Blogs

July 2008 FET Newsletter (attached below)[HIVE is a newly started, Starlab led EU FP7 FET Open project. Read more here.] 

Bayes' theorem relates the conditional and marginal probabilities of two random events:

The 3rd newsletter from the HUMABIO project is now available. Within Humabio, Starlab has develop a physiologically based authentication (biometric) system based on EEG and ECG. The hardware used is Enobio, a 4 channel electrophysiology system, and the software platform, StarFast, can fuse EEG and ECG features to deliver robust and hard to hack authentication.

At the recent PRESENCE summer school in Dubrovnic we had a very interesting talk by Jeremy Bailenson, director of of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab which threw up some very powerful ideas on presence and interaction and how these can be manipulated in VR. This is interesting in itself but I think it highlights just how "hackable" we are.

Mel Slater has been an ICREA Research Professor at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya since January 2006. He is also the founder of the Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics group in the Department of Computer Science, University College London.

His major research interest is in helping to find out what makes virtual reality work for people - in the sense that they can engage with one another in virtual environments, and also interact with virtual characters.

Interview carried out by Leo Ruffini of Starlab with Elem3ntal Creative Lab.

Mr. Tompkins in VR

A few years ago, when I was still in college (ok, maybe it was more than a few years ago) I read and enjoyed a little book from George Gamow titled Mr. Tompkins in paperback.  As you can read in Wikipedia, the books are structured as a series of dreams in which Mr Tompkins enters alternate worlds where the physical constants have radically different values from those they have in the real world. This results in the counterintuitive results of the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics becoming obvious in everyday life.

Do you like to keep things simple?

The superposition principle states that, for a linear system the superposition of stimuli yields a superposition of responses.

where x is some sort of stimulus, r is some sort of response and F(x)=r is the linear relationship.

In other words, in a linear system,

The net response at a given place and time caused by two or more independent stimuli is the sum of the responses which would have been caused by each stimulus individually.

32 suns orbiting the Earth?

Somehow ... yes! Let's try to demonstrate it ...

Do you remember those summer holidays, many years ago, when you took these two pictures, at sunset? I'm sure you do .... But: do you remember which of the two days was the windy day?

To answer to this question you just have to carefully look at the pictures. Did you find it out? Yes! You're right! The second day was windier!

For those who are not old salts: just look at the width of the sun glint. It is larger in the right hand picture (the one of the second day): this means that the sea surface was rougher and this in turn means that there was a higher wind speed blowing over the surface!

(Image: The Earth seen from Apollo 17).

What is an organism? Some sort of organized community of entities giving rise to what scientists call “emergent” behavior, behavior which is complex and unexpected given the relative simplicity of its parts.

A human being is an organism: a community of cells, a huge set of simpler organisms. The community “agrees” to work together for the greater common benefit. Indeed, when a revolt takes place it’d better be put down fast, or all chaos will ensue and the organism will die.