Belting out a few notes on key might take years of practice, and perfect pitch the right genetics, but when it comes to something as simple as telling noise from symphony, speech from music, all ears are created equal - or so it was once thought.

But in a new study, scientists have found that the left and right ears process sound differently. From birth, the right ear responds more to speech, while the left ear is more attuned to music, according to the study, published in Science on Sept. 10.

Researchers from UB's Virtual Reality Lab have developed a new tool for transmitting physical touch to the virtual world.

Their virtual clay sculpting system enables users to replicate in real time on a personal computer the physical act of sculpting a block of clay or other malleable material. The resulting 3-D electronic shape shown on the computer screen then can be fine-tuned for product design using standard computer-aided design/modeling software.

"This technology will give product designers, or even artists, a tool that will allow them to touch, shape and manipulate virtual objects just as they would with actual clay models or sculptures," says Thenkurussi Kesavadas, director of the Virtual Reality Lab and associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Wouldn’t you like to be able to read off the screen of your laptop in direct sunlight? Your mobile phone battery to last much, much longer? Or your next flat screen TV to be less expensive, much flatter, and even flexible? Thanks to a breakthrough technology called Organic Displays, this could soon be reality.

Although the technology behind Organic LED (OLED) displays is pure chemistry, the applications are much more everyday - mobile telephone and television screens, laptop and stereo displays, car navigation systems, or even billboards.

Speaking without using vocal cords, knowing which direction a telephone call comes from, or even communicating with the five senses are some of the dreams of Japanese researchers for the mobile phones of the future.

The first time you enter a room, you probably look around quite a bit to see what's there. The second time you enter the room, you'll probably look around a little less.

Researchers from Trinity College in Ireland have added memory to a neurobiological model of visual attention in order to generate more realistic animation for virtual reality characters.

Promising ultra-thin displays so skinny and flexible they could be rolled up inside a pen or a mobile phone, Polymer Vision, a new technology incubator established by Philips Research, unveiled what it claims is the thinnest, most flexible, active-matrix display so far.

The new organics-based quarter VGA (320 x 240 pixels) active- matrix display measures 5 inches on a diagonal, features a resolution of 85 dpi and a bending radius of 2 cm.

Semiconductor maker STMicroelectronics today announced a Bluetooth chipset and reference design using the Human Interface Design (HID) standard that allows mobile keyboards to work with laptops, PDAs and mobile phones.

Keyboards powered by the chipset, which combines ST's STLC2150 Bluetooth RF Transceiver and STLC2410 baseband along with Bluetooth HID profile software, can be used for data-entry application to multiple platforms. A complete reference design is also available.

Source

A common concept in wearable computing is the audio-only interface. We attempted a "Wizard of Oz" study in order to assess the effectiveness of such an interface. Results of this study revealed more about the limitations of human collaboration over audio channels than the hypothetical computer assistant we wished to study. This paper explores the implications of using audio-only communication to enable a mobile ad hoc collaboration between a user and a remote, pro-active human assistant.

Computing | Human interface | Input interface | Natural language | Output interface