As part of our degrees, myself and my housemate worked on an audio based augmented reality system. We had a bunch of sensors to track position (we used ubisense at the time, it now uses gps or something), orientation (digital compass, gyroscope, accelerometer) and distance from solid objects (ultrasonic) to track the wearers movements and then provided 3D audio feedback through a pair of high quality wireless headphones.

Applications for this were both entertainment and guidance (though you could come up with more elaborate applications if you try hard enough, we didn't since time was limited). For entertainment, we had a few ideas: a virtual zoo (or anything else that can be represented through sound) where you can walk around and hear different animals and, more interesting, a virtual band where each instrument is playing at a different location in the room and the wearer can walk around the soundscape.

For guidance, we built two simple applications: we position a row of sounds to guide the wearer to some location. Only the next "waypoint" is audible and when you walk "into" it, it stops playing and the next one in the sequence starts. The other one was that a sound would play when it detected a wall (and the sound changed so you could effectively "scan" along a wall and get a rough idea as to its shape). Got some great feedback off a blind guy too.

My housemate is loosely continuing this project as part of his phd. The sensors, for example, have been replaced by "military" grade ones, so the accuracy is phenomenally good now. Also, the whole thing is packaged better (and smaller) than our tape-and-wires prototype was. Its interesting to "see" what else people can use audio for, it seems to still be relatively untapped as an output device for computers/augmented reality.

You're probably right. In a few days they'll publish the results haha. I gave up during the second one anyway. Since I didn't know the rules, I felt like I had no real chance and I gave up. I don't enjoy mindlessly clicking in order to figure out why.

I'm just randomly clicking. A computer can do that better than I can. A genetic algorithm should be unbeatably fast vs a human and even brute force probably would be too. If they explained the rules a little bit maybe.. I was greatly disappointed and thought it was a stupid and unfun game. Clicking randomly is not fun.

I couldn't care less about /b/tards, I just meant that these are people who have money and blocking sites the like to visit shouldn't be something a telco company does to its customers. Obviously the people I know aren't on AT&T, since I'm in Ireland, but I assume that similarly aged and employed people exist in affected areas too. If not, ignore my comment.

Ok, so I can't type. Whatever. I of course meant 18-23.

Besides what the other replies to parent have already stated, the only thing left unsaid is that a large portion of /b/ users are not actually 15 year olds at all. I know a good few /b/tards myself and most are in the 19-13 age range, and most of them are NOT in fact unemployed either. Personally, I don't give a crap if /b/ is taken down, but plenty of other people seem to, so best not annoy them TOO much.

I'm in favour to transitioning away from TCP/IP towards SCTP/IP personally. Any future network code I write will be based on SCTP instead of TCP, if I can get away with it. :-P Not only is it more resilient to SYN flooding than TCP is, but it gives me other nice possibilities like multiple streams per connection, multi-homing, the choice of ordered or unordered and the choice of reliable or unreliable. The disadvantage being that its not as widely used, so there may be some associated issues, though Linux, at least, does have SCTP support out of the box :-)

Bleh. Its all just terminology. What do you define as AI? The definition of AI (going by what is popularly counted as AI by the computer science community and NOT by what the media likes to call AI) counts most control systems as AI: state machines, expert systems, Deep Blue style minmaxing by searching all possible solutions, google page rank, amazons recommendation system, matchmaking algorithms, pattern matching, classification, bayesian filters - all of these are in the "AI" category.

Thats what he meant. The negative change won't happen until 2083.

Well, yeah, I was being a little harsh on C. Though C++ was a patch to try and bring new features to C (OO, templates, etc) and to fix things which were perceived as flaws (for example, having to define variables at the start of a function). It succeeded too, but also introduced much much more complexity, more undefined pits of doom and other flaws to the language. Now they want to patch this? I say no - switch to a language which never had these flaws to begin with and be done with it. Besides, how long will it take for compilers to really support C++0x anyway? By the time its fully supported, I'll hopefully have stopped using C++ entirely. (Yes, I still sometimes use C++)

Who gives a shit. They lost me when they first announced C++0x
C++ was a great old language (sometimes, when the moons were aligned), but I've moved on. They needn't bother trying to patch up a patch up for an old obsolete language (and I do apologize to C fans.. I know I'm being harsh). Opinion, sure, but you gotta admit, we don't need a patched up C++.

My moneys on C++0x++
Gotta keep with the theme here.

Haha good point!

$50 million to build it, $150 million to keep it running for the next year or two and $100 million for the politicians to congratulate each other with over a job well done.

Seconded.