I discovered this place while browsing latests bookmarks on sl-messenger, and this place discovered by Lapsus Weinstein really caught my attention, it’s the nicest idea I’ve seen on SL for a long time, taking back iconic paintings and recreating the original place. So nice !

There is something that I’ve been missing in Second Life for quite some time now… Have you noticed how impersonal the avatars are in SL ? They move through mechanical gestures with no real link to what the person behind it is really doing. I gave a few keynotes inworld and it’s really a pain to see that as a speaker your body language and your attitude just don’t reflect at all your words. As body languages transmits so many useful information which are currently lost when in SL, I though it was time to act.
The VR-WEAR team has been working for a couple of months on integrating cool signal processing abilities to the SL client which is now able to connect to your computer’s camera and analyze your head motions in real-time.
Below is a short demo video of tracking my head moving “Yes/No”. We’ll be releasing in September a full load of cool emotions/motions filter that will give your SL avatar a more human look.
This project will be released under a dual license (GPL-like for non-commercial applications) – so if you have some mad skills that you think could be useful and want to give us a hand, don’t hesitate !

If only those were true I’d get them straight away! If you have the sould of a Wii modder WiiMoteMods is the site to find a whole load of good stuff.
Source Gizmodo

Wireless USB has been along since CES 2007, but it took a while to see the first products. Belkin announced last year a wireless USB hub that eventually got shipped this summer and now it’s IOGEAR’s turn to announce their VGA extenders priced at a hefty 229.95USD which is really an awful lot.
I guess all this CE industry is being so pressured at showing innovative products that they tend to forget that making industrial wireless devices is not always so easy and that emerging new chipsets need time to mature and enter industrialization phase.
The IOGEAR’s looks nice although I can only regret that it’s not a VGA dongle on the PC side – using the USB port to connects to the PC limits its used to supported Windows machines. My guess is they had to do this to enable pc-based pre-treatment of the images to lower the required bandwidth needs…

Source Engadget

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“Helix” is a new game available in WiiWare (the online game shop available on the Wii) and costs 1000 points, it’s pretty neat as it’s the firs one of its kind using 2 WiiMotes (one on each hand) to capture full hands and somehow top body gestures. that new gameplay is worth mentioning. Add a dance mat and you get a fully-fledged choreography game.

It can be done and it’s fairly easy ! On OSX, simply download Darwin Remote and the soft will take care of everything. If you have a Wii led board positioned on top of your computer screen then you can really benefit from the WiiMOTE precision and take your mouse to your oldies museum (or maybe not … ). Anyway it’s really worth a try as it’s as easy as 1-2-3 to have it up and running.

Had to give back the secondary screen I was using so I bought this w00t Acer screen which has a 1920×1200 resolution … something that way above what World of Warcraft can support, and it looks enormous near my 15″ MacBook Pro… and only costed 259€. It’s always stunning to see the quality gaps between TFT generations.

This is my holiday’s book – that I received home the day after I left (Ok, it costed me only 4€ but shipping from the US is so slow…) – and it’s developing a really interesting vision about the use of wearable computing in 2020s which is giving me a whole bunch of new ideas for VR-WEAR.

In the near future, the European Center for Defense against Disease discovers a diabolical pseudomimivirus. Rather than set off a panic, secret agents of the EU, Japan, and India work clandestinely to uncover a conspiracy seemingly based in a San Diego lab. Former poet Robert Gu, a recovering Alzheimer’s patient (one of the lucky few who took to all the treatments), returns to school just as agents Braun, Vaz, and Mitsuri put their wheels in motion. Immensely frustrated by simultaneously living with his son’s family and completely reeducating himself, Gu becomes a perfect dupe for the hacker hired by the gang of spooks. Under cover of a library protest, Gu and some old friends get into the lab, trailed by one of Gu’s adolescent classmates and his granddaughter. The conspiracy runs deep and has some terrifying implications on account of YGBM (you gotta believe me) technology, regardless of the conspirators’ intentions. The near future is less alien here than in some of Vinge’s other work, but no less fascinating and well constructed. Regina Schroeder