of annoying but the setup is very impressive, though I see room for improvement. I'd try to make that gun more realistic by removing the onscreen gun because you're already carrying a gun, and also removing the small screen on the gun. Use the Kinect to see when you're looking through the scope and then change the view on the projected screen accordingly. Also I'd put the paintball gun stands outside the tent with small holes to shoot through. Maybe placing fans and heaters/coolers to simulate wind and temperature. Then you'd really feel the heat when you step outside into the sun.

How much would you pay if these systems became available in an arcade? I think I would pay around €10 per half hour, I doubt you can play much longer because you'd get tired.

It's about fucking time

This should have been done many Windows generations ago.

Nyan cat just became more epic

The people over at YouTube edited the progress bar of the Nyan cat video :)

Someone even made a script which makes all YouTube videos have this progress bar.

Data porn

TED: Aaron Koblin: Artfully visualizing our humanity

Aaron Koblin's website

Johnny Cash project

The Mechanical Turk (we should think of a fun project to do with this)

The Scrollwheel

Relevant Reddit thread.

Carnegie Mellon about how games will influence the future

How games will influence the future. The start is boring old stuff. After 20 min he got some nice thoughts.

DS Games - E3 2011 - Wii Fit Plus

Tab Candy

This seems perfect for me as I always suffer from tab overload. This could also totally replace bookmarks.

Cool interactive projection technology

whiteboardblog
Consisting of the LiteBoard projector and special pen/wand, the system will work on any surface—wall, screen, whiteboard, etc.—so there’s no need to mount an interactive whiteboard hardware.

The wand works by detecting patterns in the projected image that the human eye cannot see, communicating with the projector over a radio frequency to triangulate exactly where the user is pointing.

All information is passed to the computer in the same way as any other mouse/pointer device – so you could use this on any software.

Google Maps Navigation

Quite an awesome GPS navigator with a lot of advantages. Though I do see some disadvantages, like the high price of a phone and service plan compared to a normal GPS navigator. High bandwidth price if you don't have a service with a flat fee. Also it won't work if you don't have cell phone coverage, which may be a problem in certain areas. However this might be solved if they develop a program that determines if your route will fall outside of coverage and then caches the google maps route beforehand.

Improvements in Prosthetic Arms

It seems that war often drives medical innovation.

Amazing to see the interface between technology and the human body improving. The Singularity is near! Related to this post about a prosthetic arm.

The TENORI-ON

Media artist Toshio Iwai and Yamaha have collaborated to design a new digital musical instrument for the 21st century, TENORI-ON. A 16x16 matrix of LED switches allows everyone to play music intuitively, creating a "visible music" interface. TENORI-ON layers can be thought of as “performance parts” or “recording tracks.” The TENORI-ON has a total of 16 layers. Separate notes and voices can be assigned to each layer, and all layers can be played together in synchronization.

Here is another nice track.

World Builder

Microsoft Envisions the Future

Some pretty cool concepts.

History of the browser user-agent string

In the beginning there was NCSA Mosaic, and Mosaic called itself NCSA_Mosaic/2.0 (Windows 3.1), and Mosaic displayed pictures along with text, and there was much rejoicing.

And behold, then came a new web browser known as “Mozilla”, being short for “Mosaic Killer,” but Mosaic was not amused, so the public name was changed to Netscape, and Netscape called itself Mozilla/1.0 (Win3.1), and there was more rejoicing.... read on

Dean Kamen's Robotic "Luke" Arm

Dean Kamen's “Luke arm”—a prosthesis named for the remarkably lifelike prosthetic worn by Luke Skywalker in Star Wars—came to the end of its two-year funding last month. Its fate now rests in the hands of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which funded the project. If DARPA gives the project the green light—and some greenbacks—the state-of-the-art bionic arm will go into clinical trials. If all goes well, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gives its approval, returning veterans could be wearing the new artificial limb by next year. Read more...

Mind Games

Mind Gaming' Could Enter Market This Year
by Lisa Zyga

In an adapted version of the Harry Potter video game, players lift boulders and throw lightning bolts using only their minds. Just as physical movement changed the interface of gaming with Nintendo's Wii, the power of the mind may be the next big thing in video games.

And it may come soon. Emotiv, a company based in San Francisco, says its mind-control headsets will be on shelves later this year, along with a host of novel "biofeedback" games developed by its partners.

Several other companies - including EmSense in Monterey, California; NeuroSky in San Jose, California; and Hitachi in Tokyo - are also developing technology to detect players´ brainwaves and use them in next-gen video games.

The technology is based on medical technology that has been around for decades. Using a combination of EEGs (which reveal alpha waves that signify calmness), EMGs (which measure muscle movement), and ECGs and GSR (which measure heart rate and sweating), developers hope to create a picture of a player´s mental and physical state. Near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), which monitors changes in blood oxygenation, could also be incorporated since it overcomes some of the interference problems with EEGs.

[...]

Another company, Interactive Productline in Sweden, has a game called Mindball, which isn´t a video game, but uses mind control technology that may lead to video mind-gaming. Two players sit across from each other at a table, focusing on a small white ball. The objective is to make the ball roll toward your opponent and away from you, using only your mind. Headbands measure the players´ alpha waves, and the ball rolls away from the player with the calmest mind.

"Instead of activity and adrenalin, it is calmness and focus that mark the truly successful Mindball Game player," the company explains on its Web site. "Mindball Game is unique amongst machines since it is not controlled by the player´s rational and strategic thoughts and decisions. On the contrary, the participants are dependent on the body´s own intuitive reactions."

Full Story...

Emotiv video demo

Seems like this system still needs quite some work. Lot of visible lag.

MindBall

Giving Your Screen Depth With Head Tracking

Really an amazing effect. I want this for the PC, would make FPS much more immersive.

Digg This?

I'm SABbing (Study Avoiding Behaviour) pretty hard today:

Annom and I have added a digg button to all posts. Clicking it (not the one in the previous sentence, but the one at the bottom) will bring you to Digg, where the permalink to the post is already filled in. all you need to do is make a title and description. If the post has already been submitted, digging it will give us an extra digg point, which will give the post more exposure.

Maybe we can get another Liquid Metal like success. Always fun to have more visitors. So sign up to Digg and start digging the posts you really like on our blog.

Digg has a few rules though:

* Submit things you think a lot of other people might be interested in.
* Link to the original source, not a site that's simply copying others' work.
* Don't submit content that violates our Terms of Service. It's there for this reason.
* Yes, you can submit your own content to Digg — just think about whether it's of general interest to others.

But it's up to the users to bury a story if they don't like it, so we'll just see what happens.

Maybe someone else wants to add a reddit or similar button. Or maybe we don't want this kind of thing on our blog. Discuss...

Next Gen Paint Brush

At first glance, it looks like your standard brush, but upon closer inspection you’ll find integrated LEDs, touch sensors, and a camera. This gadget basically “lifts up and captures photons”, allowing artists to draw with “special ink” picked up from their immediate environment.

Physics game