New York artist Karolina Sobecka calls the system "All the Universe is Full of the Lives of Perfect Creatures," and says it is meant to evoke inquiry into self-awareness, empathy and non-verbal communication. She built it using the FaceTracker library from Jason Saragih, a FaceTracker add-on, and Unity3d and Blender3d. Other face-morphing apps we have seen just change a human face into a different-looking human face — this goes another step entirely.
You get a different animal every time you walk in front of the mirror, and the animal's facial expressions mirror and play off your own. Step back and the ghostly wolf flattens its ears; curl your lip and watch it bare its teeth; laugh and an evil, evil goat laughs with you. The person looking at his or her reflection would see the animal head instead of her own head. But a viewer at an angle would see a disembodied animal head like the one here.
"The familiar is transformed into the uncanny, prompting us to see the mechanics of perception, interaction, and relationships with others anew," Sobecka explains.
Does this make you see the world in a new light?
[via Infoniac]
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Farm subsidies in the EU cost taxpayers billions of euros each year, and so it’s naturally in the best interests of regulators to maintain tight oversight over who gets how much. For years now, regulators have relied on satellite imagery to help them keep an eye on those claiming subsidies, photographing farmland from above and looking for the telltale signs of subsidy cheats or breaches of environmental rules. But satellite images are unreliable. In some places, mountainous terrain makes for long shadows that obscure features on the ground. In places like Scotland, it’s overcast all the time.
Enter the drones. Flying under cloud cover, their cameras can get detailed imagery of the ground below, snapping angled views that complement the straight-down imagery gathered by orbiting satellites. They are quick to deploy and can be used to investigate specific cases rather than huge swaths of countryside. And they could help the EU keep from bleeding millions of euros to subsidy fraud.
Of course, to be truly effective the EU will need to develop it’s next-gen strategy for unmanned systems in the larger airspace, a strategy that is currently being hurried toward approval. That would let drones off the leash they are currently on--right now they must remain in line of sight of the operator at no more than about 550 yards distance--and let them fly free, allowing them to inspect acres and acres of agricultural land in a day. And of course there is the inevitable privacy discussion, which is bound to come to a head as government regulators seek a more invasive role in monitoring private property.
But the fact that drone auditors are on the agenda lends further credibility to the notion that drones aren’t just for shadow wars anymore. Unmanned systems are poised to enter all kinds of roles, from combat fighter jock to law enforcement officer to the more mundane bureaucrat-with-a-clipboard.
[BBC]
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Over the next year-and-a-half, DARPA plans to prove out LS3’s technology and get it ready to support warfighters in the field. Its main battlefield role will be little more than that of a robotic pack mule, carrying hundreds of pounds of gear so that dismounted Marines and soldiers won’t have to. These days, a lot of that weight is batteries, and here LS3 provides a two-fer: Not only can it carry troops’ various batteries and battery powered handheld devices, but it also serves as a mobile power source that can recharge them on the move.
The idea here is to create an animal analog--something that can haul lots of gear over rough terrain and interact with personnel naturally, in a way that is intuitive to the soldiers and Marines around it. In addition to its “eyes,” DARPA wants to give it auditory sensors that can respond to simple voice commands like “come” or “stay.” And ongoing tests aim to refine the vision system so it can distinguish between humans and learn to track specific individuals.
At the end of the 18-month proving period, LS3 will embed with Marines conducting field exercises to see how it gets along in real maneuvers. Here’s hoping those Marines don’t require the element of surprise. As you can see below, LS3 can see and move better than ever, but it is still very, very loud.
[PhysOrg]
]]>Predictions, opinions, and hopes from the creators of Gears of War, Mass Effect 3, Halo 4, and more
This month, Popular Science explores the future of fun. Here on PopSci.com, we've teamed up with the game experts at Kill Screen. We speak to top video game designers about their visions of the future of fun; take a look at the resurgence in making your own fun, and bring you a playable online arcade.In 1907, Hungarian explorer Sir Marc Aurel Stein discovered the Diamond Sutra in north-west China, a Buddhist holy text believed to be the oldest printed book. Dated 868 A.D., the faded paper, wrapped around a wooden pole, looks nothing like our published texts. But at a foundational level, the scholar 1200 years ago would still absorb its material the same way we do today: by reading words from a page.
Music and film, too, have advanced with technology but remain fundamentally the same as their precursors. Videogames, however, evolve on a separate plane. Even the simplest element of digital play, the interactive gesture, has changed dramatically in games' short history. Tapping commands on a keyboard has given way to full-body immersion, with new interfaces every year.
The sheer number of users continues to explode. In a few decades, videogames have grown from the simple geometry of Spacewars!, experienced by a rare few in computer labs, to the near-photorealism of Call of Duty, a controllable blast of napalm in the hands of millions. In a hundred years of film, the distance between DeMille's Birth of a Nation and Cameron's Avatar is great; but compared to the gap separating Space Invaders and Mass Effect, the entirety of film's progress resembles a baby's first step.
So where will we go from here? Kill Screen asked a wide range of developers, from those building the next great AAA blockbuster to the individual crafting tiny gems from their desk chair. Read on, and discover their hopes, fears, and predictions for the future.
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Typical magnetic recording technology for hard drives uses an external magnetic field to invert the poles of a magnet. The speed of the recording depends on the strength of the magnetic field. But the physicists, led by a team at the University of York, says they have figured out a way to use heat rather than a magnetic field to cause the same effect.
The heat in question is a simple ultrafast heat pulse, beamed with a laser. At only 60 femtoseconds, it's exceedingly brief, but manages to provoke a ferromagnetic state in certain materials.
It's very interesting on a theoretical level; this is a change in how we thought data storage worked in pretty basic ways. But given the growing prominence of solid-state storage--which is not magnetic, and can theoretically perform these operations far faster than a magnetic hard drive--we're not sure this is really going to catch on. Still, interesting stuff.
The article appears in the journal Nature Communications.
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Located in the constellation of the same name (Carina, that is), the nebula is roughly 7,500 light years away, making it both quite distant and at the same time one of the closest star nurseries to Earth that produces very massive stars. These stars are some of the heaviest on record and some of the brightest in our sky. And they make for a dazzling display in the infrared, where so many more stars are visible.
But what’s most interesting is what you can’t see, even in the infrared. Infrared light is great for seeing through the cosmic matter that obscures our visible spectrum views of many of the galaxy’s features, but even the VLT can’t see through the really dense pockets of gas and dust. That’s what those small blobs of dark material are--and that’s where new stars are forming.
[ESO]
]]>$90 million has been earmarked for development of the weapon system (not really)
For his part, Obama got a schooling from the young Hudy on exactly how to put together a pneumatic cannon. And the President contributed a little elbow grease himself, using a bicycle pump to prime the long-range snack delivery system (LSDS). See it all unfold, including the climactic marshmallow blast, below.
[YouTube]
]]>Dangerous-sounding neuroscience
The wide-ranging document reportedly covers a lot of ground, including the ethical issues surrounding the use of neuroscience in defense. It seems to focus less on ways to impact the enemy directly, and more on the enhancement of soldiers’ fighting abilities--though neurological drugs that make enemy captives more talkative or perhaps cause enemy troops fall asleep or become disoriented also get a mention.
Of particular interest in the document: transcranial direct current stimulation, or tDCS. The idea of passing electrical signals through the skull to the brain to boost performance isn’t new to U.S. defense dreamers, as the U.S. military has already done tests on the technology (and found it helpful in improving soldiers’ abilities to detect threats). A battle helmet that can pass weak electrical pulses through the brain could sharpen a soldier’s mind, the report suggests, upping attention spans and memory as well as attention to detail.
Similarly, electroencephalogram (EEG) could work to turn the human brain into a more efficient tool, although in a somewhat backwards fashion from tDCS. Using an array of electrodes, EEG can record brainwaves through the skull, detecting things that may not be conscious but that the brain nonetheless registers. For instance, the report cites DARPA research in which subjects looking at satellite photos were monitored with EEG. Even when the subjects missed some of the targets they were looking for in the images, the brain detected them, and that was evident in their brain waves even though it was never converted to conscious thought.
Such tools could also be used to screen recruits and identify certain mental traits, helping fighting forces more efficiently organize their ranks into fast learners, decision-makers, peacekeepers, and hardened, battle-ready special ops types. But none of these ideas is as far-out as using brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) to plug soldiers’ brains directly into weapons systems.
This is based on the same kind of research that has shown that disabled individuals can move prostheses with nerve signals from the brain, but in this context such BMI technology would be used to plug the fast processing power of the brain into drone technology and other weapons technologies for faster target identification and, presumably, termination. Let’s hope the soldiers mind-melding with the killer drones aced their EEG decision-making exams.
[Guardian]
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Massachusetts-based iRobot already has a number of robots in the field and in the household--they make everything from the popular Roomba vacuum robots to the tiny SUGV and larger Packbots that are workhorses of American Explosives Ordnance Disposal teams working overseas. But the Warrior will be the largest, weighing in at 450 pounds and sporting a 6.5-foot mechanical arm. It can climb stairs, reach its arm up to 11.5 feet high, and negotiate obstacles up to more than 1.5 feet high. It can be weaponized, or fitted with a variety of task-specific tools. It can delicately open a car door or smash its way through the windows. Or it can just tow the car.
You don’t need us to tell you that’s awesome. Warrior’s size and weight will limit its ability to deploy in the field like Packbot and SUGV, which fit relatively well in the back of a truck or, in SUGV's case, in a rucksack. But in situations where it can be deployed it will offer handlers a far more versatile robot than its lighter brethren. See it perform many of these versatile tasks below.
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