Even the Trashbot Will need Social Skills During the Robopocalypse

Pity the trash can robot. When it tried to offer its services as a waste receptacle in a Stanford University cafeteria, some people pointedly ignored the robot despite its attempts to get their attention. One person even gave the trash robot a kick to move it along. Unlike the protocol droid C-3PO from “Star Wars,” the trash can robot took its abuse in good stride rather than blurting out “How rude!”

The trash robot represented part of a Stanford University experiment designed to test how people interact with robots in a more natural setting outside the lab. Such information could prove valuable as human designers try to create more sophisticated robots capable of reading human social signals. A kick from a person represents an obvious social signal to “go away.” But Stanford researchers, working with a colleague from the University of Southern Denmark, found that the majority of people who didn’t want the robot’s services showed their lack of interest by choosing to avoid social interaction with the robot entirely.

“We are particularly interested in how people will behave when they encounter robots “in the wild” as they go about their daily activities; what they do to signal or interact with the robot, and how they make sense of the interaction,” said Wendy Ju, executive director of Interaction Design Research at Stanford University and a coauthor of the paper.

link.

How to Allow Interaction With Reality While in Virtual Reality

Augmented reality provides a live view of the real world with computer generated elements superimposed. Pilots have long used head-up displays to access air speed data and other parameters while they fly. Some smartphone cameras can superimpose computer-generated characters on to the view of the real world. And emerging technologies such as Google Glass aim to superimpose useful information on to a real world view, such as navigation directions and personal data.

But there’s a related problem that most people will not yet have considered. Imagine wearing a virtual reality headset and that you are immersed in a virtual world quite unlike the physical one around you. Now suppose you want to take a sip of water from a cup on the desk in front of you.

The only way to succeed is by feeling your way to the cup while still immersed in the virtual world or by removing the virtual reality headset and returning to the physical world. Neither of these is particularly good, say Pulkit Budhiraja and pals at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who have come up with a solution.

These guys have been testing ways of superimposing physical reality onto a virtual reality experience. The goal is to find a way to allow users to interact with real physical objects while they remain immersed in a virtual world—a kind of augmented virtual reality

Budhiraja and co began by modifying an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset with a pair of cameras that produce a stereo view of the real world in front of the headset. They then came up with four different ways of superimposing the real world images onto the virtual world for the task of picking up and drinking from a cup, while remaining immersed.

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DARPA's ULTRA-Vis: A Wearable Ocular Head's Up Display for the Infantry

After 20 years of unsuccessful efforts to produce a wearable display to provide foot troops digital data without blocking their view of the real world around them, DARPA has invented one called ULTRA-Vis.

“The prototype was completed within the past several months. The breakthrough [was] the holographic wave guide” program manager Yiftach Eisenberg told me as he displayed me an admittedly clunky demonstration model at this afternoon’s “DARPA Demo Day” in the Pentagon courtyard.

Yes, he said “holographic,” but no, the wearer doesn’t see a three-dimensional image hovering in front of him like Princess Leia in Star Wars asking Obi Wan for help. The holographic wave guide is a system of channels etched into high-tech coatings on the glass. Those channels convey light from a 0.3-lb projector mounted on the side of your helmet — the prototype is awkwardly unbalanced — to the display over your eye.

That makes it possible to superimpose data directly over your natural field of vision, without requiring you to look up at an eye-straining angle as with Google Glass or look down at a smartphone display as with the Army’s Nett Warrior system. Nor does the display block your field of vision like the ill-fated monocle display on the Army’s earlier Land Warrior.

Instead, you get an augmented reality effect where the data you desire — say, the direction to the nearest friendly unit or your objective — floats over the landscape. The indicators move to stay superimposed over the correct place in the real world as you turn your head, because the helmet-mounted device tracks the direction you’re looking as well as where you are. If there are friendly forces on the other side of the hill, their icon will stay over that hill. A flattened ring on the bottom of the display gives a compressed 360-degree view so you can see if what you’re looking for is currently behind you. (Fighter pilots have long had such “heads-up displays,” but it’s a lot harder to implement in something compact enough to wear).

link.

Taiwanese Group Creates "Minority Report" Rival for Google Glass

write up on the other side of this link.

Neural Dust: Smart Dust for Mind-Machine Interfaces

The real time monitoring of brain function has advanced in leaps and bounds in recent years. That’s largely thanks to various new technologies that can monitor the collective behaviour of groups of neurons, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, magnetoencephalopathy and positron emission tomography.

This work is revolutionising our understanding of the way the brain is structured and behaves. It has also lead to a new engineering discipline of brain-machine interfaces, which allows people to control machines by thought alone.

Impressive though these techniques are, they all suffer from inherent limitations such as limited spatial resolution, a lack of portability and extreme invasiveness.

Today, Dongjin Seo and pals at the University of California Berkeley reveal an entirely new way to study and interact with the brain. Their idea is to sprinkle electronic sensors the size of dust particles into the cortex and to interrogate them remotely using ultrasound. The ultrasound also powers this so-called neural dust.

Ultrasound seems like a really, really bad idea, but...