prosthetic knowledge
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In-Store Facial Recognition Market Research
New technology from Japan can monitor all shop visitors, discerning age, gender, and visiting frequency, and measures the data with a system called ‘NeoFace’, all with a normal PC and webcam - via DigInfo (video embedded below):
NEC has developed a marketing service that utilizes facial recognition technology to estimates the age and gender of customers, and accumulates the data, along with the dates and times that customers visit stores. This data is then used to analyze trends in customer behavior and visit frequency.
This service is provided in Japan via NEC’s cloud computing technology, only requires a regular PC and video camera, and is available for approximately $880 (70,000 yen) per month per store.
“This service is mainly intended for retailers that have several stores. It provides retailers with customer attributes based on facial images. That information is helpful for sales strategies.”
This service can also detect repeat customers across multiple stores. It uses a face detection and comparison engine developed by NEC, called NeoFace.
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Kinect@Home
Cloud 3D modelling service allows you to create 3D object files with video taken with a Kinect camera - watch the video embedded below:
Kinect@Home is a place where you can help robotics and computer vision researchers around the world and get 3D models of your room, office or whatever you want in return, right in your browser!
Kinect@Home aims to use your powers to make robots more awesome than ever. Robotics and computer vision researchers need vast amount of images from everyday environments such as homes and offices to improve their algorithms.
As well as being able to help science, you can download the 3D object file to do whatever you want with it. As a bonus, you can also embed your 3D capture on webpages, like below:
You can find the project’s website here
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MIT: Glasses-free 3-D TV looks nearer
MIT Media Lab makes an attempt to see how 3D monitors could be constructed with current available technology. Above is not some new type of glitch art (yet algorithms are used for visual compression) - they are images for several layers which will be played simultaneously to form a moving image with depth. The video embedded below demonstrates their method:
As striking as it is, the illusion of depth now routinely offered by 3-D movies is a paltry facsimile of a true three-dimensional visual experience. In the real world, as you move around an object, your perspective on it changes. But in a movie theater showing a 3-D movie, everyone in the audience has the same, fixed perspective — and has to wear cumbersome glasses, to boot.
Despite impressive recent advances, holographic television, which would present images that vary with varying perspectives, probably remains some distance in the future. But in a new paper featured as a research highlight at this summer’s Siggraph computer-graphics conference, the MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture group offers a new approach to multiple-perspective, glasses-free 3-D that could prove much more practical in the short term.Interesting read here, which research into the current state of the technology. I wonder how close it is to this piece of tech currently in development?
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Foldit - Game which turns scientific research into a competitive puzzle game
Achievement Unlocked - Cured AIDS
From New Scientisit:
Players of an online video game called Foldit have helped researchers discover the structure of an protein-cutting enzyme produced by an AIDS-like virus found in monkeys. Scientists have struggled with the problem for a decade, but the gamers helped crack it in just three weeks.
Foldit tasks players with manipulating the complex 3D shapes of various virtual proteins in an effort to discover what they look like in real life. Proteins tend to occupy low-energy states, so players are awarded points for the most energy-efficient configurations. The game was created by researchers at the University of Washington in 2008 and since then players have proved that they can beat other automated protein-folding methods, which can often get stuck in dead-ends that require human creativity to overcome.More here from New Scientist
Foldit Website
Link to a video explaining the game -
Cats in Zero Gravity
An extract from a film on Bioastronautic Research made in 1947, demonstrating the effects of weightlessness on cats in a C-131 (Complete film can be seen here)
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Pantomation (1977 - 1979) via VintageCG
Pantomation was a very early tracking chromakey system from the 1970s. Originally intended for music scoring, the system was adapted to other styles of performance art. While crude by modern standards, the concept was decades ahead of its time; it can reasonably be considered an early forebear of systems like Microsoft’s Project Natal (Kinect)
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![Mappiness - free iPhone app
Psychogeographic tool, asking what your modd is which is then (anonymously) recorded.
What’s in it for us?
We’re particularly interested in how people’s happiness is affected by their local environment — air pollution, noise, green spaces, and so on — which the data from mappiness will be absolutely great for investigating
We hope to have results published in academic journals and elsewhere — whatever we produce will be linked from here
[Link]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l7kwn30UIT1qav3uso1_400.png)
Mappiness - free iPhone app
Psychogeographic tool, asking what your modd is which is then (anonymously) recorded.
What’s in it for us?
- We’re particularly interested in how people’s happiness is affected by their local environment — air pollution, noise, green spaces, and so on — which the data from mappiness will be absolutely great for investigating
- We hope to have results published in academic journals and elsewhere — whatever we produce will be linked from here
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The status sorters How is status conveyed and interpreted? One sociologist went undercover to study status on the front lines, New York City bouncers:
[Lauren Rivera] found that bouncers ran through a hierarchical list of qualities to determine in seconds who would enhance the image of the club and encourage high spending. Social networks mattered more than social class, or anything else for that matter. Celebrities and other recognized elites slipped through the door. And people related to or befriended by this “in crowd” often made the cut, too. …. “New Faces,” as the bouncers called unrecognized club-goers, were selected on the basis of gender, dress, race, and nationality. Sometimes the final call boiled down to details as minor as the type of watch that adorned a man’s wrist.
It comes down to this:
Social network mattered most, gender followed. For example, a young woman in jeans stood a higher chance of entrance than a well-dressed man. And an elegantly dressed black man stood little chance of getting in unless he knew someone special.
What won’t work:
More interesting is Rivera’s report that bouncers look down on bribes, suggesting that they are invested in their ability to accurately assess something more nebulous than raw wealth — that they are proud of being able to distinguish souls of gold from souls of bronze.
Like other undercover researchers, Rivera took a position as a “coat-check girl” and “cigarette girl” to sort the status sorters.
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Using Brain Scans To Make Movies (via PSFK)
MindSign Neuromarketing is helping develop a new kind of “neurocinema”. The company is using real-time brain scans to observe people’s reactions to on-screen activity, providing an inside look into what micro-details excites viewers the most.
Wired Explains:
The company uses the scanning technique to track blood flow to specific areas (especially the amygdalae, those darling little almonds of primal emotion) while a test subject watches a movie. Right now, the metrics are pretty crude, but in theory, studios could use fMRI to fine-tune a movie’s thrills, chills, and spills with clickwheel ease, keeping your brain perpetually at the redline. MindSign cofounder Philip Carlsen said in an NPR interview that he foresees a future where directors send their dailies (raw footage fresh from the set) to the MRI lab for optimization. “You can actually make your movie more activating,” he said, “based on subjects’ brains.”
MindSign has already helped advertisers dial in their commercials’ second-by-second noggin delight and has even assisted studios in refining movie trailers and TV spots: One of its “videographs,” mapped over a trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, clearly shows viewers’ brains lighting up whenever a monkey appears onscreen. (Of course, if there’s one thing we don’t need a computer to tell us, it’s that monkeys are funny.) Now the company wants to replace that ancient analog heuristic, the dreaded focus group. Carlsen claims that focus group members not only misrepresent the likes and dislikes of the broader population — they can’t even articulate their own preferences. Often, they’ll tell a human researcher one thing while the fMRI reveals they’re feeling the opposite.
Wired: “Scott Brown on How Movies Activate Your Neural G-Spot”
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FLIP Research Vessel
The FLIP is a ship that is unique - it can operate horizontally (like a normal ship) AND verticaly (imagine a long ship sinking, but the top end stick out at a 90 degree angle).
Has to be seen to be believed - great feat of engineering.
