New Florence. New Renaissance.

Airport Avatars

Travelers flying out of Boston’s Logan International Airport may have met its newest assistant, Carla. She’s upbeat, informative – but not human.This hologramlike virtual assistant stands by one of Logan’s checkpoints, explaining the rules for passing through security. As she bops through each regulation, pictures of cellphones and toiletries (neatly packed into plastic bags) appear above her hands (like at 0.43 in video below) After the two-minute spiel, Carla repeats the message in Spanish.

Christian Science Monitor

Beam me up, Scotty!

“Project LifeLike is a collaboration between the Intelligent Systems Laboratory (ISL) at the University of Central Florida (UCF) and the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) that aims to create visualizations of people, or avatars, that are as realistic as possible. While their current results are far from perfect replications of a specific person, their work has advanced the field forward and opens up a host of possible applications in the not-too-distant future.”

Physorg

Google's Lively World

"After downloading free software, users can create cartoonish avatars, roam in virtual chat rooms, watch videos from Google's YouTube and photos from Picasa, or create their own virtual rooms to chat with friends and family. Lively avatars can assume different identities, change cloths, laugh, cry and hug with just a few clicks of the mouse.

Google says Lively is a "20 percent project" by Google Labs, meaning it's about 20 percent complete. The lab is where the company tests new products before launching them. Unlike the real world, Google said it is not planning to sell ads in its new virtual world."

SFGate.com

Crowd Simulations

"Torrens’s computer simulations let planners drop a few thousand virtual people into a burning building, then sit back and take notes—with heat coming only from the computer itself. The specific scenarios Torrens creates could show firefighters how to save the most people, tell architects where to place exits or barriers in stadiums, and guide police forces in corralling unruly mobs."

"Torrens’s model, on the other hand, turns each individual into an “avatar” with an artificial mind. Avatars can plan their own route, adjust their path on the fly, and even respond to the body language of fellow cybercitizens who may be jostling them."

Discover

"The Hard Science of Videogames"

Popular Science (sub required) has an analysis on all the geekery and hard work that goes in to making video games. They list the 10 biggest challenges and related technologies and techniques:

1. Processing Power
2. Water
3. Human Faces
4. Artificial Intelligence
5. Light and shadows
6. Fire
7. Material Physics
8. Realistic Movement
9. True to life capture
10. Motion capture

When Geeks and Nerds go to the movies!

They do not leave Newton and Archimedes at home - and find fault with the "Physics of Hollywood"

Check out this Popular Science slide show of math and other bloopers in 11 popular movies.   

Learning from Online Virtual worlds

"Online virtual worlds, electronic environments where people can work and interact in a somewhat realistic manner, have great potential as sites for research in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences, as well as in human-centered computer science. This article uses Second Life and World of Warcraft as two very different examples of current virtual worlds that foreshadow future developments, introducing a number of research methodologies that scientists are now exploring, including formal experimentation, observational ethnography, and quantitative analysis of economic markets or social networks."

Science magazine (sub required)

Second Earth

MIT Technology Review

"The World Wide Web will soon be absorbed into the World Wide Sim: an environment combining elements of Second Life and Google Earth."

Surreal.