Flying Car Gets Green Light From Feds Flying car company Terrafugia, whose website conveniently includes a pronunciation guide (say it with me: “Terra-FOO-gee-ah”), has announced that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has granted the company specific exceptions regarding their Transition vehicle. The Transition aims to fulfill the dream that we’ve been promised since the earliest days of prognostication: The flying car. Unlike other projects like the Skycar, the Transition is meant to function as both a street-legal car and a light aircraft. For Terrafugia, receiving these exceptions is a great accomplishment but it is by no means the last hurdle for the Transition. (Terrafugia via Geeks are Sexy)
Affective computing Affective Computing is also the title of a textbook on the subject by Rosalind Picard. Areas of affective computing[edit] Detecting and recognizing emotional information[edit] Detecting emotional information begins with passive sensors which capture data about the user's physical state or behavior without interpreting the input. The data gathered is analogous to the cues humans use to perceive emotions in others. For example, a video camera might capture facial expressions, body posture and gestures, while a microphone might capture speech. Recognizing emotional information requires the extraction of meaningful patterns from the gathered data. Emotion in machines[edit] Another area within affective computing is the design of computational devices proposed to exhibit either innate emotional capabilities or that are capable of convincingly simulating emotions. Technologies of affective computing[edit] Emotional speech[edit] Algorithms[edit] Databases[edit] Speech Descriptors[edit] Overview[edit]
www.readwriteweb.com/archives/code-free_augmented_reality_in_under_5_minutes_video.php Augmented reality guru Bruce Sterling shared a fascinating video on his Wired.com blog Beyond the Beyond today that shows a developer building an AR application without any programming language in just shy of five minutes. Using the Mac-based visual design app Quartz Composer and few additional plugins, the developer (apparently a Russian named Vladmir, according to his YouTube account) quickly assembles the application using Quartz's visual Yahoo Pipes-like interface. The video embedded above is pretty easy to follow despite being a screencast of a complex design application. The developer simply drags and drops a few elements onto the screen to initialize the video input device, recognize a marker, and incorporate a 3D model of a teapot. After connecting a few dots and tweaking some settings, we see the teapot appearing on an AR marker via the developer's webcam.
Comcast Is Bringing Skype to TV Soon you might be heading to the television to take a call instead of the phone. Comcast has partnered with Skype, a video-calling service that was recently purchased by Microsoft, to offer the service for TVs sometime next year. Subscribers who rent a video kit from Comcast will be able to use their TVs to make and receive calls from other Skype users — regardless of whether those people are also using a TV for the call. Although Skype-enabled TVs have been available since last year, this is the first time that Skype will be available to Comcast subscribers regardless of which TV they own. Comcast hasn't yet announced what it will charge for the kit, but presumably it will be less expensive than purchasing a Skype-enabled television. "Your television is ringing" might become a new household phrase. [via Associated Press]
Emotiv EPOC EEG Headset Hacked Bryan Bishop September 13, 2010 An Interview with Cody Brocious Cody Brocious has created Cody's Emokit project, an open source library for reading data directly from the Emotiv EPOC EEG headset. The Emotiv headset is a consumer EEG headset. In common slang, it's a brain-computer interface. H+: So, why did you get into Emotiv hardware in the first place? CODY BROCIOUS: A consumer-grade EEG headset is a game changer. CB: Emokit — there's not much to it. H+: How would people use it? CB: You instantiate the Emotiv object from Emokit, set the ID for the headset, then there's a function that gives you a generator. H+: That sounds simple. CB: Yeah. H+: What has Emotiv's response been so far? CB: I posted the announcement copy on their forums. H+: How do you think Emotiv will respond? CB: As for how Emotiv is going to respond to any of this, there are a few different possibilities. It's clear that Emotiv is a company in the consumer brain-computer interface market. H+: Who should buy an Emotiv? Emotiv
OpenViBE EmoRate Future Applications EmoProfiles The list of potential applications for Affective Computing aka Computing With Emotions is incredible. As the technology develops people will develop EmoProfiles, profiles of their emotional reactions to videos, songs, books, reviews, anything and everything that sparks an emotional reaction (which basically is everything since we are emotional beings). The definition I have come up with for an EmoProfile: “An EmoProfile is a profile that contains data cataloguing your emotional reactions to various stimuli, tagged by keywords and other ontological aids and statistics, in a manner that allows one profile to be compared with another or a group of other profiles digitally by any reasonable computing device.” As adoption of EmoProfiles spreads they will become powerful tools for predicting what someone likes and dislikes, and how compatible people will be with each other and when interacting in a group. Emotion Based Recommendation Systems Emotion Guided Search
Journal of Neural Engineering Dominique M Durand et al 2014 J. Neural Eng. 11 020201 Neural engineers have made significant, if not remarkable, progress in interfacing with the nervous system in the last ten years. Although there are several multichannel arrays described in the literature, the workhorse for these cortical interfaces has been the Utah array [12]. The reasons for this failure are not known but clearly involve the interface between the electrode and the neural tissue. In 2013, two symposia were held independently to discuss this problem: one was held at the International Neuromodulation Society's 11th World Congress in Berlin and supported by the International Neuromodulation Society 1 and the other at the 6th International Neural Engineering conference in San Diego 2 and was supported by the NSF. (1) The ability to access remotely and reliably internal neural signals . (2) A translation strategy taking basic research to the clinic . References 1 www.neuromodulation.com/8-june-2013
Welcome to the OpenEEG project About the project Many people are interested in what is called neurofeedback or EEG biofeedback training, a generic mental training method which makes the trainee consciously aware of the general activity in the brain. This method shows great potential for improving many mental capabilities and exploring consciousness. Other people want to do experiments with brain-computer interfaces or just want to have a look at their brain at work. Unfortunately, commercial EEG devices are generally too expensive to become a hobbyist tool or toy. The OpenEEG project is about making plans and software for do-it-yourself EEG devices available for free (as in GPL). Right now, this site is mostly about the hardware; schematics, part lists, building instructions etc. Some regulatory business Commercial and clinical EEG devices must live up to certain standards. In other words, if you decide to build and use one -- the responsibility is yours.
EU project BRAIN - Brain-project.org LucidQuest Audio Brainwave Entrainment - Sonic Art & Engineering for the Brain/Mind