Progress in Lens Design and Processing Algorithms Brings VolumeVideo Within Reach

It's a classic idea – fully immersive, encompassing video, offering a viewer the ability to look up, down, around, even behind. It's a logical next step in the evolution of full-motion video presentation, so simple and analogous to normal human vision, that the concept itself does not so much require imagination to grasp, but rather simply begs that you forget about the last 140 years of recorded film. Or perhaps just forget about the screen it's been stuck in.

And yet, the technical obstacles to capturing and presenting fully immersive video are massive, accounting for the fact that there is no straightforward way to capture a 360º sphere. There's always a camera behind that lens that obstructs your view. Until recently, the very concept of presenting fully 360º volumetric video had been dismissed as an attractive but, alas, unattainable goal, a pipe dream shattered by the all-too-concrete laws of optics and physics.

A small, dedicated team of developers and optics professionals, however, have been working for the past ten months on making dreams come true. “Technically, what we're showing on computer monitors today, we shouldn't even be able to film. We shouldn't be able to shoot scenes like these and obey the rules of physics,” explains EnterNetica president Andronik Nazaretian. “In fact, we can't shoot these kinds of images without bending the rules a little bit, without making certain mathematical assumptions and applying specific heuristics to fill in the gaps in a scene.”

The Public Diplomacy and Virtual Worlds project is a research project examining one aspect of new technology and public diplomacy: the role of video games, specifically Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), in public diplomacy.

The study explores the role of MMOGs in the following ways:

* For U.S. games, as extensions of the U.S. brand and their role in shaping how the world sees the U.S. (for non-U.S. games their role as extensions of identity, image and brand of their respective country);
* As online venues (or virtual worlds) in which people from different cultures come together and shape or form ideas about each other and their respective cultures;
* The unique role that 'localization' plays in public diplomacy (How does framing a game for a community outside the game's country of origin play a role in its impact?);
* Game Design: As public policy play tools that can be used to educate (not train) people about how different cultures work and/or function (e.g. Roleplay Kofi Annan or the President of Russia, etc.).

Why Virtual Worlds?

A thoughtful presentation by Cory Ondrejka, Linden Lab at Accelerating Change 2005 suggested that games will "save the world" by teaching more people how to critically filter the increasing information to which they are exposed.

Gamers are critical-thinking goal-oriented people. Games are learning environments. When a gamer first enters a game, he explores and carries out experiments to understand the characteristics and constraints of the environment. This is good scientific practice and will be extended to real-life as well.

Royal Air Force officers have joined a team of American pilots based in the desert near Las Vegas that is flying and firing missiles from unmanned Predator spy planes more than 7,000 miles away in Iraq, writes Stephen Grey.

The British airmen are part of a 24-hour operation that controls the Predators remotely by satellite, secretly filming militants attacking American and British troops and using Hellfire air-to-ground missiles to destroy enemy positions.

The RAF pilots, like their American counterparts, are split between the bases of Balad, near Baghdad, where Predator pilots are responsible for the landing and takeoff of the 27ft craft, and Nellis, just outside Las Vegas, from where most of the remainder of the Predator’s 18-hour missions are controlled. The RAF has confirmed British involvement but declined to detail how many pilots were taking part.

Researchers from the University of Tsukuba and ATR Media Information Research Labs in Japan have constructed a moving floor that allows the user to stay in place while walking in a virtual environment.

The device makes it possible to literally move through a virtual environment, and could be used to simulate operations like disaster evacuations, according to the researchers.

The device, dubbed CirculaFloor, consists of movable sections of floor equipped with ultra-sound sensors that keep track of the floor section positions, and magnetic sensors that keep track of the motion of a user's feet. The floor moves in the opposite direction from the user so that the motion of each step is canceled and the user's position remains fixed in the real world.

Crystal Space is a free (LGPL) and portable 3D Game Development Kit written in C++. It supports: true six degrees of freedom, colored lighting, lightmapped and stencil based lighting, shader support, mipmapping, portals, mirrors, alpha transparency, reflective surfaces, 3D sprites (frame based or with skeletal animation, also using cal3d animation library), procedural textures, particle systems, halos, volumetric fog, scripting (using Python, Perl, Java, or potentially other languages), 16-bit and 32-bit display support, OpenGL, and software renderer, font support, hierarchical transformations, physics plugin based on ODE, ... See the extensive list of features for more details.

ODE is an open source, high performance library for simulating rigid body dynamics. It is fully featured, stable, mature and platform independent with an easy to use C/C++ API. It has advanced joint types and integrated collision detection with friction. ODE is useful for simulating vehicles, objects in virtual reality environments and virtual creatures. It is currently used in many computer games, 3D authoring tools and simulation tools.

Russell Smith is the primary author of ODE.

One of the inventors of the MP3 format is back with a new technology that he hopes will revolutionize audio, creating superrealistic sound for theaters, theme parks and eventually even living rooms.

Karlheinz Brandenburg, director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Media Technology, along with a team of co-developers, is in Los Angeles this week showing off his new "Iosono" technology to representatives of Hollywood studios and giants including Disney. Brandenburg is credited with much of the work leading to the MP3 format, also developed at Fraunhofer.

He and his team are touting their new product as true "three dimensional" audio, which can give the impression of, for example, a horse galloping through the center aisle of a movie theater, or pinpoint a noise so that it sounds exactly like a person shouting from outside theater walls. The best existing surround sound speakers can approximate this only for a small "sweet spot," perhaps a few feet wide, while the Iosono system would create the same realistic illusion for everyone in the room.

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.

Games aren't just child's play anymore. Advances in computer graphics and communications have given rise to a growing market for "serious games" — nonentertainment applications developed by public-policy advocates, educators, corporate management, the health care industry and nonprofit foundations.

Applications draw on realistic game-based simulation to deliver educational programs, military training and tools for health maintenance and therapy.

A bat echolocation system, adapted for human ears, has been used allow people to locate objects in a virtual reality environment. The researchers behind the project hope that a similar system in the cockpit of fighter planes could allow pilots to track some controls using their hearing, freeing up their eyes for other tasks.

In a museum in Tampere, Finland, Ismo Rakkolainen's fog machine conjures up the Mona Lisa on an invisible sheet of water particles. Thousands of miles away in Hermosa Beach, California, a graduate student passes his hand through an image of a DNA strand produced -- apparently out of thin air -- by a modified video projector. The two inventions represent the latest front in advanced computer displays -- eliminating the screen altogether.