23269402
submission
__aajbyc7391 writes:
Software developer Robert Oschler has launched a Kickstarter project aimed at creating a low-cost, mind-controlled, robotic telepresence system, based on integrating support for WowWee's Rovio robot, Emotiv's EPOC neuroheadset, and Skype communications into a new version of Oschler's Robodance software. The headset's ability to detect head movement and facial gestures will enable those with limited mobility to explore their home or any place else in the world where there's a Rovio they can connect to, at a fraction of the cost of other alternatives, says Oschler. As a reward for supporting the Kickstarter project, contributors at certain levels will have the opportunity to experience 10- or 20-minute 'telepresence tours' if the project achieves its funding goal.
18735898
submission
robotsrule writes:
In order to raise funds to complete Robodance 5 in these difficult times, AndroidForum.com is being auctioned off on SEDO. For more information and a link to the auction, please visit the Robodance 5 fundraiser page. This could be a good domain name for any SlashDot readers that are in the Android market or who are interested in creating a web site or business in that space. Robodance 5 is 90 percent done and the funds are needed to complete it. The software has applications for the physically disabled since it can pilot a remote telepresence robot over a Skype video call using only thoughts and facial gestures, thanks to the Emotiv EPOC 14-electrode EEG headset, as seen in this video. There are a handful of other good domain names available too. You can read about the fundraiser on this page.
16679400
submission
robotsrule writes:
A user comment on one of my more popular videos remarked that it was "lame" because it was only 3 seconds long. It's supposed to be several minutes long and indeed it was up until about 2 months ago, judging by the user comment history. But now the video length reported by YouTube in the playback bar is only 3 seconds and when you play it, that's exactly how many seconds of video that plays so it's not just a video length reporting issue. If you have any YouTube videos, especially if you are a YouTube partner and derive income from your videos, you may want to inspect them for similar damage. I don't know if this happened during a YouTube restore operation or the like and I've posted a bug report on their forums. Unfortunately the video of mine that got truncated is heavily linked to by several big tech sites so I'm hoping YouTube has a fix for this, and for others like myself. If you have had the same thing happen, please report it in a SlashDot comment to this post and indicate about when it appears to have happened.
15595616
submission
robotsrule writes:
Here's a a demonstration video of EmoRate, a software program that uses the Emotiv 14-electrode EEG headset to record your emotions via your facial expressions. In the video you'll see EmoRate record my emotions while I watch a YouTube video, then index that video by emotion, and then navigate that video by simply by remembering a feeling. The web page for EmoRate explains how I used Emotiv's SDK to build the software program, and how I trained the system by watching emotionally evocative videos on YouTube while wearing the headset.
14459980
submission
robotsrule writes:
YouTube Leanback is a brand new user interface into YouTube that lets you watch videos using only 6 keystrokes on your keyboard. It is a tech preview created by YouTube in lieu of the day YouTube videos are watchable over your TV service, when you can use a standard TV remote control to watch YouTube videos. But you don't have to wait. With WiiLeanback, a free software program for Windows PCs, you can get rid of your keyboard entirely and watch YouTube Leanback with a Nintendo Wii remote . The Wii console is not required, just the WiiMote and a PC with Bluetooth capability (dongle or built-in, although the latter has not been tested yet). This gives you the ultimate couch potato experience as you sit safely in your easy chair watching videos with a wireless remote control. In addition, you can control the volume of videos as you watch, something you can't do with YouTube Leanback alone. This short video shows you how it works.
14286414
submission
robotsrule writes:
AppEliza is a free ELIZA style therapist chat-bot for Android phones. You talk to it and tell it your problems, and it responds via Text To Speech. It can also echo your conversation to a Twitter account. AppEliza incorporates Google's speech recognition web service and the Eyes-Free Text To Speech package, the former is part of every Android phone and the later is a free download from the Android Marketplace. The excitement here isn't the app since AppEliza is a simple pattern based chat-bot that reacts to trigger words and phrases, mainly those dealing with feelings and family, and uses the power of ambiguity to "fake it" the rest of the time. The excitement is due to AppInventor, the drag and drop tool that was used to create AppEliza in a single day, except for the Twitter support that I added to it this morning and that took a little over an hour. AppEliza is not up on the Android Marketplace yet but the APK file can be found on our servers as a free download. You can see some real-time Twitter sessions I had with AppEliza here.
12959036
submission
robotsrule writes:
Sci-Fi rant on Furious Fan Boys that talks about the most treacherous drug ever to affect science fiction writers, the time travel plot. Most importantly, it points out the astronomically absurd assumption that most time travel stories fail on, which is the patently false assumption that somehow you magically stick to the place you travel through time at despite the fact the galaxy itself is moving through space at a noticeable percentage of the speed of light. Thats fine in fiction but in sci-fi, if your hero after they travel time magically meets up with a past love and saves the universe when they should be sucking vacuum instead, there's not enough Sci in your Fi.
12437032
submission
robotsrule writes:
Here's an animated parody of Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" called "Out Of Space". Two computer nerds lament their server's desperate lack of space in a 2 minutes song and dance video. The animation footage used in the video is from the open source Elephants Dream video project which used Blender to create the footage. (Released under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license).
11803280
submission
robotsrule writes:
The linked video shows a WowWee Rovio mobile spy robot being piloted remotely over a Skype video call using thought, facial gestures, and head movements, with the help of the Emotiv Systems EPOC 14-electrode EEG headset with built-in gyroscope. An accompanying article explains in detail how the system works and what steps were taken with the Emotiv systems SDK to interface with the EPOC headset along with code samples. The system is based on Robodance 5, a free robot control program for consumer robot owners that will be out in beta next month on May 20, 2010.
10044586
submission
robotsrule writes:
Detailed coverage of the Emotiv EPOC headset, the first 14-electrode mass produced EEG headset for consumers. The article contains tons of screenshots and in-depth information about the Consumer, Developer, and Researcher editions with snapshots of the main Control Panel, included games and utilities, even pictures of brain activity heat maps and EEG traces made with the software by the author. The Developer and Researcher editions provide APIs that allow developers to use events generated by the EEG sensors and the headset's built-in gyroscope to create software applications, and the Researcher edition provides access to the raw EEG data stream for research projects and for advanced developers that want to create their own detection events beyond those provided for by the existing libraries.
9904366
submission
robotsrule writes:
Recently my Linux box died due to a memory problem with the host system. During the downtime before rebuilding, I needed to get some files off the hard drive which was formatted with the ReiserFS file system. I found two tools that helped me access the hard drive from Microsoft Windows. rfstool is a command line utility that can access a ReiserFS hard drive from Windows. It has an auto-detect feature that will scan your system's attached hard drives, external USB drives included, and show you the drive number and partition number of each ReiserFS partition it found which you can then mount. At that point you can use standard directory functions from a Command Window to read the drive and its directories. Then there's YAReG which provides a GUI front end to rfstool allowing you to access a ReiserFS partition using a Windows Explorer style window.
Note, access is read-only. The source code for rfstool is available under the GPL license. YAReG requires the Microsoft .NET Framework to be installed, a free download from Microsoft, and also makes it source code available under the GPL.
9534148
submission
robotsrule writes:
A recent interview with Dr. Gerwin Schalk, a leading Brain Control Interface (BCI) researcher at the Wadsworth Center in Albany, New York, goes into detail about his work creating BCI systems based on Electrocorticography (ECoG), an invasive style of BCI where a sheet of electrodes are placed directly on the brain's surface. In the interview he explains in detail the difference in signal detection resolution and capability between systems that use ECoG techniques and those that are based on Electroencephalogram (EEG) techniques, a non-invasive technique where electrodes are placed on the outer surface of the skull. Details are also given on what the potential for ECoG based systems is for people with "locked-in" syndrome (those that are completely unable to communicate with the outside world) and he talks about the current crop of EEG based consumer headsets and their use in video gaming too.
8752946
submission
robotsrule writes:
The Machine Perception Toolbox is an open source C++ machine vision library (BSD license) that does face detection and tracking along with several other machine vision tasks. In this article on ExtremeTech it is used to create a utility that drives an X10 robotic camera turret to move a camera while tracking a detected face, thereby keeping the face centered in the camera frame as it moves about. The utility runs on Windows XP and can be downloaded for free. The utility shows how MPT's face detection module and color tracking modules interact to rapidly track a face in real time from frame to frame. Another feature of the MPT is that it comes with the code for a DirectShow filter that can be used to seed your own DirectShow projects that involve machine vision. Users that don't have an X10 camera can still download and run the utility to see the machine vision technology in action via the overlay graphics that provide visual feedback, but of course your camera will not move. The article includes screenshots of the utility in action and ideas for further projects.
7412368
submission
robotsrule writes:
Responding to an article that contained an interview with Intel regarding their upcoming Larrabee graphics processor, Nvidia sets straight certain misperceptions of their GPU line and GPGPU programming. In this article on ExtremeTech that contains excerpts from interviews with Sumit Gupta and Andy Keane of Nvidia, the two attack in particular: the idea that their GPUs can't do ray-tracing and other CPU style algorithms and that their GPU chip does strictly "vector processing", the perception by some that their GPGPU tools are proprietary in nature despite their heavy involvement with OpenCL, the real history of parallel programming and multi-core discovery, and where these misperceptions are coming from.
