"A First Implementation of an Advanced 3D Interface to Control and Supervise UAV (Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles) Missions"

Francesca De Crescenzio, Giovanni Miranda*, Franco Persiani, Tiziano Bombardi

Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments, June 2009, Vol. 18, No. 3, Pages 171-184.

This Press Release talks about the use of VR in a new research initiative at De Montfort University.

"IN RECENT years, significant resources and research activities worldwide have been invested in the creation of Virtual Reality (VR) environments to train specialised skills for surgeons. Virtalis was one of the first, creating a trainer for minimally invasive therapy. Now, a research team from De Montfort University has begun work on assessing the feasibility for a whole team VR surgical trainer with Virtalis both supplying and designing the VR research platform.

From this ScienceDaily article : "Social problems like bullying and stereotyping involve thoughts, feelings and reactions that resist change. New research shows that when students play active roles in virtual dramas their attitudes and behaviour can change.

In 2006, a group of European educators, psychologists and IT specialists realised that emotionally driven problems, such as bullying, stereotyping and scapegoating demanded emotionally compelling interventions.

The researchers set out to create virtual worlds with characters that children could interact and empathise with powerfully enough to change their own attitudes and behaviour.

This Wired Gadget Lab post talks about the ‘Tele-immersive Environment for Everybody’ project of researchers at the University of Illinois. From the article: "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.

This Telepresence Options article talks about a new way to mass-produce flexible OLED displays that could mean affordable commercial products. From the article: "Flexible, full-color video displays could be closer to market because of a new advance by researchers at Arizona State University's Flexible Display Center (FDC) and at Universal Display, in Ewing, NJ. The researchers have made bendy organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays employing processes and tools that are used to make today's flat-panel LCD screens. They demonstrated a new 4.1-inch video-quality display at the 2009 Society for Information Display conference last week.

This Science Daily article reports the Nintendo Wii may enhance Parkinson's treatment. From the article: "The Nintendo Wii may help treat symptoms of Parkinson's disease, including depression, a Medical College of Georgia researcher says.

Parkinson’s disease is a degenerative disease that impairs motor skills. Dr. Herz theorized that the popular computer game console, which simulates various sports and activities, could improve coordination, reflexes and other movement-related skills, but he found additional benefits as well.

From this New York Times article: "Uh-oh! Another big bank is the subject of a depositor run amid charges its chairman has run off with customers’ money. Thankfully, this scandal is taking place in Eve Online, a space-age virtual reality created by CCP, a games developer and Iceland’s coolest company. But these troubles in the ether may offer some valuable lessons for earthly banking and regulation.

Eve is one of the more successful multiplayer online games. Some 300,000 people — as it happens, nearly equal to the population of Iceland — pay $15 a month to navigate characters that pilot intergalactic spaceships, manufacture and trade goods, mine resources and enter into big alliances, or bloody battles, with one another.

Purdue students in sterile garb work in the virtual pharmacy clean room with Professor Steve Abel.

When Tara Holt, a third-year Purdue University pharmacy student from Frankton, Ind., steps into a pharmacy clean room for the first time, she’s likely to experience a little déjà vu.

The room should look and sound familiar. Nothing ought to feel strange about standing encased in a sterile hair cover, mask, gown, gloves and booties. That’s because Holt and her classmates will have experienced it all before in a virtual version of a pharmacy clean room. The computer-generated, 3-D immersive environment created in a Purdue project is covered in detail in this article from Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP).

Take a look at this project by Kit Webster. Here is what he send us:

"This is an early proof of concept for an art installation I am working on:
Rotation Mapping from Kit Webster on Vimeo.
Early stages of a rotation mapping prototype. Rear space is imaged producing transparency."

Visualization Library is a cross-platform OpenGL-based C++ visualization toolkit dedicated to visualization professionals. This new release brings an enhanced volume visualization engine implementing realtime Blinn-Phong lighting with the OpenGL Shading Language, isosurface extraction via marching cubes, DICOM file support to read and write medical images and volumes, plus many other enhancements. A set of volume visualization screenshots can be found at: - http://visualizationlibrary.com/docs/html/pagguideslicedvolume.html - http://visualizationlibrary.com/docs/html/pagguidemarchingcubes.html - http://www.visualizationlibrary.com/jetcms/node/4

For more information on Visualization Library features visit: - http://visualizationlibrary.com/docs/html/pagkeyfeatures.html - http://visualizationlibrary.com/docs/html/pagchangelog.html