Minority Report is Real

Mindmap of Our SXSW Panel Presentation

Atta texana: a view underground

3d model on immersive system, created from a Ground Penetrating Radar scan of an Atta texana leafcutting ant colony in Texas.

http://www-viz.tamu.edu/faculty/lurleen/main/attatunnel/01.htm

What's really cool is they use a nintendo Wii game controller as their navigation device!

http://www-viz.tamu.edu/faculty/lurleen/main/attatunnel/immersive.htm

Scientists extract images directly from brain

This is downright spooky.
-jeroen

Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor, it was announced on December 11. According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep.

http://www.pinktentacle.com/2008/12/scientists-extract-images-directly-from-brain/

Gestures Lend A Hand In Learning Mathematics; Hand Movements Help Create New Ideas

While we think about gesture-based interface design, this article shows how gesturing is an important part of learning. I wonder if one could develop a gesture-based teaching tool? i.e. to re-enforce the brain pathways for the concept being taught.

-jeroen

ScienceDaily (Mar. 6, 2009) — Gesturing helps students develop new ways of understanding mathematics, according to research at the University of Chicago.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090224133204.htm

Brain scan reveals memories of where you've been

Scans of the part of the brain responsible for memory have for the first time been used to detect a person's location in a virtual environment. Using functional MRI (fMRI), researchers decoded the approximate location of several people as they navigated through virtual rooms.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16751-brain-scan-reveals-memories-of-where-youve-been.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

Jeroen Lapré Bio

Jeroen first saw Star Wars: Episode IV at the impressionable age of 12. It was his first step into a larger Universe. A subsequent visit to the science fiction section in the local book library set the young futurist on a life-long journey.

Through the SF masters, such as Arthur C. Clarke, Jeroen formed the belief that science-based drama would make compelling media. i.e. To transport the audience to fantastic worlds and situations; expanding the mind to what is possible, while not violating any natural laws.

In 1996 Jeroen relocated to San Francisco, with his wife Donna, to pursue a career in visual effects at ILM. Over an 11 year span Jeroen worked worked as technical director on feature films including Iron Man, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Pirates of the Caribbean II: Dead Man's Chest*, Harry Potter (4) Goblet of Fire, War of the Worlds, Hulk, E.T. re-release, Artificial Intelligence, Perfect Storm, and Starship Troopers.

While at ILM, Jeroen realized a childhood dream by working on Star Wars: Episodes I, II, & III.

In 2003, Jeroen acquired the short film rights to Maelstrom II, a science fiction short story by the late Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Production was started on Maelstrom II, as an ILM independent film project. Jeroen plans to complete Maelstrom II as an open source film project, and is seeking digital artists to participate.

A passion for science, space exploration, and technology grew in parallel with Jeroen's visual effects career. In 2004, he wrote a real-time 3D visualization of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission, which became a popular exhibit at the NASA Ames Visitor Center.

In 2008, the California Academy of Sciences building reconstruction was approaching completion in the Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. Which included a state-of-the art all-digital Morrison Planetarium.

In addition to reconstruction, production on the premier planetarium show, Fragile Planet, was underway. Jeroen joined a small but talented team, as technical director to assist in the completion of this ambitious project. Fragile Planet takes you for a 600 million light year tour of the universe, postulates other star systems that may support life, while reminding us to protect our own "island of life". Everything you see in the show is based on science data.

Jeroen is now Senior Technical Director of the Visualization Studio at the Academy, where he has the unique opportunity to combine his love of science and pixels. Some of the many tasks in the studio include refining the CG pipeline for future planetarium productions, and delivering supporting graphics for an in-house show called Science in Action.

One of the many exciting challenges for the studio is how to collect science knowledge, and make it accessible to visitors to the academy, in real time, non-real time, and stereo 3D forms. All the while supporting the academy's mission statement; to explore, explain, and protect the natural world.

Jeroen's personal interests include the semantic web, and how it can be applied to knowledge capture, and user interface design.

How Holographic UI Works

A good article in How Stuff Works about Holographic UIs. 

"Tele-immersion will blur the lines between real and computer-generated images. It will be the ultimate tele-commuting technology, almost entirely eliminating the rush-hour drive to work. Instead of commuting, people could attend board meetings by projecting themselves into the company's conference room. And if your job requires you to travel, you could still be home for dinner by tele-immersing yourself into the family kitchen. Because this technology is still in the early stages of development, the possibilities are truly endless." Read the Article.

Cave Automatic Virtual Environment - CAVE

A Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (better known by the recursive acronym CAVE) is an immersive virtual reality environment where projectors are directed to three, four, five or six of the walls of a room-sized cube. The name is also a reference to the allegory of the Cave in Plato's Republic where a philosopher contemplates perception, reality and illusion. The first CAVE was developed in the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at University of Illinois at Chicago and was announced and demonstrated at the 1992 SIGGRAPH. See Wikipedia

Ben Rigby - Bio

Rigby graduated from Stanford University with Honors, Distinction, and Phi Beta Kappa. He went on to co-found Akimbo Design, a web design firm that created and managed the consumer Web sites for The North Face, Beringer Vineyards, California Pizza Kitchen and completed award-winning projects for Nokia, Sony Pictures, MGM, Calvin Klein, and Macromedia. His company produced three Web design books, won dozens of awards, and had work featured in major media publications such as Newsweek, the New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today.

In 2002, Rigby took a position as CTO of DFILM - a youth entertainment company creating web and mobile applications. At DFILM, he managed the launch of a youth-focused communication platform in partnership with KPN, the largest wireless operator in the Netherlands. He also launched a viral application called the MovieMaker that is consistently used by 300,000 unique users per month and has been licensed by Yahoo!, Sam Adams, IBM, the Sierra Club, and Old Navy.

In 2004, he founded Mobile Voter, which was the first organization in the U.S. to engage young voters via text messaging (SMS). With grants from Pew Charitable Trusts and MacArthur Foundation, Mobile Voter registered tens of thousands of voters in 2006. In 2007, Rigby wrote the well reviewed book “Mobilizing Generation 2.0: a handbook for using Web2.0 Technologies to recruit, organize, and engage youth.”

And in 2008, Rigby made the transition from 2D to 3D - diving deep into the world of immersive media. He's currently exploring the intersection of social change, immersive interfaces, and mobile technology. COCO Studios, a San Francisco startup dedicated to making the web a visual and collaborative experience. This project often intersects with another project he co-founded in 2008 called The Extraordinaries, which allows people to volunteer on-demand and on-the-spot by mobile phone.

Jet Fighter Heads Up Displays (HUD)s

Some information about HUDs on Jet fighters: 

There are two types of HUD. Fixed HUDs require the user to look through a display element attached to the airframe or vehicle chassis. The system determines the image to be presented depending solely on the orientation of the vehicle. Most aircraft HUDs are fixed. Helmet mounted displays (HMD) are technically a form of HUD, the distinction being that they feature a display element that moves with the orientation of the user's head vice the airframe. Many modern fighters (such as F/A-18, F-22, Eurofighter) use both a HUD and an HMD concurrently. The F-35 Lightning II was designed without a HUD, relying solely on the HMD, making it the first modern military fighter not to have a fixed HUD.

HUDs are now available in cars:

Head-up displays are becoming increasingly available in production cars, and usually offer speedometer, tachometer, and navigation system displays. BMW, Lexus, Citroën, GM, and Nissan currently offer some form of HUD system. Motorcycle helmet HUDs are also commercially available. Add-on HUD systems also exist, projecting the display onto a glass combiner mounted on the windshield. These systems have been marketed to police agencies for use with in-vehicle computers. 

This from a BMW: