The 4th Dimension of gaming

Tactile Gaming Vests: The Fourth Dimension In Gaming Reaches New Level Of Pain

Graduate robotics students at the University of Pennsylvania, motivated by realism trends in movies and gaming, decided to take a step into a new dimension - the fourth dimension of haptic reality, the tactile simulation of forces that impact characters in a virtual world or on the big screen.

Unimpressed by 4-D developments they had seen at haptics conferences and theme parks, the team of students - Saurabh Palan, Ruoyao Wang, Nathaniel Naukam, Edward Li, and Katherine J. Kuchenbecker - set out to make gunshots, knife slashings, and the feeling of blood dripping from the wounds more realistic than the other gadgets they had experienced provided. The TGVs are stuffed with solenoid actuators in the chest and on the front and back of the shoulders, and they are timed to go off when your character gets shot. They even get you where your character gets shot. Getting stabbed is no sweat either. The vibrating motors embedded around the vest simulate that experience. Oooh. Aaah. Why the vest can even simulate blood flowing from a wound. Ugh.

But there’s more to come. More sensations. More reality. But not much more pain. Palan and team want the vest to communicate the suddenness of the impact, but not too much pain. And I should add, that the Tactile Gaming Vest is not being developed just for gamers, but for 4-D movies, and the military to simulate what happens in battle.

Read more at: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-software/tactile-gaming-vest-punches-and-slices

Bio-inspired computer networks self-organise and learn

Bio-inspired computer networks self-organise and learn

European researchers have developed an innovative computing platform. The European PERPLEXUS project draws on another hot topic in research: self-organising wireless networks which can adapt to the job in hand.

This idea began with an earlier European project, POEtic, which developed a processor based on a large number of identical sub-units or cells. Depending on the current task, each cell can vary its function by changing its internal wiring; at a higher level, links between cells can also be made or broken. Until now, such flexibility has only been available from chips that are externally programmed. The ubichip, in contrast, works out the necessary wiring for itself.

Another branch of the project involved a fleet of small but sophisticated all-terrain robots fitted with ubichips. The researchers developed a new strategy in the field known as collective robotics, whose premise is that groups of robots which communicate with one another are more effective than the same robots acting individually.

In this case, the researchers looked at how foraging robots locate an important place such as a collection point for items they have picked up. Each robot displays a coloured beacon and carries a video camera which can see other robots’ beacons. Robots change the colour of their beacons to signal that they have successfully found the target, and nearby robots copy this behaviour.

The result is a gradient of beacon colours which guides other robots towards the target, rather as in an unfamiliar shopping mall where you might locate a particular store by following a trail of people carrying distinctive plastic bags. According to Pérez-Uribe, this technique is promising for situations where navigation by fixed coordinates or GPS is impossible.

Read more at: http://www.perplexus.org/

A Robot Performs Science

By any standard, it was an elementary discovery — the identification of the role of about a dozen genes in a yeast cell. But what made this finding a major breakthrough was the unlikely form of the scientist: a robot. In April, "Adam," a machine designed at Aberystwyth University in Wales, became the first robotic system to make a novel scientific discovery with virtually no human intellectual input.

Robots have long been used in experiments — their vast computational power assisted in the sequencing of the human genome, for example — but Adam was the first to complete the cycle from hypothesis to experiment to reformulated hypothesis without human intervention. Interviewed after Adam's experiment appeared in Science, inventor Ross King argued that artificial intelligence had almost limitless scientific potential — and that a computer would one day make a discovery akin to Einstein's special theory of relativity. "There isn't any intrinsic reason why that wouldn't happen," he said. "A computer can make beautiful chess moves, but it's not doing anything special. In my view, that's what's going to happen in science."

Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7979113.stm

Plasmobot: Scientists begin design on first robot using mould

Scientists begin design on first robot using mould
Researchers have received a Leverhulme Trust grant to develop the amorphous non-silicon biological robot, plasmobot, using plasmodium, the a commonly occurring mould which lives in forests, gardens and most damp places in the UK. The Leverhulme Trust funded research project aims to design the first every fully biological (no silicon components) amorphous massively-parallel robot.

Professor Adamatzky explains, “Most people's idea of a computer is a piece of hardware with software designed to carry out specific tasks. This mould, or plasmodium, is a naturally occurring substance with its own embedded intelligence. It propagates and searches for sources of nutrients and when it finds such sources it branches out in a series of veins of protoplasm. The plasmodium is capable of solving complex computational tasks, such as the shortest path between points and other logical calculations. Through previous experiments we have already demonstrated the ability of this mould to transport objects. By feeding it oat flakes, it grows tubes which oscillate and make it move in a certain direction carrying objects with it. We can also use light or chemical stimuli to make it grow in a certain direction.

“This new plasmodium robot, called plasmobot, will sense objects, span them in the shortest and best way possible, and transport tiny objects along pre-programmed directions. The robots will have parallel inputs and outputs, a network of sensors and the number crunching power of super computers. The plasmobot will be controlled by spatial gradients of light, electro-magnetic fields and the characteristics of the substrate on which it is placed. It will be a fully controllable and programmable amorphous intelligent robot with an embedded massively parallel computer.”

Read more at: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090827073256.htm