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Toyota is using VR to train robots as in-home helpers
Home robots could make all of our lives easier, and perhaps most importantly, they could allow seniors to live more independently. But training robots to operate in homes is difficult because each home is unique and filled with so many objects in different combinations and layouts. Toyota Research Institute (TRI) may have a solution: using virtual reality to change the way we train robots.
The Summoner's Guidebook: Getting friends to enjoy League of Legends
I find the mainstream success of League of Legends to be extremely baffling. If you break down the skills you need to be an effective player in the MOBA genre, they are daunting. The mechanical skill cap to be acceptable is unacceptably high, and the knowledge burden is enormous. Other MOBAs have dozens of characters and hundreds or thousands of matchups. League of Legends' character pool is so unbelievably large that even professionals cannot grasp the entirety of its design space. While I can't fathom how normal people find a game this hard fun, I can simply accept it. That makes it quite possible to get our friends and significant others hooked. However, because League is a hard game, it is probably best that we be careful when we try to teach our friends. It's pretty easy to scare them with the enormous difficulty in the game.
TED-Ed website launches in beta, lets teachers customize video lessons
Last month, TED announced its new education initiative -- fittingly named TED-Ed -- with a YouTube channel showcasing teachers' lessons presented as animated videos. Today, the program moved forward, as TED opened up a beta version of a website meant to complement those lessons. Though there are plenty of study aides here, ed.ted.com is really about the grown-ups on the other side of the classroom. The site lets teachers with a TED account "flip" videos from TED-Ed and YouTube -- i.e., customize them to include multiple-choice and open-answer questions and links to additional info on a topic. Currently there are 62 videos and 238 "flips" available for viewing, but TED is gearing up for a full launch to be timed with the new school year in September.
EngKey telepresence robot teaches English to Koreans by way of the Philippines
You know, for all the hubbub we've been hearing about le robots (the robots), you'd think we'd see them put to better uses than chasing our pets and killing people. Right? Right. Well, the best use we can think of is education, and that's exactly what they're doing at an elementary school in Daegu, South Korea. Developed by the Korea Institute of Science of Technology (KIST), EngKey is just under three-and-a-half feet high, features a video display for a face, and seems hell bent on taking all those "teach English in Korea" jobs away from shiftless American college grads looking to postpone responsibility for one or two more desperate years. There are currently twenty-nine such devices, which -- get this -- are actually operated remotely by teachers in the Philippines. Is this the end result of globalism? Not quite yet: for the time being, the robots are still too cumbersome to operate and expensive to justify putting into production. But who knows? Maybe someday, kids.
Video: Concert Hands teaches you to play piano, whether you want it to or not
Look, we're all for accelerated learning, but somehow the idea of strapping our limbs into the Concert Hands setup is a wee bit disconcerting. Locked at the wrists onto a sliding mechanical bar, the apparatus guides our paws to the proper keys, while pulses are sent to your fingers to tell you what keys to press. Intimidating? Sure, but honestly, we're more worried about what our idle hands might learn if this thing was hooked up to the wrong AI... okay, probably just a Chopin piece, but you never know. See for yourself and imagine the horrors after the break. [Via Engadget German]
EQ2 helps teach English in pilot study
You may pick up the odd new word here and there playing MMO's, but a recent university study has used the game EverQuest II to reinforce the entire English language. The article was noticed by one of EQ2's senior producers Scott Hartsman on his personal blog. Hartsman muses that people will always find new ways to use code or software to achieve things that they had not been designed for, but also says that this particular use of EQ2 "wasn't something that was on the radar".There were a number of reasons that EQ2 was chosen by the Northwestern University researchers for their project. They had considered World of Warcraft too, but in the end EQ2's clear descriptions and labeling made it the ideal choice. Everything is explained in detail in the game, and most items and places have extra labels on them. The researchers said that there is simply a lot more text in the game than in WoW.
Kansei makes a comeback with reactive facial expressions
Quite a lot has transpired in the android universe in the past two years, and it's fairly safe to say that Kansei has made a few solid strides during that time as well. A Japanese research team has purportedly crafted a working prototype that can "pull up to 36 different facial expressions based on a program which creates word associations from a self-updating online database of 500,000 keywords." According to a professor at Meiji University's School of Science and Technology, the idea of the project is to "create a flow of consciousness in robots so that they can make the relevant facial expressions," and the device relies on 19 movable parts and a silicon face mask in order to work its magic. Developers also noted that speech abilities should be added within a few years, and while we doubt you had to guess, it's quite likely that fully developed Kanseis will one day roam nursing homes as Japan seeks to care for its quickly growing geriatric set.
Emotion-tracking rings to assist in distance learning
Let's face it, not all of us will have the luxury of attending a school where we get to construct massive LEGO machines or learn how to become savvy in SMS, but a developing technology that tracks student emotions could help tutors and distance instructors alike in keeping kids focused while learning. Co-developed by Essex University's Vic Callaghan and Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Liping Shen, the emotion-tracking tutoring software can analyze physical signs to keep track of a student's attention span, their level of understanding, and even the amount of stress a certain lesson produces. Aimed to help tutors become more effective and to add another layer of "personal" to distance-based education courses, the software would receive information about a student's "heart rate, blood pressure and changes in electrical resistance caused by perspiration" via a sensor-laden, Bluetooth-enabled ring worn on one's finger. The information can then be assessed to determine a student's interest level and frustration level, but a decibel meter to measure snoring isn't likely to be included. If all goes as planned, the team intends on testing the system out in "real learning scenarios in China" to further tweak their creation, so it won't be too long now before an interest-tracking ring will become as necessary as pencil and paper a stylus and a tablet PC come class time.
