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AUGUST |
Newsletter |
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Issue
45 |
Included in this months issue:
Windows 7 Release Date Announced
How To Digitally Iron Out Chewed-Up Photos
Our-of-Body Experiences Help Bring Avatars to Life
The dream of many of paralysed people, computer-game designers – and pornographers – is one step closer to reality with the demonstration of a technique that allows people to physically identify with a virtual body.
The achievement builds on previous work in which neuroscientists created something similar to out-of-body experiences in healthy volunteers and tricked people viewing their virtual body into feeling that body being touched.
In the latest experiment, vibrating pads with flashing lights were positioned on the subjects' backs. Virtual bodies were generated by a camera filming their backs and were viewed as though 2 metres in front of the subjects through a head-mounted display. Repeated stroking of their backs, and the sight of the doppelganger being stroked, created the feeling that they were outside of their bodies.
At the same time, the subjects saw flashes on their virtual bodies, and felt vibrations on their real bodies. Participants were asked to ignore the flashing lights and only report where the vibrations were by pressing a button as fast as possible. The extent to which the flashing light interfered with the reporting of the vibrations was an indicator of where subjects perceived the spatial location of the vibrations to be.
Some volunteers had out-of-body experiences and reported that the vibrations were felt in the location where the flash was seen on their virtual body.
By Vian Azzu
London To Get First BT Brownfield FTTH Trial
BT is to begin its first brownfield pilot of fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) in the Highams Park area of north-east London. Previously, the IT and telecommunications giant tested a greenfield deployment FTTH at the new Ebbsfleet development in Kent, but the Highams Park pilot will mark BT's first such deployment in an existing residential area with a copper-based telecoms infrastructure.
By David Meyer
Microsoft Opens Office To The Crowd
An unofficial project at Microsoft is asking Office users for suggestions on how to improve the software. A Web site lets the crowd post suggestions and vote on others' ideas. Asking users for direct input on what direction to take future product designs is something tried with varying degrees of success by other tech companies, notably Dell with its IdeaStorm site.
By Jessica Mintz
Toshiba Joins Blue-Ray Disk Camp
Toshiba is to start making products that can play Blu-ray discs.
The decision marks a big change for the electronics firm which was the prime mover of the rival HD-DVD format.
Taken from BBC Technology News
Driverless Pod Cars Offer A Glimps Of The Future Of Transport
From next year, travellers at Heathrow Airport's Terminal 5 will be able to step into one of these vehicles and be whisked straight to their destination - all without the need for a driver.
The driverless vehicles are currently being tested at the airport and are due to be operating between one of T5's business car parks and the terminal building by 2010.
By Tim Ferguson
Windows 7 Release Date Announced
Windows 7, the next major release of the world's most popular operating system, will be officially available to the public on 22 October.
Microsoft is hoping it can avoid the negative press that surrounded the launch of Vista, the last major Windows release, almost three years ago.
Windows 7 has been designed to be compatible with Vista so users do not have to invest in new hardware.
Customers who buy a new PC with Vista will be offered upgrades to Windows 7.
By Darren Waters
How To Digitally Iron Out Chewed-Up Photos
A sophisticated imaging technique used to enhance fossils and ancient engravings may soon help you erase rips and creases from old photographs, using just an ordinary flatbed scanner.
Tom Malzbender of Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California, and his colleagues pioneered a method of taking scores of digital photographs of a textured object from slightly different angles to create a computer model of the object's bumps and ridges. The team used it to bring carvings on previously unreadable ancient tablets into sharp relief (New Scientist, 7 April 2001, p 38). But back then the technique involved a metre-wide plastic dome and 50 separate light sources.
Now Malzbender's team has achieved the same effect using an off-the-shelf flatbed scanner. They rely on the fact that modern scanners use two separate light bulbs. This feature was added to scanners to improve colour quality, but it also lets you capture the image from two different angles. Re-scanning the object after rotating it 90 degrees provides a total of four different angles, more than enough to deduce 3D information about the object - mathematically, you only need three.
Read More ...By Lisa Grossman
Pay-Per-Email Plan To Beat Spam And Help Charity
Yahoo! wants to reinvent the postage stamp to cut spam. Researchers are testing a scheme where users pay a cent to charity for each email they send – so clearing their inbox and conscience simultaneously.
You may see less spam these days, but it is more abundant than ever, making up more than 90 per cent of all email sent globally. Most is intercepted by anti-spam programs that filter mail by its origin or content.
Yahoo! Research's CentMail resurrects an old idea: that levying a charge on every email sent would instantly make spamming uneconomic. But because the cent paid for an accredited "stamp" to appear on each email goes to charity, CentMail's inventors think it will be more successful than previous approaches to make email cost. They think the cost to users is offset by the good feeling of giving to charity.
By MacGregor Campbell
Music Executives Put Pressure On 'Pirate Bay' Owner
Music industry executives in Europe are pressuring Global Gaming Factory X (GGF), the company that intends to buy the Pirate Bay, to turn over any money it pays to acquire the site to them.
Jo Oliver, general counsel for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), wrote to Hans Pandeya, GGF's chief executive, on 24 July. Oliver told Pandeya that the group will ask authorities in Sweden to "issue an order prohibiting GGF from paying the purchase sum" to the founders of the Pirate Bay. Oliver added that copyright owners will also ask that the government require GGF to turn over information about the acquisition should it go through.
By Greg Sandoval
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