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For the first time, a paraplegic has walked without a robotic suit
A paraplegic has walked without robotics using his own brain waves, thanks to research done at Southern California's UC Irvine. Scientists used a computer to "link" 28-year-old Adam Fritz's brain to his legs over a Bluetooth connection, bypassing the severed region of his spinal cord. An EEG then picked up signals from his brain, which were relayed by a "brain-control interface" (BCI) computer to electrodes on his knee, triggering walking movements. Though Fritz was supported and only walked haltingly for 12 feet, the research is being heralded as a milestone -- so far, paralyzed patients have only be able to walk using suits like that from Ekso Bionics.
WoW Archivist: WoW in China, an uncensored history -- part 2
WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? In China, few Western games have been more embraced than World of Warcraft. But few games have endured more scrutiny from the government and more interruptions. As WoW Archivist covered two weeks ago, Chinese players have put up with censorship, endless waits for expansions, and intense bureaucratic meddling that shut the servers down for months. But their enthusiasm for the game remains. Today, we will look at the more recent years of WoW in China, the raiding scene there, and the game's impact on popular culture, including a certain infamous theme park... Too soon, Executus After sorting out issues with the Ministry of Culture and GAPP (General Administration of Press and Publications), WoW operator NetEase was on a roll. Though Cataclysm also faced delays, it launched in China on July 12, 2011 -- just half a year after the Western release. By the standards of prior expansions in China, this release was practically instantaneous. In a bitter irony, however, the expansion actually arrived too soon.
UC Irvine's iMedEd Initiative is a 2012-13 Apple Distinguished Program
The University of California, Irvine has announced that its innovative medical education program based on the iPad as the sole learning tool has been chosen as a 2012-13 Apple Distinguished Program. Apple Distinguished Programs are ones that Apple feels meets the criteria of using Apple technology in an educational setting to provide "...visionary leadership, innovative learning and teaching, ongoing professional learning, compelling evidence of success and a flexible learning environment," according to UC Irvine. UC Irvine's program, known as The iMedEd Initiative, has existed since 2010 and equips new medical students with iPads that are loaded with medical textbooks, apps and podcasts of lectures. The university says that one of the benefits of the iPads is that students can interact with data from digital stethoscopes, bedside diagnostic ultrasound units and myriad other medical devices. Besides the increased learning capability the iPad offers, the university also says that iPad-based learning has increased test scores of virtually all students: "The first class participating in the iMedEd Initiative scored an average of 23 percent higher on their national exams -- taken at the end of the second year of medical school -- than previous UC Irvine medical school classes, despite having similar incoming GPAs and MCAT scores." For those of you interested in medical learning on the iPad, check back soon. I'll have a preview of a revolutionary new medical app that you'll be sure to want to get your hands on as soon as it becomes available. [Image: Steve Zylius / University Communications]
Grad students forge digital light projector into medical imaging device, can't find dates
If it's a geek badge of honor to find an entirely new use for something, then the grad students at UC Irvine have earned theirs. Over at the university, a group of grad students have hacked an off-the-shelf digital light projector to create a spatial frequency domain imaging system. Once complete, the budding mad scientists were able to image their thesis adviser's bicycling injuries and have used it to measure the oxygenation of skin flaps during reconstructive breast surgery. Click past the break for a video of the device in action, and remember this: helping your professor with their sports injuries and reconstructed bosoms may not equal Dean's List, but it sure can't hurt.
OutRun AR project lets you game and drive at the same time, makes us drool
Cool game, or coolest game ever? That's the question we were asking ourselves when we first came across Garnet Hertz's augmented reality-based OutRun project -- a concept car that weds Sega's classic driving game with an electric golf cart, allowing players to navigate their way around real-life courses using only arcade consoles. Hertz, an informatics researcher at the University of California Irvine, has since brought his idea to fruition, after outfitting the system with cameras and customized software that can "look" in front of the car to automatically reproduce the route on the game cabin's screen. The map is displayed in the same 8-bit rendering you'd see on the original OutRun, with perspectives changing proportionally to shifts in steering. The cart maxes out at only 13 mph, though speed isn't really the idea; Hertz and his colleagues hope their technology can be used to develop game-based therapies for disabled users, or to create similarly AR-based wheelchairs. Scoot past the break to see a video of the car in action, and let your dreams converge. [Thanks, Stagueve]
California universities use iPads to report news, diagnose heart conditions; Penn State students are like, 'what's an iPad?'
As you know, colleges and universities love throwing in "free" gadgets to justify bumping up their enrollment fees. To this end, USC Annenberg has announced a new program to provide j-school students with iPads, digital cameras, and audio recorders to help them report the news. Now, don't get us wrong: we appreciate the importance (and we're big fans of) "the journalism," and if an upgrade from those long, skinny notepads to modern consumer electronics helps facilitate a new crop of Woodwards 'n Bernsteins, then so be it. But are these kids really supposed to type their front-line reportage with the on-screen keyboard? And haven't most students had access to proper laptops for years now? In other "iPad in education" news, UC Irvine's iMedEd Initiative is providing first year medical students with "a comprehensive, iPad-based curriculum," according to PhysOrg. The devices are equipped with all the necessary apps for note-taking, recording audio, and faculty will develop podcasts and archiving lectures. Our favorite part of all this? The "digital stethoscope," which interfaces with the tablet for listening to and recording a patient's heartbeat. Once recorded, it can be compared to a library of over 3,000 heart sounds that typify specific heart conditions. Thornton Melon never had it so good! [Thanks, Matt F]
Undulating Flux project uses Wiimotes, Arduino boards to transmit dancer's movements
Undulating Flux is UC Irvine student David Resnick's attempt at creating a "sensory augmentation system" that uses a dancer (or "vibrationist") to "transduce music into tactile sensations." In layman's terms, a dancer's movements are sent via Wiimote to an Arduino-equipped chair. The chair's vibrations correspond to the dancer's movements, allowing an observer to see, hear, and "feel" the dancing. There's a lot more to it than that, actually -- feel free to hit up the source link for all the nitty gritty, and make sure you peep the video after the break.
UC Irvine to compare WoW players from America, China
The University of California at Irvine has been granted $100,000 to study the differences between Chinese and American World of Warcraft players, according to the Orange County Register. The study will mostly focus on explaining why American players are much more likely to employ modifications such as Cosmos than Chinese players are, but project lead Bonnie Nardi made some interesting observations outside the scope of this particular endeavor.For example, she noted that Chinese players are for some reason more likely to talk about the aesthetic appearance of the game than are Americans. Whereas American players often play with their children, parents, or siblings, Chinese players are unlikely to do that. "The older generation dislikes video games," she said, and playing with siblings is obviously rare since most Chinese of the gaming generation have none."The vast majority of Chinese players are not gold farmers," she said. "They're ordinary players like anyone. The media has blown that story out of all proportion. Many people think Chinese play for a job. They play for fun." Enlightening stuff. We're looking forward to seeing what else comes out of her research.[Via Ten Ton Hammer] One of Azeroth's millions of citizens? Check out our ongoing coverage of the World of Warcraft, and be sure to touch base with our sister site WoW Insider for all your Lich King needs!
HIPerSpace monitor wall makes a great Grand Theft Auto IV canvas
Rolling around jacking up innocents and tossing Molotov cocktails is pretty enthralling on your vanilla 46-inch HDTV, but can you even imagine the rush of swiping a hot dog, burning out in someone else's whip and then snagging a new pair of kicks on this? Researchers (and gamers, obviously) down at UC San Diego have re-engineered their middleware to enable such masterpieces as this to be played on the big monolithic HIPerSpace screen, and needless to say, we can't imagine much real work getting done with this new functionality coming to light. Head on down to the gallery to see what you're missing -- science, research and 4.0 GPAs are such beautiful things. %Gallery-22388%
UC Irvine researchers tout first nano-scale radio
A pair of researchers at UC Irvine look to be out to make a name for themselves in the increasingly-crowded field of nanotechnology, with them now announcing that they've developed the first nano-scale radio. While the entire setup obviously isn't nano-sized (as you can see above), the demodulator portion of it most definitely is, measuring thousands of time smaller than a human hair. Despite that diminutive size, the demodulator apparently has no trouble translating AM radio waves into sound using nothing more than carbon nanotubes, as you can see and hear for yourself in the video available via the Extreme Tech article linked below.
HIPerSpace visualization system takes the crown with 220 million pixels
For AV freaks enamored with their own HDTV and hardcore gamers who doubt anyone's ability to unleash more graphical firepower than that found in their rig, prepare to be humbled. As part of the HIPerSpace visualization system, engineers at the University of California, San Diego "have constructed the highest-resolution computer display in the world, with a screen resolution of up to 220 million pixels." The system, which links between UCSD and UC-Irvine (responsible for the mighty HiPerWall) via dedicated optical networking, contains a "graphics super cluster" that relies on 80 NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 GPUs. Reportedly, scientists dealing with large-scale applications involving "Earth sciences, climate prediction, biomedical engineering, genomics, and brain imaging" will be able to make use of the newfangled setup in order to better digest the information they're dealing with. Sheesh, all we want is a solid day with this thing, infinite Doritos, and Halo 3.[Via MedGadget]
UC Irvine's monster HIPerWall monitor
Just when we were feeling superior with our triple monitor setup, the techies at UC Irvine's Calit2 Center of GRAVITY (Graphics, Visualization and Imaging Technology) had to go and show us up with not a four, not a five, but a 50 display Frankenmonitor powered by 25 Power Mac G5s (each loaded with 2GB of RAM) supported by the team's proprietary tiling software. And these aren't any regular old monitors, mind you; they are Apple's top-of-the-line 30-inch Cinema Displays maxed-out at 2560 x 1600 resolution. To save you a trip to the calculator, the HIPerWall (for Highly Interactive Parallelized display) measures 192-inches diagonally and sports a maximum resolution of 25,600 x 8000-so although this enormous setup was designed with medical, meteorological, and military uses in mind, all we can think about is the number of Dashboard widgets we could cram in. [Via TUAW]
