Interactive

Thanks to touchscreens and motion controls, we're able to interact with anything with a screen like never before; but this still leaves that glass barrier between us and the virtual world that we see behind it. We can't just leap into our televisions or computers like Mike Teavee in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and we certainly can't jump into the same space as someone else on the other side of the world. Now though, thanks to one design student's Portal boxes, we can at least reach our hands behind the screen along with another person connected to the internet, and interact with a virtual world together. Read More

Finnish company FogScreen has been wowing attendees at major events, trade shows and conventions and giving advertisers another way to capture our attention for over five years now with its FogScreen technology - a display system that projects images onto a curtain of fog so they appear to float in the air. Now Russian company DisplAir has added some interactivity to the technology by giving it multi-touch capabilities that allows users to manipulate projected images in mid-air. Read More

Had the wicked Queen from Snow White access to a Cybertecture Mirror, she would have had much more to think about than who was the fairest in the land. Described as a reflective window into a digital life, this internet-connected, intelligent mirror can augment your reflected image with weather and news, check for messages or social network feeds, let you watch a TV program, give you information on your state of health and can even act as a personal exercise coach. Read More

If you own a dog or a cat and are having a hard day at work, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to take a break and play with them? Well, if you’ve got the money, now you can do it – via the internet. A consumer version of a system already in use at some U.S. animal shelters, iPet Companion Home Version lets computer users remotely control dog or cat toys located in their home, watching their pets reacting to those toys’ movements in real time. For some people, it could be the biggest workplace distraction since Facebook. Read More

San Francisco's Sifteo Inc has confirmed that its cube-based, interactive educational gameplay system we looked at back in March is now ready for release in the U.S. and Canada. The Sifteo Cubes system takes timeless building blocks play and learning and gives it a modern update - with a color display, embedded computer system and sensing technology. Read More

At one time not all that long ago, cars had a warning light on the dashboard that simply said “ENGINE.” That’s pretty vague. Really, it might just as well have said “CAR.” Some newer automobiles now have codes that appear on the console, which the driver must then look up in an index in the vehicle’s owner’s manual. Working with Audi, Germany’s Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) Institute of Business Informatics is now working on taking things a step farther, with the development of an on-screen avatar that will talk to drivers, and even understand their spoken questions. Read More

"You know what your living room needs? A giant animatronic Triceratops." Should an interior designer ever offer you this advice, well, now you know where to find such a beast. Fancy goods-seller Hammacher Schlemmer is now offering a 20 foot (6 meter)-long, 1,345-pound (610 kg) model of everyone's favorite three-horned dinosaur, that moves and growls when human gawkers trigger its motion sensors. Its price tag might scare more people than its fearsome countenance, although at US$350,000, it's probably still cheaper than cloning your own real Triceratops from amber-encased dinosaur-blood-filled mosquitoes. Read More

Although already incorporated into devices such as the Microsoft Kinect gaming console, the ability of computer vision systems to recognize specific body poses is still very much a work in progress. One of the big challenges involves the chaos that such systems encounter in real-world use – while it’s one thing to initially train a computer to recognize a given person standing and pointing against a neutral background, for instance, it’s quite another to expect it to recognize that same stance in visual data where variables such as background, clothing and body type are constantly changing. A new interactive music video from Dutch electronic band C-Mon & Kypski, however, may help address that problem. Read More

Earlier this month we featured some novel building blocks that help teach robotics to kids, and grew from a project at Carnegie Mellon University. Now it's MIT's turn, with the Sifteo Cubes – 1.5-inch gaming blocks sporting full color screens that respond to motion, and interact with the player and each other as they are moved around. Games and apps can be bought online and wirelessly transferred onto the cubes via an internet-connected computer or laptop. The current title catalog includes adult games, puzzles for kids, and challenges and games that people can play together. Read More