Biological navigation (BioNav) created by DARPA to be next kinect/ Military training software12/04/2010  THE REGISTER Latest military-research boon: Game interface to rule them all Sometimes, people suggest that military boffins are a waste of the taxpayers' money. They either develop hideous weaponry calculated to increase the amount of misery in the world, or fool about inventing pointless gadgetry which wastes our soldiers' time. Not today, though - today is one of those days when the brainboxes of the military-industrial complex seem set to come up with one of their successes, like integrated circuits or radar or jet engines - something with military applications, sure, but also a thing of beauty in itself which will enrich the lives of us all. In this case, to be specific, the military boffins in question are hot on the trail of what promises to be the greatest gaming interface ever seen - one which would leave such unsatisfactory compromises as the Kinect, Wiimote, PlayStation Move etc mouldering in the dustbin of history. Its name? "BioNav", short for Biological Navigation. The idea is simple: you're a soldier in an immersive simulated training environment - an Afghan village, the snows of the Hindu Kush, wherever it may be. Naturally enough your arms and hands and voice, as they would be in the real world, are fully taken up managing your weapons, sensors and communications. It is wholly unsatisfactory to have to control your avatar-self's movement using normal interface or even gesture-based controls: you should be able to run, leap or otherwise navigate about virtually without needing to do so physically. READ MORE  FROM FORBES Meet The Man Who Just Made A Half Million From The Sale Of Virtual Property Cyber-celebrity and virtual entrepreneur Jon Jacobs Many people might balk at the idea of paying even a dollar for virtual cow in a game like Farmville. But Jon Jacobs has just sold a virtual space station he’s spent the past five years managing for a whopping $635,000 in total, making over half a million dollars. Who would devote so much time and investment into something that doesn’t exist in the real world? Make no mistake, Jacobs isn’t your stereotypical gamer geek. An actor, filmmaker, cyber-celebrity and entrepreneur, Jacobs deals with movie and music moguls, running a business out of a 6,900 square-foot office in the heart of Hollywood, in the historic El Capitan Theatre building on Hollywood Boulevard, with windows overlooking the Kodak Theatre. Jacobs has a penchant for flamboyant dress. He has his own theme song. Jacobs’ story is a larger-than-life tale that blurs the line between real-life and virtual-life fame and fortune. In virtual life, Jacobs is the avatar “Neverdie,” perhaps the most famous person in the whole of the Entropia Universe, a massively multiplayer online gaming platform designed by Swedish developer MindArk with a real cash economy. Until recently, Neverdie was the owner of one of the hottest virtual properties in Entropia, Club Neverdie, situated on a virtual asteroid around Entropia’s first planet, Planet Calypso. Jacobs bought the virtual asteroid back in 2005 for $100,000, after taking out a mortgage on his real-life house. READ MORE  From POpular science Shills Get ready to lose yourself in videogames—literally. In May, the Excalibur Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas installed the first public Virtusphere, a human-sized hamster ball that lets you move through virtual worlds by walking, running, or crawling inside it. Until now, the sphere has been used primarily for military and police training. Now, wearing a virtual-reality visor, anyone inside can play a first-person-shooter game or tour historic Russian architecture. The 10-foot sphere is made of the same plastic as Legos, and its curvature helps to cushion players if they fall. The ball spins on a platform fitted with 45 caster-mounted wheels. Beneath, an optical sensor tracks motion the same way a computer mouse does, watching for relative movement across x and y axes. To make the experience truly immersive, the player is fitted with a head-mounted display with two internal LCD screens. A laptop wirelessly collects the data from the sensor and the gyroscopes, magnetometers and accelerometers on the headset to create the image the player sees. As new spheres pop up in malls and arcades, users will be able to jump into movie trailers or globe-trot using Google Earth. READ MORE  Immortal avatars: Back up your brain, never die June 6th from NewZcientist ZOE GRAYSTONE is a girl with two brains. Only one of them is human: the other is an exact digital copy that has become conscious in its own right. When the human Zoe dies, her digital brain is implanted into a humanoid robot, effectively bringing her back from the grave. Such ideas have littered science fiction for decades. Indeed, Graystone is a character in the American TV drama Caprica. But could such a tale ever become reality? Though there is little prospect of creating a genuinely conscious robo-clone in the foreseeable future, several companies are taking the first steps in that direction. Their initial goal is to enable you to create a lifelike digital representation, or avatar, that can continue long after your biological body has decomposed. This digitised "twin" might be able to provide valuable lessons for your great-grandchildren - as well as giving them a good idea of what their ancestor was like. Ultimately, however, they aim to create a personalised, conscious avatar embodied in a robot - effectively enabling you, or some semblance of you, to achieve immortality. "If you can upload yourself into this digital form, it could live forever," says Nick Mayer of Lifenaut, a US company that is exploring ways to build lifelike avatars. "It really is a way of avoiding death." For now, Lifenaut relies on a series of personality tests, teaching sessions and uploaded personal material such as photos, videos and correspondence. The result, Mayer says, will be an avatar that looks like you, talks like you and will be able to describe key events in your life, such as your wedding day. But how far can such technology go? How much of your personality and knowledge can be reproduced by a computer? Can we ever hope to use avatars to resurrect the dead? Like many people, I have often dreamed of having a clone: an alternative self that could share my workload, give me more leisure time and perhaps provide me with a way to live longer. My first step on the road to immortality is to use Lifenaut's website to create a basic visual interface with which others, hopefully including my descendants, can interact. This involves uploading an expressionless photo of myself, taken face-on. Lifenaut's software then animates it so my face can speak, wink and blink. Right now this kind of avatar is rather crude, though other companies are generating much more lifelike representations that could be adapted for use by projects like Lifenaut. One such company is Image Metrics in Santa Monica, California, which specialises in creating digital faces for films and games. Faces are particularly difficult to reproduce. For years, animators have struggled with a problem dubbed the "uncanny valley", in which a computer-generated face looks almost, but not quite, lifelike, triggering a sense of revulsion among human observers. "Systems which look close to real but not quite real are very creepy to people," says Dmitri Williams of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Image Metrics believes it has cracked the problem. The company's engineers record a series of high-resolution images of a person's face, each one with a different expression. Then they calculate the differences between these expressions using powerful mathematical modelling software. The result is pretty convincing. For example, the digital version of American actor Emily O'Brien, which the company unveiled at the ACM Siggraph meeting in Los Angeles in 2008, not only looks realistic, but can be manipulated in real time. "The movements are perfect. We can pretty much make Emily say anything we want," says Mike Starkenburg, CEO of Image Metrics. At the moment the process is expensive: creating the virtual Emily cost around $500,000, so for now I'll make do with my primitive avatar and hope my grandchildren won't feel too repelled. When the autonomic nervous system and virtual reality collide...  From BBC A South Korean couple who were addicted to the internet let their three-month-old baby starve to death while raising a virtual daughter online, police said. The pair fed their own premature baby just once a day in between 12-hour stretches at an internet cafe, the official Yonhap news agency reported. Police officer Chung Jin-won told Yonhap they "lost their will to live a normal life" after losing their jobs. He said they "indulged themselves online" to escape from reality. The 41-year-old father and his 25-year-old wife were arrested in the city of Suweon, south of Seoul, earlier this week, five months after they reported the death of their baby. READ MORE |    See all tech news here
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