From the Singularity Hub website: "With the amazing video recording and production systems commercially available, how hard can it be to create a realistic virtual reality environment? I mean, all we really need are some cameras, some computers, and a video screen, right? Well, Virtualization Gate, a new project from the INRIA and Grenoble University in France, debuted at SIGGRAPH in early August.

From this Science Daily article: "What are the causes of illness? How can the effect of medication be improved? Molecular biologists can now gain new insights by the virtual simulations generated with a new type of software.

This Technologie Review article talks about an inexpensive pressure-sensitive pad that can sense multiple inputs at once. From the article: "Now that more and more smart phones and MP3 players have touch-screen interfaces, people have grown accustomed to interacting with gadgets using only taps and swipes of their fingers. But on the 11th floor of a downtown Manhattan building, New York University researchers Ilya Rosenberg and Ken Perlin are developing an interface that goes even further.

This Science Daily article reports how a "visual time machine" offers tourists a momentary view of the past combining augmented reality (AR) content with location awareness on mobile devices. From the article: "A ruined temple, ancient frescos and even a long-dead king have been brought to life by a “visual time machine” developed by European researchers.

From this Wired Science article: " New pilots train on flight simulators before flying their first 757. Scientists experiment on animals before giving their new drug to patients. And fledgling surgeons perform their first few operations on… real people.

Now, a small but growing group of doctors are trying to make surgical training safer by bringing virtual reality into the operating room, and taking the trial-by-error out.

From the Harvard Business Blog: "In a tight economy, with companies spending much less on IT, the tech giants will take growth wherever they can find it. The Wall Street Journal reported recently that Cisco and HP are in a pitched battle for customers for their high-end teleconferencing systems. According to the report, it's "one of the few technologies that has benefited from the downturn, growing 30% from last year as businesses look to reduce travel expenses."

From this Science Daily article: "When you feel you are being touched, usually someone or something is physically touching you and you perceive that your "self" is located in the same place as your body. Neuroscientists at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, investigated the relationship between bodily self-consciousness and the way touch stimuli are spatially represented in humans. They found that sensations of touch can be felt and mislocalised towards where a "virtual" body is seen. These findings will provide new avenues for the animation of virtual worlds and machines.

This Wired article talks about a flight simulator built to understand how flies can process images much faster than humans. From the article: "Ever wonder how an insect with such a tiny brain can thwart your attempts to catch it nearly every time? Apparently scientists do, too.

To find out how the common blowfly manages to process visual images more than four times faster than humans, researchers have built the bug a flight simulator.

This Dayton Daily News article talks about the Virtual Army Experience at the 2009 Vectren Dayton Air Show. From the article: "The Virtual Army Experience was one of the most popular attractions at the air show this year. After all, the huge grey tent holding nearly 20,000 square feet of virtual reality entertainment was hard to miss.

The attraction launched in 2007, said Public Relations manager Amy Lindstrom, and this is the second time it has been featured at the Vectren Dayton Air Show.

From this Telepresence Options article: "A social robot can operate autonomously with children in a preschool setting. One long-term goal is to engineer systems that test whether young children can learn a foreign language through interactions with a talking robot.

Education is on the cusp of a transformation because of recent scientific findings in neuroscience, psychology, and machine learning that are converging to create foundations for a new science of learning.