virtual reality

If the idea of turning consumers into true cyborgs sounds creepy, don't tell Intel researchers. Intel's Pittsburgh lab aims to develop brain implants that can control all sorts of gadgets directly via brain waves by 2020.

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Looking to get away to Paris this winter, but concerned about the cost? Worry not; for the price of a pair of lab safety goggles, a cardboard box and an HTC Magic (even better if the HTC magic comes in a large cardboard box), this DIY augmented reality headset can transport you anywhere in the world, just as long as the Google Street View team has been there first.

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In this video, a mouse runs through a virtual maze derived from a Quake 2 level, by steering a trackball suspended on a jet of air. Obviously the Princeton scientists did this because it's awesome, but the ostensible reason is because it gives them unprecedented access to study the neurological activity of the rodent while it moves around.

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First-person-shooter video games have nothing on a new combat simulator by defense giant Raytheon. Fully rigged warfighters can roam freely in the real world and engage unseen virtual enemies through their VR goggles, tossing real flash-bang grenades and even shaking off the muscle-numbing effects of getting shot.

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Japan certainly hasn't let the recession damp its enthusiasm for all things robot, even if much of the robotic workforce still suffers from unemployment idleness.

The robot tiles emerged as the brainchild of Hiroo Iwata, a virtual reality researcher at the University of Tsukuba in Japan. A touch-sensitive conductive fabric covers each robot and gauges the pressure applied by a walking person's foot, which goes toward predicting the next step.

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This simulator goes far beyond the olden days of the board game "Operation." Last month, for the first time, neurosurgeons rehearsed on a 3-D model of a patient's brain just hours before removing a brain tumor for real.

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Every little boy lives in a world that is as much fiction as reality. For a kid sitting in the back seat of a car during a long road trip, that Batman action figure isn't a plastic doll, it's actually the Dark Knight himself. And that arm rest with the drink holder? The towering precipice of a Gotham high rise. And its exactly that imaginary world that Frantz Lasorne looks to make a bit more concrete with his augmented reality toys.

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What happens when you pop a pill? Inside the University of Calgary's $1.5-million virtual-reality room, scientists can don a pair of 3-D goggles and find out in high-definition detail. Biochemist Christoph Sensen and his colleagues have created a virtual human dubbed the CAVEman (for Automated Virtual Environment) that lets them monitor how a virtual body metabolizes medicine.

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