Tomorrow is Today

Japanese Augmented Reality Robot Lets Users Physically Interact With Avatars

U-Tsu-Shi-O-Mi is a “virtual assistant” that is actually a green-clad humanoid robot. Users look at her using virtual reality goggles and instead of seeing a mildly creepy, ninja-like blog they see an actual face and body. You can reach out, touch the body, and even shake hands with your robotic pal.

Made by a Japanese company called Different Dimension Inc., the robot uses a program called MMDAgent to interact with users. An initial prototype looked like a ‘tween in footie pajamas and a full-face hood. The newest version consists of half of a body and a much smaller profile. The pre-order price will be about $5,000.

via Gizmag (via This Augmented-Reality Robot Is The Closest Thing You Can Get To A Real-Life Hologram | TechCrunch)

Can Military Psychologists “Vaccinate” Soldiers Against PTSD?

The most common treatment [for PTSD] is known as exposure-based therapy. This asks those afflicted to imagine the sights and sounds that traumatised them, and helps them confront those memories. It often works. But not always. And it would undoubtedly be better if troops did not develop the condition in the first place.

With this in mind, a team of engineers, computer scientists and psychologists led by Skip Rizzo at the University of Southern California propose a form of psychological vaccination. By presenting soldiers with the horrors of war before they set off to fight, Dr Rizzo hopes to inure squaddies to anything they might witness on the field of battle.

The idea of doing this developed from Dr Rizzo’s work using virtual reality to help with exposure-based therapy. Such VR enables the sights, sounds, vibrations and even smells of the battlefield to be recreated in the safety of a clinic, and trials suggest it can help those who do not respond to standard exposure-based therapy.

The success of such simulation led Dr Rizzo to wonder if a similar regime, experienced before actual battle, might prepare troops mentally in the way that traditional training prepares them physically. His preliminary results suggest it might.

The virtual training course Dr Rizzo and his team have developed leads soldiers through a tour of duty that includes seeing and handling human remains, experiencing the death of virtual comrades to whom they have become emotionally close, and watching helplessly as a child dies. Unlike a real battlefield, though, a virtual one can be frozen, and events occurring there discussed at leisure.

When that happens, a virtual mentor emerges from the midst of the chaos to guide the user through stress-reduction tactics he can deploy. These may be as simple as breathing deeply, or as sophisticated as objectively recognising normal reactions to stress, and thus realising that your own reactions are normal too.

To monitor what is going on Dr Rizzo’s colleague Galen Buckwalter tracks physiological markers of stress, such as the reactions of participants’ pupils to what their eyes are seeing, their electrocardiograms and their galvanic skin responses. Dr Buckwalter hopes that as his charges become more psychologically prepared for battle, these markers will change in recognisable ways. This will allow officers to identify who is, and is not, ready for combat.

(via Post-traumatic stress disorder: Battle ready? | The Economist)

New Technique Uses Light Changes Over Time To Render 3D Models From Video Footage

It is all down to how sunlight bounces off surfaces differently at various times of year, as the relative position of the sun changes.

“As the sun passes over the scene, different pixels will light up at different times,” says Austin Abrams at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. The software he and his colleagues created uses a GPS reading, which can be taken separately, and time-stamp data to calculate the position of the sun in relation to a webcam image.

By watching how reflections change over the course of a few months, it can figure out the orientation of all the surfaces in the scene.

Google generates the 3D models that populate Google Earth by using a fleet of camera-equipped planes that fly over cities snapping photos. The program also lets users create their own 3D models of local buildings and upload them. Those models are kept simple to ensure that Google Earth runs smoothly.

The researchers’ models, by contrast, capture minute detail. “In some cases, we can even capture the 3D structure of individual shingles on a rooftop,” says Abrams.

(via Webcam + sunshine + time = 3D model of your world - tech - 06 October 2012 - New Scientist)

PlaceRaider Malware Hijacks Smartphone Camera to Render 3D Model of Victim’s Location

Malware called PlaceRaider, developed by academics at the Naval Surface Warfare Centre in Indiana and at Indiana University, takes control of a smartphone’s camera, relaying information about the target’s physical environment back to the thief.

The PlaceRaider malware could be hidden inside a custom-made, innocuous-looking app, something like Instagram or Hipstamatic that would be downloaded by a large number of users, the researchers say.

Capturing information from the camera continuously would generate tens of megabytes of data every minute, quickly overwhelming the phone’s communication channels, filling up its storage space and preventing any further monitoring. Instead, the researchers, led by Robert Templeman from the Naval Surface Warfare Centre, use the device’s gyroscope and accelerometer to instruct the malware to take pictures only when it will be useful to the attacker, avoiding recording when the phone is still and upside down in a person’s pocket, for instance.

The malware then sends those collected images to the PlaceRaider command and control centre, where the images are knitted into a 3D model that the thief can examine at their leisure to find valuable objects or information.

To make sure the victim is unaware their smartphone is snapping away, PlaceRaider mutes the telltale sounds of the shutter closing and also covers up the preview picture that normally appears when a photo has been taken.

(via One Per Cent: Hijacked smartphone camera spies on your world)

As Virtual Crimes Grow More Common, A Drive to Identify Rogue Avatars and Bots:

Virtual crimes will become more common as we venture more and more into these worlds, says computer scientist Roman Yampolskiy. To prevent this, multinational defence firm Raytheon, based in Waltham, Massachusetts, has a patent pending on fusing a person’s real biometrics with their 3D avatar, so you know for sure who you are speaking to in a digital world.

Yampolskiy and colleagues at the Cyber-Security Lab at the University of Louisville in Kentucky are going one step further: they are developing the field of artificial biometrics, or “artimetrics”. Similar to human biometrics, artimetrics would serve to authenticate and identify non-biological agents such as avatars, physical robots or even chatbots.

(via Face recognition could catch bad avatars - tech - 11 April 2012 - New Scientist)

Japanese Marketers Develop Interactive Poster that You Can Kiss:

If you’ve ever been to Tokyo or any other large Japanese city, you’ll have noticed the huge variety of billboards plastering the urban landscape, often featuring the month’s most popular idol. Now researchers at Keio University are working on a system that will allow passers-by to interact with said posters via an ultrasound sensor setup.

The punchlines write themselves

(via thisistheverge)