Southampton is one of the leading centres in Europe for the study of archaeology, with world class research and teaching ranging from human origins to the modern world, and with field projects across the globe. We have an international reputation for the quality of our teaching and research.

'Augmented Reality' on Smartphones Brings Teaching Down to Earth

Chronicle of Higher Education (06/20/10) Li, Sophia

A panel at EmTech@MIT will discuss future directions in augmented reality (AR). Over the past year, the technology has reached the mainstream, with applications released for cell phones equipped with sophisticated positioning sensors. So far, most are geared towards tourism and navigation.

Integration of health monitoring tools into textiles brings the benefits of safety and comfort to the users. Instrumented clothes will provide remote monitoring of vitals signs, diagnostics to improve early illness detection and metabolic disorder and benefits to the reduction on medical social costs to the citizen. Ambulatory healthcare, isolated people, convalescent people and patients with chronic diseases are addressed.

Over the past decade, as many as 10,000 of the rarest and most important medieval manuscripts have been scanned into digital formats that could be studied on the Internet, but finding these documents online can be extremely difficult. "Searching for medieval manuscripts gets you millions of hits, most of which have nothing to do with manuscripts, and when they do, they usually feature only images of a single page rather than the entire book," says University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) professor Matthew Fisher.

The project is already finished, but has interesting possibilities such as the "cybercarpet"

Dryad lets you intuitively create beautiful trees for your virtual world or game. In Dryad, you create a tree by visually navigating to it through a design space: the space of all trees. This space has close to a hundred dimensions and Dryad lets you move around it as if it were a city map. To help you find your way, Dryads around the world communicate to share which trees were picked in the past.

Twelve law enforcement agencies in the United Kingdom are using a forensic facial composite software tool that does not require witnesses to provide detailed descriptions of suspects they can barely remember. Instead, the EFIT-V software has the witness answer questions about the age, sex, face shape, and hairstyle of the suspect to initialize the system and then produce a set of computer-generated faces.

3D Virtual Learning Platforms

Eureqa is a free program developed at Cornell University's Computational Synthesis Lab that takes raw data and derives mathematical laws in a matter of hours. Cornell researchers developed Eureqa as a successor to a series of robots that can repair themselves. The same algorithms used in earlier robots have been adapted for the analysis of any kind of data that can be presented in a spreadsheet. The algorithms may help scientists find complex equations and laws.

Enormous amounts of data are being generated every day in health care, computational biology, homeland security, commerce, and many other areas. Analyzing these massive and complex data sets is essential to achieve new discoveries, but extremely difficult.

Evaluating Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems is a notoriously hard problem: Unlike natural language interpretation, where annotated corpora may provide a gold standard against which a system can be measured, there are generally multiple equally good outputs that an NLG system might produce. On the other hand, access to human experimental subjects who could judge the quality of the system's output is usually too expensive for large-scale use. Nevertheless, there has recently been an increased interest in shared tasks and new methodologies for evaluating and comparing NLG systems.

GestureTek, creates interactive displays for TV weathermen, museums, and hotels using three-dimensional cameras that can distinguish the hand movements of users. From a soft punch up into the air to turn on the TV, to a twist of the hand to change channels, or raising the volume with an upward pat, these simple gestures can be detected by the cameras and interpreted by specially-designed computer chips.

EU Scientists Make Virtual Reality Touchable

CORDIS News (Belgium) (07/20/10)

Virtual Training Gets Real!

Immersive simulated environments for experiential learning are growing in popularity and will play a key role in tomorrow’s technologies for adult training. The major challenge is to effectively align the learning experience in the virtual environment with the ‘real-world’ context and ‘day-to-day’ job practice.

ImREAL provides a new class of cost effective adaptive systems adjusted to adult learners' needs:

The Laboratory for Intelligent Imaging and Neural Computing (LIINC) was founded in September 2000 by Paul Sajda.  The mission of LIINC is to study fundamental processing strategies and representations used by biological vision systems and apply these to develop artificial vision systems capable of sophisticated and adaptive image and scene analysis.  Our laboratory pursues both basic and applied neuroscience research projects, with emphasis in the following: 

A new European research project is developing three-dimensional (3D) versions of Mediterranean islands that will be updated automatically with current information from public and private databases. MedIsolae-3D will enable users to virtually "fly over" Mediterranean islands and swoop down on areas of interest.

Children's Hospital Boston (CHB) researchers, in collaboration with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have developed MedWatcher, an iPhone application designed to engage health care professionals and the general public in drug safety issues and real-time pharmacovigilance. MedWatcher enables users to track the latest drug safety updates provided by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and incorporates information about medications listed in FDA databases. Users also can see reviews by patients and providers.

The National Visualization and Analytics Center is a national and international resource providing strategic leadership and coordination for visual analytics technology and tools. NVAC supports the Department of Homeland Security's mission to secure our homeland and protect the American people.

The NYU Movement Lab is a motion capture studio and research group dedicated to the analysis and animation of all forms of human movement.  It is housed at NYU's Courant Institute and VLG.

Posey is a computationally enhanced poseable hub and strut construction kit that can be used as an interface to applications running on a host computer. Its optocoupled ball and socket joints transmit local topology information and determine the roll, pitch and yaw of connections. Zigbee transceivers in each hub communicate this data wirelessly back to the host computer.

Live3D is a web-based application that allows users to update the geometry and textures in Google Earth to see what the world looks like at this very moment. Users are encouraged to take one of the many outdoor webcam images and embed them three-dimensional space, constructing a scene with up-to-date images.

Live3D can also calibrate camera images and infer the camera's location and orientation. So, without leaving your desk, you can geo-locate and geo-orient a camera (usually to within a couple meters).

You Are the Controller.

Introducing Project Natal, a revolutionary new way to play: no controller required.  See a ball? Kick it, hit it, trap it or catch it.  If you know how to move your hands, shake your hips or speak you and your friends can jump into the fun -- the only experience needed is life experience.

The RFID Ecosystem is a large-scale project with participants from various research groups at the University of Washington's Department of Computer Science and Engineering. The project investigates user-centered RFID systems in connection with technology, business, and society. Past research on user applications of RFID has been limited to short-term technology and user studies in restricted scenarios. In contrast, the RFID Ecosystem provides a living laboratory for long-term, in-depth research in applications, databases, privacy, security, and systems.

Computer-controlled (USB), eight-cartridge scent* machine uses compressed air** to project different scents on cue for a predetermined time followed by a burst of unscented air to clear for the next scent. System includes software to control the delivery and duration of scents from the SDS100 unit. Scents can be triggered from a virtual reality environment.

Skape provides B2B professionals with presentational 3D city and mapping data as well as high accuracy building data.

In order to help us give you the best possible service, we commissioned over 80 interviews with organisations using geo-information products (2D or 3D). These included:

European researchers are working on what they call a “tangible acoustic interface", which will allow users to convert virtually any tangible objects such as table tops, walls, and windows, into interactive surfaces. The advantage of these new techniques is that they are not limited to objects of a specific location or size like keyboards, mice, and touch screens, and can enable users to interact more intuitively with computers wherever they are.

This is the site for the Color Organ created by Jack Ox and David Britton with 3D modeling by Richard Rodriguez and Jack Ox.

You can watch the development of this visualization instrument by visiting our online "notebook" every so often.

In the ViSUS project (see the featured article in the LDRD report) we develop data streaming techniques for progressive processing and visualization of large scientific datasets. Our strategy is to exploit the coupling between time-critical algorithms and progressive multi-resolution data-structures to realize an end-to-end optimized flow of data from the original source, such as remote storage or large scientific simulation, to the rendering hardware.

World Wind allows any user to zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth, leveraging high resolution LandSat imagery and SRTM elevation data to experience Earth in visually rich 3D, just as if they were really there.