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Sony put four perspectives in one VR headset
At the back of a cold gray warehouse in Austin, Texas, I put on a headset and proceeded to chase three strangers in a game of tag at SXSW. I was expecting an immersive VR experience far removed from reality but instead the head mounted display split my field of view into four squares that represented different perspectives of the room. The top left corner showed me what I was looking at while adjacent blocks brought in the view of the room as seen from the other participants' eyes.
Sony makes floating-head telepresence avatars a reality, Sean Connery digs out gun and red speedos
The real world just got a little more Zardoz thanks to Tobita Hiroaki and his colleagues at Sony Computer Science Laboratory, who've built a telepresence blimp that projects the operator's face across its meter-wide surface. The looming, translucent face can float about like any other blimp; an interior camera allows the user to see where it's going. The whole thing is ominous in a completely different way from, say, a tiny googly-eyed robot perched on your shoulder, but something about its nearly silent movements still gives us the creeps – and unlike the Anybots QB, it's not going to pick up your scone from the café. But if your dreams include having others bow before your god-like visage, you'll have to wait awhile, as the technology's still in its early stages. In the meantime, you can practice intoning "Zardoz is pleased!" while watching the video above.
Sony prototypes pressure-sensitive tactile touchscreen, hopes to use it ASAP
Sony may come up with some far-out ideas, but the company insists this one's a bit closer to home: it's a LCD touchscreen with force sensing resistors and piezoelectric actuators that can detect how much pressure is applied and vibrate the panel respectively. Tech-On was rocking the scene at Open House 2010, and reports that the Cover Flow-like interface shuffled icons faster the harder a demonstrator pressed down, an interesting UI quirk in and of itself. Though the publication sadly didn't get to test out the tactile feedback for themselves, Sony said commercialization might not be too far off -- when asked about that telling Sony Ericsson logo, the company asserted that it'd like to see the tech in mobile phones "as soon as possible." We'd love to hold them to that, but unfortunately the applied pressure mechanic is just a prototype at this point.
