Simotron
Science and Fiction
Your software will see you now.. – SimSensei & MultiSense: Virtual Human and Multimodal Perception for Healthcare Support
This video shows two interactive technologies recently developed for multimodal perception and healthcare support:
Multisense automatically tracks and analyzes in real-time facial expressions, body posture, acoustic features, linguistic patterns and higher-level behavior descriptors (e.g. attention, fidgeting). From these signals and behaviors, indicators of psychological distress are inferred to inform directly the healthcare provider or the virtual human.
SimSensei is a virtual human platform specifically designed for healthcare support and is based on the 10+ years of expertise at ICT with virtual human research and development. The platform enables an engaging face-to-face interaction where the virtual human automatically reacts to the perceived user state and intent, through its own speech and gestures.
Europa Report trailer – 2013
Hmmmm, looks kinda budget to me and if it’s really such a ‘refreshing departure’ why does it look like Alien all over again?
Star Trek: Into Darkness – my review, there may be some spoilerly bits..
One of the things I always disliked about Star Trek was the Enterprise which I think is a bit crap. It just always seemed like a throwback to the time when space was all ‘flying saucers’ and puts me in mind of some dude in a green, rubber suit dancing around with Kirk somewhere in the Californian desert.
Yeah, so it’s fair to say I’m not a Trekkie – it looked budget and cheesy and even when I was a child I knew that you couldn’t just go and land on some random planet, breathe the air and start talking to the natives in English.
So how do you remake a series like that? – well through the 80′s they brought it back in various ways – with the old crew, getting older and riffing a bit on that fact but again, none of them really grabbed me – even the Wrath of Khan for all it’s high praise I watched it recently and thought it was lame – Khan is supposedly a bad ass but in the end he’s undone by some weak, behind-you trick which defies logic.
Having ripped into Star Trek I did like Spock and the idea of his being from a purely logical race and I liked the idea of a sci-fi series that was about exploration even if the execution left a lot to be desired.
Anyway JJ Abrams rebooted the franchise in 2009 with all the flash and bang of modern action sci-fi but what really made it enjoyable were the characters and the dialogue which again is the selling-point of the new installment.
The writing is good and the jokes are funnier than one might expect – with cheeky jabs back at the conventions of the series and gags that reward a certain grown-up level of attention. There’s plenty of lazy Hollywood pandering too but you can forgive it when they’re also taking the piss out of themselves at the same time saying this is entertainment!
The plot is pretty complex in that needlessly-obtuse way that all action movies ‘have’ to have these days – good guys turning bad and darker motives being revealed and while you’ve got have conflict and moral dilemmas it feels to me that if you had a few minutes to actually ponder the intricacies of the plot you’d find yourself finding all sorts of holes..
..but there’s not really any time to think about these things as the movie gallops on at 500mph and there’s another massive action sequence with falling spaceships, warp-jumps or a huge chunk of the Enterprise getting blown away and members of the crew meeting horrific deaths in the vacuum of space to no-one’s particular concern or apparently much effect on the integrity of the ship.
The heroes make some big mistakes too but there never seems to be any real soul-searching from Kirk or Spock even after thousands and thousands of people get killed near the end as a result of their actions by the end of this movie. Perhaps I’m asking for too much – it’s entertaining sci-fi nonsense really lifted by a good script and some very funny moments that had me laughing.
Simon Pegg is still great but I’m still trying to figure out what the point was of that plotline that took up the first ten minutes of the film..
Aircraft transits partial solar-eclipse – Phillip Calais
It was just eight minutes after sunrise, last week, and already there were four things in front of the Sun. The largest and most notable was Earth’s Moon, obscuring a big chunk of the Sun’s lower limb as it moved across the solar disk, as viewed from Fremantle, Australia. This was expected as the image was taken during a partial solar eclipse – an eclipse that left sunlight streaming around all sides of the Moon from some locations. Next, a band of clouds divided the Sun horizontally while showing interesting internal structure vertically. The third intervening body might be considered to be the Earth’s atmosphere, as it dimmed the Sun from its higher altitude brightness while density fluctuations caused the Sun’s edges to appear to shimmer. Although closest to the photographer, the least expected solar occulter was an airplane. Quite possibly, passengers on both sides of that airplane were contemplating the unusual view only visible out the eastern-facing windows.
Hole in Mars – Curiosity
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has broken out its trusty drill again, pulling samples from deep within a Red Planet rock for the second time ever.
The 1-ton Curiosity rover bored 2.6 inches (6.6 centimeters) into a rock dubbed “Cumberland” on Sunday (May 19), NASA officials said. The resulting powdered sample will be delivered to the robot’s onboard science instruments in the coming days.
Curiosity first used its drill to collect samples back in February, boring into a nearby rock called “John Klein.” That operation revealed that ancient Mars was likely capable of supporting microbial life — a groundbreaking discovery that the mission team wants to confirm.
Full story here.
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