Research

The IMMERSCOM 2009 Second International Conference on Immersive Telecommunications will be held at the University of California, Berkeley on May 27-29, 2009. Full papers are due on November 1, 2008. Here's the mission statement of the conference: "The aim of IMMERSCOM is to focus on multi- and cross-disciplinary research on capturing, processing, analyzing, coding, communication and rendering of rich audio-visual content in order to enable remote immersive experiences of people, objects and environments. The body of technologies that enable such immersive remote experiences is collectively referred to as immersive telecommunications technologies. Applications of immersive telecommunications technologies can be varied, and include telepresence, industrial automation, health care, education, and entertainment.

This ScienceDaily article takes a look at a PhD thesis presented at the University of the Basque Country which puts forward the use of avatars or virtual Internet personages as an efficient form of non-verbal communication, principally focusing on emotional aspects. From the article: "Scientists have been working for decades so that the interaction between people and computers be more natural and intuitive. In fact, a great part of the success or failure of a computer application depends on the user interface. The way in which we communicate with the operating system, for example, has progressed a lot from the time when it was required to write complicated lines of commands on a black and white screen to those with much more intuitive windows.

This Technology Review article reports researchers at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign have developed a simple process to grow upright copper nanowires on different surfaces which could be used in ultra-thin field-emission displays that are brighter and sharper than flat-panel displays. From the article: "The nanowire arrays could find use in field-emission displays, a new type of display technology that promises to provide brighter, more vivid pictures than existing flat-panel displays. In such an application, the nanowires would be used to fire electrons at phosphor particles on a screen, lighting them up.

This Media Newswire article reports a NIMH-sponsored double-blind study of 24 war veterans shows a marked reduction in acoustic startle — the reflex response to sudden loud sounds — in those treated with virtual reality exposure therapy combined with either d-cycloserine, an antibiotic that has been shown to facilitate the extinction of fear memories; pill placebo; or the anti-anxiety medication alprazolam ( Xanax ). From the article: ""These preliminary data suggest that this type of virtual reality exposure therapy is effective in reducing the elevated startle response that was evident before treatment," says Barbara Rothbaum, PhD,*a professor in psychiatry at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta.

[This Physorg article reports research published in the March issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, is suggesting that we process images in two very distinct ways. From the article: " Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Psychologist Tzvi Ganel and his colleagues presented research participants with the “Ponzo” illusion, an image common in psychological research that makes two objects that are similar in length appear drastically different. They then hooked participants’ index finger and thumb to computerized position tracking equipment and asked them to grasp the objects with their fingers.

Even thought the object appeared to be larger (or smaller) than it really was, the size of their grasp reflected the object’s real rather than apparent size. For good measure, the researchers arranged the illusion so that the object that appeared to be the smaller of the two was actually the larger of the two.

This ScienceDaily article reports scientists at the University of Illinois have created the first mixed reality state in a physical system using a virtual pendulum and its real-world counterpart. From the article: "Through bidirectional instantaneous coupling, each pendulum "sensed" the other, their motions became correlated, and the two began swinging as one.

"In a mixed reality state there is no clear boundary between the real system and the virtual system," said U. of I. physicist Alfred Hubler. "The line blurs between what's real and what isn't."

This ICT Results article reports SIMILAR, a European task force focused on human-computer interaction (HCI), plans to make human-computer interaction ‘similar’ to the way humans do it. From the article: "Human-computer interaction has not improved enormously since Mark Twain’s time, when the typewriter was invented. A European research task force hopes to change that by making human-computer interaction, well, ‘similar’ to the way humans do it.

This Science Daily article reports engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights. From the article: "Movie characters from the Terminator to the Bionic Woman use bionic eyes to zoom in on far-off scenes, have useful facts pop into their field of view, or create virtual crosshairs. Off the screen, virtual displays have been proposed for more practical purposes -- visual aids to help vision-impaired people, holographic driving control panels and even as a way to surf the Web on the go.

This NewScientist Technology Blog post takes a look at the relative keyboard project: a solution for entering text into mobile devices which could permits to type on any touch-sensitive surface and have it recognised correctly. From the post: "Do you ever get bored of looking at the same old keyboard? Fortunately two researchers at the Language Technologies Institute of Carnegie Mellon University have a new idea - making them invisible.

This Physorg.com article reports researchers from the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC), a joint project of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, have for the first time described a mechanism called “dynamic connectivity,” in which neuronal circuits are rewired “on the fly” allowing stimuli to be more keenly sensed. From the article: "This new, biologically inspired algorithm for analyzing the brain at work allows scientists to explain why when we notice a scent, the brain can quickly sort through input and determine exactly what that smell is.