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

From this Science Daily article : "Vast quantities of data are transferred in real time from telescopes around the world to a supercomputer in the Netherlands, where European researchers combine the information to create high-resolution images of distant objects in space.

By pointing up to 16 radio telescopes from six continents at one source in space and combining the observation signals from the telescopes via a high-speed network, European astronomers have created a ‘virtual telescope’ that delivers better resolution than any single telescope on earth. The high-speed network also makes it easier for astronomers to react to so-called Targets of Opportunity – transient events such as supernova explosions and gamma-ray bursts in space.

This ZDNet article reports "a team of scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems IPMS in Dresden, Germany, is working on a device which incorporates eye tracking to influence the content presented to the viewer. Without having to use any other devices to enter instructions, the wearer can display new content, scroll through a menu or shift picture elements simply by moving her eyes or fixing on certain points in the image.

“We want to make the eyeglasses bidirectional and interactive so that new areas of application can be opened up,” says Dr. Michael Scholles, business unit manager at IPMS.

From the Networked Performance website : "Sheldon Brown: The Art and Technology of Better Virtual Worlds _ June 25, 2009; 5:00 - 6:00 pm :: Seminar Rooms, Ben Pimlott Building, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London.

Brown will describe his work to make better virtual worlds — addressing both their computational challenges as well as their expressive affordances. This comes out of work that Brown has been doing for over a decade in creating art installations that utilize virtual reality notions and technologies to pursue conceptually complex interests with a deliberate aesthetic. As the use of virtual worlds and muti-user online gaming environments has moved historically from experiment to speculation to novel experience, technological progress has allowed the field to move from the narrowly experienced to the broadly based, creating a primed culture for meaningful virtual worlds.

This Science Daily article takes a look at a research on water and other liquids sound simulation. From the article: "Splash, splatter, babble, sploosh, drip, drop, bloop and ploop! Those are some of the sounds that have been missing from computer graphic simulations of water and other fluids, according to researchers in Cornell's Department of Computer Science, who have come up with new algorithms to simulate such sounds to go with the images.

From the turbulence.org blog " “…Unseen geographies of our cities lay around us with areas yet to be discovered. Much of it seldom noticed as we pass through them in our everyday lives. The traces of our journeys through each city leave temporary presences. There was once a time where many would have believed these traces were spirits, psychic remains, registrations and impregnations onto objects and environments, from what was possibly a traumatic event in time. Are contemporary technologies a realisation of this belief? These technologies that record our movements in time, are no longer odd, or alluding to being mystical occurrences but the switching of sensors and transmission of radio waves through the ether.

From this BBC News article : "We are all capable of "hearing" shapes and sizes and perhaps even "tasting" sounds, according to researchers. This blending of sensory experiences, or synaesthesia, they say, influences our perception and helps us make sense of a jumble of simultaneous sensations.

You've probably noticed VRoot was recently flooded by spam. The problem should now be solved since we just integrated a visual challenge-response test in the registration process. We are sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused you and are now resolved in doing as most as we can to ensure it does not happen again.