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August 04 2011
Archaeologists Trade in Their Primative Tools for a Kinect
Is there any limit to the cool things you can do with Microsoft’s Kinect? Just last month we told you about students in Switzerland that used the device to create a gesture-controlled quadrocopter; now, students in California are looking to employ the Kinect in archaeological digs in Jordan.
Excavation is painstaking work, requiring careful cataloging of every artifact and the exact locations where they were found. To simplify this tedious process, researchers at the University of California, San Diego have modified a Kinect to do all the work for them. The new system, called ArKinect (archaeology + Kinect, if you didn’t catch that), extracts information from the Kinect’s streaming data feed of visible and infrared light.
The archaeologists will the use the system to quickly make accurate 3D scans of both the entire dig site and anything they pull up from the ground. The idea is to then plug the data into their 360-degree virtual reality environment called StarCAVE, which would allow the archeologists to interact with the virtual objects. “We can then use the 3D model, walk around it, we can move it around, we can look at it from all ...
May 19 2011
Laser-Equipped Wheelchairs Let the Blind “See” Obstacles in Their Path
The story of a PhD student weaving his way through a busy university corridor doesn’t usually make for breaking news. But then the average PhD student isn’t wheelchair-bound, visually impaired, and testing a new laser-based wheelchair navigation system. In front of a crowd of onlookers earlier this month, a student performed the first public demonstration of a wheelchair that lets blind people “see” and avoid obstacles, afterward remarking that it was just “like using a white cane” (presumably underselling the technology to blunt the jealousy blooming in the onlookers).
From the user’s perspective, the new high-tech wheelchair is quite simple: You hold a joystick in one hand to drive the motorized chair, while the other hand engages a “haptic interface” that gives tactile feedback warning you about objects in your path, be they walls, fire hydrants, or those mobile collision-makers called people.
Developed at Sweden’s Luleå University of Technology (who brought us the autonomous wheelchair), this wheelchair uses lasers that make use of the time of flight technique, wherein “a laser pulse is sent out and a portion of the pulse is reflected from any surface encountered,” and the distance ...
August 04 2010
Drakozoon in 3D! Scientists Take a Look at an Ancient Sea Blob
The Silurian Period, 425 million years ago: As volcanic ash rained down on proto-England, a sea blob named Drakozoon gave its last. Now, using a computer model, scientists have finally witnessed what the soft-bodied ancient looked like in 3D.
Researchers first found a Drakozoon fossil six years ago in Herefordshire Lagerstätte, home to England’s mother-load of soft-bodied fossils. Such fossils are rare since most of these creatures decompose before a fossil can form.To capitalize on the find, a team chopped the Drakozoon fossil into 200 pieces, photographed those slices, and used a computer to construct a rotatable image of the old softy.
They found that Drakozoon, which was little more than a tenth of an inch long, had a hood that it wrapped around itself to ward off predators, and had tentacles for snaring microscopic food bits out of neighboring water. The researchers also noted that Drakozoon had eight ridges on the sides of its body, what they believe could be vestiges of an evolutionary step up from creatures with repeating body segments, similar to modern-day caterpillars. The critter was described in the journal Biology Letters.
Mark Sutton, from the Imperial College London’s earth science and engineering department, said in a college press release:
“Excitingly, our 3D model brings back to life a creature that until recently no one knew even existed. . .”
Related content:
Discoblog: The Curious Case of the Immortal Jellyfish
Discoblog: Stem Cell-Powered Worm Doesn’t Age, Can Grow a New Head
Discoblog: Military Blob-bot to Ooze Its Way Past Enemy Lines
Discoblog: Weekly News Roundup: Giant Sea Blobs Attack!
Image: Imperial College London
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