Touch is a research project that investigates Near Field Communication (NFC), run by Timo Arnall at the Institute of Design at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design in Norway.

This video shows the interaction of multiple objects in a Rube Goldberg device without any of the objects physically touching each other. Only electrical signals, gravity or air cause interaction.

 This video shows the actual usable detection RF field around a RFID reader.

TED speaker Nick Veasey shows outsized X-ray images that reveal the otherworldly inner workings of familiar objects -- from the geometry of a wildflower to the anatomy of a Boeing 747. 

I am going to post another video shotly about visualizing magnetic fields with what Alex F lovingly refers to as magic grease.

Asperger’s individuals isolate themselves socially and express difficulty in reciprocating in two-sided friendly exchanges. Their social ineptness creates tension within certain environments, not only for the Asperger’s individual but for educators, peers, family members, etc. as well. Everyone is sensitive toward social awkwardness, and we believe that a simulator would help in bridging the social gap between Asperger’s individuals and the greater community.

It is important that educators know how autistic students think. Encouraging integration of students with disabilities into general K-12 classrooms is crucial in promising autistic children a better chance at normalcy in the real world. Further isolation and lack of integration could worsen their already prominent social inept tendencies. In order for such integration to be successful, educators must understand the thought process of an autistic mind so they can then evaluate how to communicate effectively with such students. With our experience in making multi-sensory simulators, we could build a human experience device to help teachers navigate an Asperger’s mind.

Isolation is outdated in an age of social networking. Asperger’s individuals have a lot to offer our workforce, considering their ability to focus intently on one area of interest. They just require the patience and understanding of others.

Imagine if your mouse had a half-second delay every time you moved it with your hand. The on-screen pointer would be behind your input and maddeningly frustrating. A delay of only 150 milliseconds is enough time for your brain to question weather or not the mouse is actually even working.

We design all of our systems so that as little latency as possible is introduced giving participants as near-to-life experience as they would expect.

Captivating storytelling is one of the most important elements of a successful simulation experience, allowing the participant to become more empathic and aware of all of the ailments a patient would be experiencing. Creating a compelling story arc allows the participant go through different stages of a given disease and experience the progression of symptoms as well as the regression with the correct treatments.

When designing a simulation you always have to take into consideration all of the elements that will truly immerse and not distract the participant such as: temperature, motion, light, wind, scent, participant position (sitting, standing, prone), live action or CG media and audio.

A simulator can reside in a briefcase or backpack when deployment requires ease of portability or multiple units in the field. For larger simulations, a permanent venue can be designed with ancillary facilities, such as training or briefing areas. When mobility is needed for a larger simulation, specially-designed simulation vehicles can be built to accommodate the simulation, as well as waiting areas and pre/post experience briefings. The mobile simulator can also provide a large canvas for awareness campaigns, as a 53' truck also acts as a giant moving billboard.

Other ideas for immersive disease simulators include:

Asthma, diabetes, glaucoma, Parkinson's, migraine, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, macular degeneration, obesity, phobias, epilepsy, anxiety, insomnia, and while not a disease, our most requested; pregnancy.

The state of technologies for displays and human interacting is in an interesting place, because of the economic downturn of the early part of the 21 st century we are seeing the result of a lack of innovation industry wide. Wireless, touch, networks, computing power are all at a level of maturity that the applications are dwindling behind.

The prevalence of multi-touch devices and implementations have been breed from a single idea, and much like the mouse the technology and interface have now be come quite standard. Pinch to zoom out, flick a finger left or right to pan. The real innovation comes when more designers and developers embrace the other possibilities such as musical instruments and control interfaces for existing products. Child safety devices can be developed to only unlock after a series of coordinated moves requiring a high level dexterity.

Here is a brief over view of some interesting technologies we are working with now:

Non-invasive EEG emotion tracking

How would you like to be able to know if your customer or viewers are truly enjoying your program or are affected by your advertising message? Imagine that your are able to print a report of what your audience is feeling every second that they view your material. Did they grimace or smile when the saw the mother cuddle her young child in a blanket surrounded in a filed of daises during your latest detergent commercial?

Emotion, cognition and engagement can be tracked through hte use of EEG which measures brain-waves, and can create data sets that when analyzed display emotional signatures. Pleasure, fear, anxiety, sadness, anger, are some of the emotional signatures that can be tracked.

Facial recognition with eye and head tracking

The human face can be tracked with lasers, infrared cameras, or traditional video cameras with each having a different benefit for specialized applications. By tracking the human face we can detect eye movement to track where a viewer is looking within a scene or display. This gives us valuable data for usability studies, evaluating designs and determining attention spans.

Demographic profiling can be created by serving custom media to different audiences once their age range and sex has been determined by the tracking system. This can be determined in seconds and when properly integrated can create a seamless experience where the viewer is not aware that they are being profiled.

Laser scanning systems for data visualization

Laser scanning allows images to be created from actual 3D space and then manipulated with in the processing system to allow realtime panning, zooming, and fly troughs of the location or object scanned. With laser scanning a tremendous amount of time is saved because the scene or object does not have to be created by hand. What would take a traditional artist several weeks can be completed by a laser scan in minutes or hours. See the new Radiohead video below that used the data visualization of the raw 3D data. 3 different styles of 3D scanners are used for the making of this music video.

Auto-stereoscopic displays (3D without glasses)

The idea of 3D displays with out the use of glasses has been the holy grail of main stream 3D deployment. There are several technologies that are now reaching a teenage state of maturity. By that we mean are still cranky and rebellious but getting closer to an acceptable age of maturity.

Layered LCD stacks are one of the designs that are promising to provide compact fairly inexpensive displays. Each layer in a a layered LCD sandwich can display a direct image creating the parallax effect and the other layers create a variable mask or aperture that revels only a certain slice of the images, giving the viewers eyes a small field of view. This delivers slightly different imagery to each of the viewers eyes creating a 3D image.

Spinning mirror scanning 3D displays create the 3D effect by projecting through an extremely high sped digital projector on to a spinning array of mirrors. The mirrors reflect a specific slice of the projected imagery to the viewers eyes creating the 3D effect see below. This is a very good effect and is quite effective.

Wet lenses

There are certain oils when electrostaticly charged change their surface tension and density, this change of the oils property allows for the creation of variable lenses. When combined with an eye-tracking system and auto-focusing mechanism we can crete glasses that change their focus to simulate different conditions of ocular degeneration. This could also mean that you have one set of glasses that change prescriptions on the fly.