A 3D Scanner for which No Object is Too Big or Too Small
3D scanners are considered the normal way to turn a physical object into a 3D construct in avirtual environment. Detailed, efficient, relatively fast - providing your object is roughly the same size as your scanner. If it is not, well, maybe a new paradigm is required...

External-Grade 3D Scanners
All 3D scanners have had one thing in common: You place the object inside the scanner, which performs a scan either around the object or through the object. However, if the item is too big to be encapsulated in this fashion, and you still have to scan it, you need an entirely different type of scanner.

Messing with Tangent Space
Tangent space is sometimes called texture space. It is the co-ordinate systems for one face of any 3D skinned model. Use of tangent space, which this tutorial covers, is necessary to properly map a texture onto part of a 3D shape.

Augmented Reality, Designed for Space, Half a Century Behind Everyone Else
The European Space Agency (ESA) have released details of a new augmented reality interface they have been testing and how it actually benefits astronauts when in space. Quite scarily they actually believe they are the first organisation to implement an AR interface, according to their press release.

Proof of Concept for “The 3D Printer Problem”
For SIGGRAPH 2013, one joint research team presented a proof of concept method to solve the 3D printer problem - the ability of any 3D printer to theoretically counterfeit any physical object small enough for it to print. They demonstrate a terahertz-radiation 'watermark' that can be 3D printed inside a genuine object, is easy to scan for, and very difficult to duplicate from the scan data.

This tome, written long before the Metaverse Roadmap, was one of the first large works to discuss how virtual spaces create entirely new kinds of space, and require mapping constructs and methodologies utterly alien to what had come before.

The Drive for Storage Space and Speed
More music; more films; more photography; more, more, more. More of everything seems drive this fetish for storage space and power. Yet is it just more, more, more, or can more actually equal better in VR?

Sensor Web: A look at an Internet in Physical Space: AR Orientation
The Sensor web, is a long-anticipated faced of an augmented world. It is, in theory at least, a huge web of interconnected sensors, actuators, RFID, GPS, specialised routing controls, and augmented sensory hardware, all wired together into an immense web in physical space, facilitating Augmented Reality applications.

Spatial Representation of a Virtual World
How do you perceive space and spatial relationships between objects in a virtual environment. Rather easily if you are setting out to replicate the physical world. But that is too easy, it loses so many of the true advantages of VR, where space is irrelevant, and every room can be a TARDIS. This article looks at mapping that kind of a mess, beginning with text worlds, where such spatial irrelevancy is at its highest.

(17/05/2009)
Just when you thought invisibility cloaks couldn't get any weirder, researchers come up with this: a way to make one object look like any other.

The illusion is a two-step process, and to see how it works, imagine making a m...

(26/09/2008)
You might think that the farthest distance at which you can hold a book and still read it quickly is determined by the size of the letters. However, New York University neuroscientists have concluded that it's the spacing between letters, ...

(18/04/2013)
An infrared sensor that could improve NASA's future detecting and tracking of asteroids and comets has passed a critical design test.

The test assessed performance of the Near Earth Object Camera (NEOCam) in an environment t...

(16/11/2006)
US researchers have outlined a simple system to deliver power to electronic devices such as computers and peripherals, without any need for wires. The concept exploits century-old physics and could work over distances of up to five metres.<...

(22/05/2013)
New research from the University of Southampton has shown that blind and visually impaired people have the potential to use echolocation, similar to that used by bats and dolphins, to determine the location of an object.

The ...