research on technabob...

DARPA’s Self-Explanation Learning Framework (SELF) program “seeks to construct systems that can participate in their own construction.” Imagine a robot helping build itself. Who or what runs DARPA these days? Are there still humans in there? Things are moving too fast folks. Let’s look at the matchup for a sec: Human fetus – looks cute/scary/funny, probable source of clones and…

Stanford researchers have designed these incredible little robots are about the size of a quarter for use in atmospheric research on Earth (and one day) on Mars. I just want them for conducting research in my office building.

This has got to be the best news for brain health since ever: playing strategy games might help prevent some ill effects due to aging. Your desire to control an animated portion of a tiny world (with your iron fist, naturally) just may be your saving grace in your twilight years.

The study, published in Psychology & Aging, reports that…

Rhodri Armour, a PhD student from the University of Bath, has invented a robot that he hopes will be a model for future space exploration and land surveying robots. Called the Jollbot, it’s a spherical robot that rolls over smooth terrain and jumps “like a grasshopper” when it encounters obstacles.

The robot imitates how a grasshopper builds up its energy…

Up until now, singers needed to either play an instrument or the help of a professional accompanist to help them realize their musical ideas. With this new technology coming out of Microsoft Research, vocalists need only sing their ideas into a microphone to automatically generate musical accompaniment.

MySong “listens” to any sampled vocal melody, then automatically selects the best chords…

Most robots are controlled using a joystick or other traditional input device, but this new system allows operators to issue commands to robots using simple hand and body gestures.

Developed by engineer Tsuyoshi Horo at Tokyo University, the system uses a circular array of cameras to detect human movements in the room, then convey them to a robot as directional…

The gaming world is full of MMORPGs, games that feature interaction of hundreds or thousands of players. However, these games usually don’t put them all in the same place at the same time, and don’t have hundreds battling each other at the same time. Because of bandwidth constraints (especially upstream), it’s been impossible to pull off high speed games like…

Just a few weeks back, Microsoft introduced their Surface tabletop multi-touch computer. Now Microsoft Research is showing off a prototype of a multi-touch interface portable computer.

By hacking some infrared sensors through the back of a standard laptop display, they’re able to track the locations and pressure from multiple finger locations. As an added benefit of the infrared technology, the…

A group of scientists working with the National Human Genome Research Institute claim to have identified the specific gene that controls the size of dogs.

Without getting into all of the scientific details (I flunked biology,) the researchers screened a group of almost 500 Portuguese water dogs (a breed with lots of size variance,) and sequenced their DNA to identify…

Check out this cool video of Microsoft’s prototype for an augmented reality system known as “PlayAnywhere“. The system combines a video projector and a sensing device that can detect a user’s gestures and the position objects placed on a surface in real time, and utilize that data to create a highly interactive and intuitive user interface.

[via VideoSift]

Technical Overview from Microsoft…