The Digital Contents Expo includes some actual, serious inventions — check out Gizmodo's report on the cool-as-hell standalone 3-D viewer — but it also includes some goofy shit. Including the funbrella, an umbrella that drenches you with simulated rain. Huh? And a video game where you eat lots of stinky foods and then blast the monsters on the screen with the worst bad breath possible, through a blow gun. According to AFP:

A clear crowd-pleaser at the four-day event was a blowgun videogame by the Kanazawa Institute of Technology where the enemies are a scary line-up of monsters including a vampire, a bat and a club-wielding ogre.

Rather than fire bullets, darts or lasers at the fearsome adversaries, players of all ages eat snacks and sip drinks to boost the smell of their breath, then blast stinky bad breath balls at the screen to kill the monsters.

"Your children may shun you when you come home reeking of alcohol, but this could make you a family hero," said Yusuke Sasayama, a Kanazawa Institute engineering student and one of the brains behind the game.

Osaka University graduate students, meanwhile, wowed audiences with their "Funbrella" — the perfect gift for people who hate sunny days — which uses a technology the inventors called the "tele-rain" system.
A humanoid robot shows off her skills during the technology fair

A humanoid robot, HRP-4C, developed by Japan's Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) shows off her skills during the Digital Contents Expo in Tokyo. A monster-slaying bad breath blow gun and a rain-simulating "funbrella" are two of the bizarre gadgets that went on display at the Digital Content Expo, a fair showcasing futuristic gaming, arts, medical and other technologies.

A vibrating device on the gadget simulates the sensation of raindrops hitting the umbrella, and there are advanced settings for hails of marbles, snakes and other objects that don't usually fall from the sky.

But that's not all — there's also a helmet that steers you by pulling on your ears. Plus a weird virtual reality egg. Check out the gallery of badness (Sadly, no pics of the funbrella or the bad-breath game, that I could find.) Photos by Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty.

A humanoid robot, HRP-4C, developed by Japan's Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) shows off her skills during the Digital Contents Expo in Tokyo on October 22, 2009. A monster-slaying bad breath blow gun, a rain-simulating 'funbrella' and a navigation-aid helmet that steers users by pulling their ears: welcome to Japan's latest whacky inventions. These bizarre gadgets and more — some of them useful, most of them fun — went on display at the Digital Content Expo, a fair showcasing futuristic gaming, arts, medical and other technologies that opened on October 22. AFP PHOTO / Yoshikazu TSUNO (Photo credit should read YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP/Getty Images)

A humanoid robot, HRP-4C, developed by Japan's Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) shows off her skills during the Digital Contents Expo in Tokyo on October 22, 2009. A monster-slaying bad breath blow gun, a rain-simulating 'funbrella' and a navigation-aid helmet that steers users by pulling their ears: welcome to Japan's latest whacky inventions. These bizarre gadgets and more — some of them useful, most of them fun — went on display at the Digital Content Expo, a fair showcasing futuristic gaming, arts, medical and other technologies that opened on October 22. AFP PHOTO / Yoshikazu TSUNO (Photo credit should read YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP/Getty Images)

Hiroo Iwata (L), a professor at Japan's Tsukuba University, presents his virtual reality machine 'Media Vehicle' at the Digital Contents Expo in Tokyo on October 22, 2009. A monster-slaying bad breath blow gun, a rain-simulating 'funbrella' and a navigation-aid helmet that steers users by pulling their ears: welcome to Japan's latest whacky inventions. These bizarre gadgets and more — some of them useful, most of them fun — went on display at the Digital Content Expo, a fair showcasing futuristic gaming, arts, medical and other technologies that opened on October 22. AFP PHOTO / Yoshikazu TSUNO (Photo credit should read YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP/Getty Images)

Hiroo Iwata (L), a professor at Japan's Tsukuba University, presents his virtual reality machine 'Media Vehicle' at the Digital Contents Expo in Tokyo on October 22, 2009. A monster-slaying bad breath blow gun, a rain-simulating 'funbrella' and a navigation-aid helmet that steers users by pulling their ears: welcome to Japan's latest whacky inventions. These bizarre gadgets and more — some of them useful, most of them fun — went on display at the Digital Content Expo, a fair showcasing futuristic gaming, arts, medical and other technologies that opened on October 22. AFP PHOTO / Yoshikazu TSUNO (Photo credit should read YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP/Getty Images)

Tokyo University of Electro-Communications postdoctoral student Yuichiro Kojima wears headgear named the 'Pull-Navi' which directs the wearer by applying pressure to the ear at the Digital Contents Expo in Tokyo on October 22, 2009. Gadgets and inventions will be on display at this high-tech exhibition until October 25. AFP PHOTO/Yoshikazu TSUNO (Photo credit should read YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP/Getty Images)

Tokyo University of Electro-Communications postdoctoral student Yuichiro Kojima wears headgear named the 'Pull-Navi' which directs the wearer by applying pressure to the ear at the Digital Contents Expo in Tokyo on October 22, 2009. Gadgets and inventions will be on display at this high-tech exhibition until October 25. AFP PHOTO/Yoshikazu TSUNO (Photo credit should read YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP/Getty Images)

Star Command is a totally ludicrous attempt to do a Trek-esque space opera on a shoestring budget. During the first hour or so, all of the female cremwmebers wear a white formal uniform that makes them look like strippers during Fleet Week, complete with white dress jackets, white caps and teeny white miniskirts. Later, there's a drill when everybody's asleep, and all the young cadets run onto the bridge of their ship wearing their pajamas... or in some cases, nothing but a T-shirt. Star Trek never did that! And no, I really don't know why my copy of Star Command is only playing in Hungarian. I think it's because the scene isn't dramatic enough in English.

But back to the weird virtual reality world. It's not just crazy torture sequences. There's also a scene where another one of our heroes has a pleasurable V.R. simulation... in which, for some unaccountable reason, he's wearing the puffiest sleeves outside of a Fabio cover. Later on, the ship's captain catches him doing this V.R. simulation, and the hot chick in the bathtub morphs, without any warning, into the captain's scowling head.

The setup for the show is immediately intriguing. The Phaeton is a spaceship on a ten-year voyage to the nearest star system with a habitable planet, in search of alien life. Its crew of 12 are funding the voyage by filming their adventures for reality TV, and their only escape from each other is into hyper-realistic virtual reality programs. So even as they try to capture the gritty reality of ship-board life for "Edge of Never: Life on the Phaeton," their sanity depends on an ability to escape the ship via immersive VR fantasies.

It's the kind of meta-meditation on technology that Ron Moore loves, and which he explored via the cylons' synthetic-but-real identities in Battlestar. Virtuality is dark like Battlestar too, but in a much more intimate way. The ship's counselor Roger Fallon is also the producer of the reality show, so he has a vested interest in keeping his patients neurotically off-center. After all, perfectly mentallly healthy people do not create good drama. While his wife sneaks off to have sex with the ship's captain in virtual reality, Fallon is left to lecture the reality TV audience back home about how everybody "plays a role" in a crisis situtation and therefore all the roles they play on ship are "as real as it could possibly be."

The ship's crisis, at least in the pilot episode, is whether or not there will even be a ten-year mission at all. Captain Pike must decide when they reach Jupiter whether they'll slingshot out of the solar system using the gas giant's gravity (along with several nukes), or return to Earth. Given that new research has revealed Earth will be going waterworld in less than a century, finding a possible new home for humanity is more important than ever. As millions tune in to find out whether it's "go or no go" for the Phaeton, Pike has to consider whether his tiny crew is ready to endure ten years together in deep space - especially given that the doctor has just discovered he has Parkinson's disease, and their virtual reality program is starting to act really weird.

Although the "go or no go" dilemma is solved in this episode, we get a potential season-long arc in the VR bug plot. A strange man starts appearing in the crew's VR fantasies, beating them and killing them before they have a chance to take off their interface goggles. It's not as if the VR fantasies can harm people physically - this isn't a Matrix deal where dying inside means you die outside - but there is still something psychologically scarring about being murdered no matter how it happens.

Much of the pilot episode, directed by Peter Berg (who is also directing an upcoming film version of Dune), simply introduces all our characters. There's the girly hacker who also serves as host for the reality TV show; the gay couple of astrobiologists who cook for the rest of the crew and complain that they come across as "bitchy queens" on TV; the sick doctor; the lonely ship's designer; the creepy counselor and his biologist wife; the tough-but-fair captain; his irascible second-in-command who manages to turn a wheelchair into his macho accessory; and the ex-military pilot who is a smart-mouthed, tomboy maverick. It's a cool group, and you'll definitely wind up wanting to know more about some of them.

It's unclear whether FOX will turn Virtuality into a series, but this two-hour premiere is certainly not a self-contained story. As I said earlier, the "go no go" plot is resolved, but so many lose ends remain at the end that it feels unsatisfying as a stand-alone TV movie.

Virtuality spins a lot of balls into the air with this pilot, and it's not clear that Ron Moore can keep them from crashing down. Is the show really going to be able to balance the reality-TV storyline with our crew's virtual reality adventures (and their real-life dramas)? The reality TV angle brings a much-needed cynical subtlety to the show, which rescues it from pure space psychodrama. But Moore isn't exactly known for his cynical storytelling, and I worry that this prickly aspect of the series will get smoothed over by Fantasy Island morality tales set in VR land.

Still, I would like the chance to find out where Virtuality might take us. Moore was willing to deliver quite a shock at the end of the pilot, which set the stage for a show unafraid to take risks. And I have to admit I'm intrigued to see what will befall the crew next, in a watching-a-trainwreck-on-Livejournal way. Creepy mind games mixed with media weirdness in space? Yeah, sign me up. Let's hope the show goes on.

Anxiety Therapy

For years now, virtual environments have been used to treat anxiety problems with exposure therapy. Psychologists treat phobias and post traumatic stress disorder by exposing the patient to the thing that causes them anxiety and letting the anxiety dissipate on its own. But this proves difficult if your stressor is a battlefield in Iraq.

Enter virtual reality. Military psychologists use simulated Iraq war situations to treat soldiers. Other therapeutic VR uses include treating a fear of flying, fear of elevators, and even a "virtual nicotine craving" simulator for smoking addiction.

VR Training Programs

Virtual reality environments have also been used for training simulators. The earliest examples were flight simulators (most of us probably remember "Microsoft Flight Simulator"), but VR training has expanded beyond just that. There are many modern military examples, including Iraqi cultural situations and battlefield simulators for soldiers. Other examples include counter-terrorism, paratrooping, welding, and mining training sims.

Multiplayer Online Gaming

One result of virtual-reality research is the existence of entirely separate virtual worlds, inhabited entirely by the avatars of real world users. These worlds are sometimes referred to as massively multiplayer online games, and the World of Warcraft is the largest virtual gaming world in use now, with 11.5 million subscribers.

Another example is Second Life. The world of Second Life can't really be classified as a game, since the goal seems really just to be to wander around and interact with people, much like the real world. There is even a Second Life Shakespeare Company that performs Shakespeare's works within Second Life.

(Image: The Second Life Globe Theater, from Pathfinder Linden)

The Nintendo Wii

Probably the most successful cousin of virtual reality on the market today is the Nintento Wii. The Wii owes its motion capture and intuitive interaction concepts to the virtual reality technologies of the past. The controller is basically a simplified version of the "virtual reality glove." Both the Wiimote and the Wii Fit offer users another way of interacting with their virtual environment without having to wear any bulky equipment.

(Image: a new take on Wii tennis by Mesq)

Medical Procedures

Modern medicine has also found many uses for virtual reality. Doctors can interact with virtual systems to practice procedures or to do tiny surgical procedures on a larger scale. Surgeons have also started using virtual "twins" of their patients, to practice for surgery before doing the actual procedure.

(Image: the Karlsruhe Endoscopic Surgery Trainer)

Project Natal

The latest entry in the virtual reality inspired gaming world is Project Natal, a new piece of technology under development now for the Xbox. Project Natal proposes a new way of interacting with games, and indeed with computer systems in general. In their demo video, they propose a system that requires no keyboard and no controller, where a user's voice and motions serve as their method for interacting with the system.

The demo video is impressive, but the technology has not been completed and released yet. When it does get released, however, virtual reality will take another giant step towards total immersion and common home usage.

The Cave

The term "CAVE" refers to any virtual reality system that uses multiple walls with multiple projectors to immerse users in a virtual world. The first CAVE was built in 1992 as a method of showing of scientific visualizations. Now, many universities have their own CAVE systems. The CAVE is used for visualizing data, for demonstrating 3D environments, and for virtually testing component parts of newly developed engineering projects.

Here's the gallery, which also includes a photo of the ship's captain, Frank Pike, acting out a Civil War scenario on horseback via the ship's virtual reality modules. And a picture of visual effects supervisor Gary Hutzel in action. After this post had already gone up, producer Michael Taylor sent me a bonus image showing the Phaeton's workings, which is now in the gallery.

And because the gallery software doesn't seem to be able to give you a high enough resolution of it, here's that explanation of the Phaeton's physics:

Having read the script to this TV movie (which still could become the pilot for a new series if the stars align just right) I'm incredibly excited to see it play out on screen. Here's the official description:

The crew of the Phaeton is approaching the go/no-go point of their epic 10-year journey through outer space. With the fate of Earth in their hands, the pressure is intense. The best bet for helping the crew members maintain their sanity is the cutting-edge virtual reality technology installed on the ship. It's the perfect stress-reliever until they realize a glitch in the system has unleashed a virus on to the ship. Tensions mount as the crew decides how to contain the virus and complete their mission. Meanwhile, their lives are being taped for a reality show back on Earth in the World Broadcast Premiere of VIRTUALITY airing Friday, June 26 (8:00-10:00 PM ET/PT) on FOX.

The Sensorama

In what may be considered the first case of virtual reality reaching beyond its own limitations, Morton Heilig unveiled the Sensorama in 1962. It was a large box that enclosed the viewer's head and displayed a stereoscopic 3D movie. The seat tilted and the box unleashed wind and smells. And all of this was accomplished mechanically.

It was a costly venture, and beyond the prototype, Heilig was forced to stop development on the Sensorama. His failure then became the model for future virtual reality failures. The device was cool, but it was also large, expensive, and awkward.

Giant Headsets

There are too many examples of this particular item to pick just one. It seemed for years that hard-to-wear headsets were a prerequisite for any virtual reality technology. The earliest virtual reality headsets looked like a giant television strapped to someone's face. The technology has advanced since then, with smaller and more economical displays, but the headsets of the past made virtual reality nothing more than a passing, gawky novelty.

Nintendo Virtual Boy

The continuing pathway to the holy grail of devices marketed for home virtual reality gaming is littered with failures. One of the more reviled, more abject of these failures came from an otherwise reliable company. I'm referring to Nintendo's Virtual Boy.

Nintendo's foray into the virtual reality world promised a few things it couldn't deliver. It promised true 3D graphics on a portable console. What it delivered was a red-tinged, blurry, semi-3D picture and a clunky headset that needed a stand to operate. Games came with the option of automatically pausing every 15 minutes for a break, which sounds more like a difficult shift at work than a fun afternoon of virtual reality gaming.

The Virtual Reality Glove

Speaking of Nintendo, it seems every time the company digs into the virtual reality market, they miscalculate. You may remember the Power Glove from such cinema classics as The Wizard. The Power Glove recreated the motions of a user wearing it on screen, but the motion tracking was imprecise and the glove was clunky. The company sold about 100,000 of the gloves in the U.S. Compare that with a more successful technology descended from the Power Glove, the Wii; Nintendo has sold over 13 million of those so far.

That didn't stop other companies from trying to market similar technologies, though. The P5 glove for PC gaming required specially designed games and therefore never caught on and the CyberGlove proved too expensive for home use. As a result, the era of virtual reality gloves quietly ended.

VRML

Turning more to the tech side, VRML was billed as a 3-D alternative to HTML. The idea was that users could interact freely with 3-D worlds on the internet, described by text and interpreted by modeling software. VRML's creators envisioned virtual spaces where people could wander in and chat with each other. The reality was closer to slow-loading, blocky graphic snippets, hardly worth the dial-up bandwidth needed at the time. In time, Second Life would crop up, and while it wasn't as customizable and programmable as VRML, it did offer a similar experience, but with better graphics.

Omnidirectional Treadmills

Beyond the display, control, and coding problems of virtual reality, there's still the problem of mobility. When you virtually move forward, you also move forward in the real world, so designers had to find a way of allowing people to walk around while staying in place.

The most common solution is the omnidirectional treadmill. This device does exactly what it sounds like it would do: it lets users move in any direction on a treadmill. It's a good idea in theory, and as early as 1997 working prototypes were created. But these treadmills are also very expensive and very large. It's hard to imagine cramming something like the device pictured here into your living room.

The Virtusphere

Enter the Virtusphere. Users strap on their VR gear and enter a large translucent sphere. The experience is something like a large stationary hamster ball: as an individual wanders about, the ball freely rotates to allow the user to wander around in the virtual world. While the device clearly does what it claims to do, the average home user seems hesitant to play their games trapped inside something that looks like it just popped out of the water and is trying to bring you back to a prison village.

There have, of course, been pretty big advances in virtual reality technology since these failures, but now that the technology has caught up with the vision, it seems like people have bigger visions. Technologies like internet and personal computers survived their awkward teenage years. Virtual reality didn't.

(omnidirectional treadmill photo by David Carmein 2007)

European scientists are studying the way in which people react to virtual environments and discovering that sometimes, things seem more real than they actually are:

For one experiment they developed a virtual bar, which test subjects enter by donning a virtual reality (VR) headset or immersing themselves in a VR CAVE in which stereo images are projected onto the walls. As the virtual patrons socialise, drink and dance, a fire breaks out. Sometimes the virtual characters ignore it, sometimes they flee in panic. That in turn dictates how the real test subjects, immersed in the virtual environment, respond.

"We have had people literally run out of the VR room, even though they know that what they are witnessing is not real," says Slater. "They take their cues from the other characters."

The reason behind the experiments is to find out whether or not VR can be used to treat patients with extreme phobias, according to the scientists. But, somehow, finding out that they also created a virtual version of the Milgram experiment makes me feel as if something more Manchurian Candidate may be going on.

When Virtual Reality Feels Real [Science Daily]

Linden's CEO, Mark Kingdon, is eager to change the perception of the company's product:

Enterprise is a really important growth vector for us because (Second Life is) a really compelling platform for learning and collaboration. Especially today in large enterprises that are distributed (around the world.

He's not the only one who's making SL sound a lot less fun these days. Executive director of enterprise marketing, Amanda Van Nuys, is sounding confident and hardcore:

Based on the level of the interest we're seeing, we are poised for explosive growth. This is not a game. We're ready for business.

This repositioning of Second Life, coming so soon after the perceived clean-up of SL's virtual sex trade activities, suggests that Linden are continuing to try to find ways to make Second Life more than the niche pastime it's become; if nothing else, this corporate take will be more profitable - Linden will be charging companies for access to the private corporate server.

Second Life's Linden Lab sells virtual realities to businesses [San Francisco Business Times]

As I've said before, when I first heard about Virtuality, I wasn't that excited, because the concept sounded too much like a whole show of holodeck episodes. But about a year ago, I reviewed a huge chunk of the pilot script (it was pretty much the whole thing) and I was an instant convert.

Yes, Virtuality is the story of the crew of the Phaeton, a deep-space exploration vessel, who use virtual reality to distract themselves from the claustrophobia and boredom of deep space (until something inevitably goes wrong), but there's way more to it than that. For one thing, the ship really is incredibly claustrophobic and slow, not roomy and zoomy like the Enterprise. For another, the crew are forced to take part in a "reality TV" show that's broadcast back on Earth... and the ship's therapist is the reality-show's producer. It's seriously twisted, demented stuff. Oh, and the menace that wreaks havoc in their virtual reality world is a bit scarier and more insidious than a bunch of Worfs in cowboy hats.

Also, it's directed by Peter Berg (Hancock and the upcoming Dune) and stars genre veteran Sienna Guillory (pictured above) alongside Clea DuVall, Jimmi Simpson, Joy Bryant, James D'Arcy, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and others.

So it's fantastic news that the pilot will finally air on Saturday, July 4. I'm guessing this is the original version of the pilot, since it's two hours long. There were reports a while back that Fox was asking Moore to revamp the pilot - possibly to make it one hour long, and also to remove "controversial" elements such as the fact that two minor characters, Manny and Val, were gay and married to each other. Here's hoping that I'm right, and this is the original pilot, not some eviscerated version.

Let's be clear, though - it seems exceedingly unlikely that Virtuality will get to become an ongoing series. (I'd say that's been clear for months, unfortunately.) It's just barely possible that if the TV movie has out-of-the-park ratings - doing much, much better than you'd expect from a Saturday night on July 4 - that Fox will reconsider killing the series. But honestly, I'd say that's not terribly likely. So I'm just glad we're finally getting to see all the Virtuality that will ever get made.

The Orgasmatron Booth
Maybe I should be more surprised that Woody Allen would come up with one of the most well known pieces of SF sextech in Sleeper, his one and only SF movie to date, but all I can think is that anything that demonstrates how easily people can be replaced by machinery is right up his 1970s comedy neuroses alley. Sure, science may have tried to create the real thing, but the fact remains: Is there a closet that I can walk into and experience multiple climaxes without the presence of another human being and risking repetitive strain injury? No. And that's the true tragedy here.

The Excessive Machine
Unlike the Orgasmatron, Barbarella's Excessive Machine is made for evil purposes, apparently (Unless you think that "Executioner" is some kind of porny euphemism), but you can't deny that with a little reworking, this organ-based organ-replacement could bring happiness to a great many people everywhere, while being more aesthetically-pleasing to look at than any of the inventions seen so far on popular internet destination Fucking Machines (Dear everyone: That link is very NSFW. Do not blame me when you click on it in your place of employment and get in trouble. The clue as to why may be in the name of the site).

Sex Rays Of Various Types
Whether it's Flesh Gordon's Sex Ray or Orgazmo's Orgazmorator, there's no denying that there's something primal about the idea of making that penis/gun substitution a little more literal than usual. The best variation of this idea belongs to 2000AD's satirical Big Dave strip from the 1990s, wherein Saddam Hussein unveiled his plan to defeat the West once and for all by using his Love Gun - built by aliens, of course - to turn opposing armies gay, and therefore - proving the reasoning behind the US military's ban on homosexuals - useless as soldiers.

Freaky Virtual Reality Sex
http://io9.com/5054503/the-dos-and-donts-of-cybersex
Lawnmower Man's face-melty sex scene may look somewhat cheesy now - and make you go "Hey, it's Frank off Lost! But young!" - but let's face it; Second Life really doesn't compare to the virtual reality insect fetish sex that this movie promised us. Science fiction loves to suggest that VR will open up all new worlds of sexual exploration (Even Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had Quark's holodeck suites, which you knew were dens of perversity and characters fantasizing about Dax and Kira getting it on with them), but the reality has proven to be somewhat lacking.

Sexbots In General
I know, I know. Sexbots; they're the android dream for all of us, whether they're Cherry 2000, Battlestar Galactica's Six or any of a large number of other possibilities, there's something amazingly alluring to many people about the idea of a lifelike play partner that only does what you tell it to do (or maybe not). But when I don't care how realistic they think robots are getting, that whole dead-eyed look just doesn't do it for me just yet. Give me a call when they've reached Tricia Helfer level - or maybe Sky-Doll.

Group leader, MIT Professor Joe Paradiso, and his students are installing 45 "Ubiquitous Sensor Portals" in the Media Lab building. Each of these portals has a touchscreen, camera, and array of sensors that are wirelessly connected to the active Second Life universe. Through these portals, Second Life users can interact with real-life people, and real-life people can enter and experience Second Life without even having to download the software. As the group itself puts it on their Media Lab project page, in this way "events in the real world drive phenomena in a virtual environment that is unconstrained by time, space, or the constraints of physics." Sounds like the best kind of futurism to me.

Forbes.com quotes Paradiso on the nature of the Second Life portals:

"These devices are designed to be like wormholes that let you tunnel through to a second reality," says Paradiso. "Second Life is detached. We're tying it into the real world."

X-Reality group member Josh Lifton, the mind behind the Shadow Lab project, offers plenty of application ideas for such technology:

Lifton argues that the "Shadow Lab" setup could be expanded to a more complex scenario like a building's emergency response system. In a fire, for instance, responders could map out the building's temperature and even find inhabitants in the virtual world before risking their lives in the real one. Paradiso offers the more prosaic example of a factory floor outfitted with ubiquitous sensors that lets any executive monitor its manufacturing in the virtual world.

After a bit more development on projects like this, it will be hard to tell where the real world ends and Second Life begins — looks like it's time to start lecturing your real-life friends into accepting your Second Life girlfriend. And while teleportation might not be on its way, you'll certainly be able to beam yourself virtually to a business meeting in Bangkok, just like Will.i.am did at CNN; with X-Reality's technology, though, you might one day be able to toss a paper airplane to your colleague at the other end of the table.

A Realer Virtual World [via Forbes.com]
Ubiquitous Sensor Portals [MIT Media Lab]
Dual Reality Lab [MIT Media Lab]

Artigas was up against Castor Fantoba, the number four aerobatic pilot in the world, and test pilot Bruno Van Waeyenberghe. Fantoba and Waeyenberghe took off from an airfield in Lerida, Spain; using a combination of GPS (global positioning satellite technology) and INS (inertial navigation systems), their Extra EA-300L aircraft were able to follow the virtual course while in the air. In the end, Fantoba beat Artigas by 1.5 seconds.

This wasn't just for fun, either. The dynamic nature of the virtual course makes it an ideal possibility for pilot training; every time Artigas, Fantoba, or Waeyenberghe missed an obstacle, his finish line was postponed. According to the BBC, though, the two pilots are nervous about the increased presence of virtual reality in flight:

Air Sports aims to ramp up the virtual experience in the cockpit.

It is considering projecting images of obstacle courses on to the retinas of pilots.

Nevertheless, safety concerns are an issue. One of the pilots from the trial reported feeling detached from reality in his cockpit.

Peter Newport is wary of pushing boundaries too far.

"We wouldn't suggest this is carried out by amateur organisations. We are working at the top of the game, using highly skilled pilots. Until virtual reality is better understood, widespread use should not be encouraged."

If anything is going to be projected onto a pilot's retinas in flight, it had better be damn accurate. Until GPS and INS are better than human eyes at giving pilots an instinctive sense of where they are and how they're moving, too much made-up scenery in the cockpit is probably a bad idea.

Still, the Sky Challenge test flight went well, and this partially virtual competition is a great way to bring both pilots and flight simulator addicts together to revel in the glory of the free sky. Air Sports Ltd. plans to develop Sky Challenge into both a mini-airshow and a multiplayer internet video game — so get ready to pit your joystick hand against the aerobatic pilots of the world.

[Sky Challenge]

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You don't think of virtual worlds like Second LIfe as sensual — after all, there's no sense of touch at all — but watching the lush footage in Second Skin and hearing people talk about their hunger for Worlds of Warcraft may change your mind. Immersive virtual reality might never live up to the hype, but already more and more people are pouring so much of their hearts and minds into virtual worlds that they seem to "feel" their experiences in them.
Director Juan Carlos calls it "An Inconvenient Truth meets Errol Morris," which sounds like he's swinging for the fences. If Carlos was on death row, he'd pick Weird Science as his last movie to watch:

I've always really loved that comedy. I mean John Hughes is great, and he's made a bunch of good movies, but Weird Science to me gets the fan favorite award. The idea behind that movie was so inventive and hilarious. Plus there is just something awesome when aliens come to crash a party in the middle of a teen comedy. So I'd laugh to start, and then get a little Zen.

We weren't really sure what to expect going into this movie, because every 3D experience we've been promised has been fairly "meh" in quality. The recent Beowulf CGI meets 3D experience wasn't bad, but the promised third dimension still felt like all the 3D films we'd been seeing for years. Namely, a few things loom out of the screen, but it feels like a gimmick instead of something organic.

Enter the U23D concert film. We've seen concert films before, but never like this one. From the first shot of a packed arena that opens up like a pop-up book, to the long zooms from the audience right up into Larry Mullen's drumface, or the Edge's guitar, it feels like an otherworldly experience. You're literally right there with the band, experiencing something 1,000 times better than the view you'd get from a front row seat. You can see Bono's setlist tossed down on the edge of the drum platform, a couple of cups of coffee next to water bottles, the stitching detail in their clothing and so on. It looks so realistic that at times it feels fake, like you're looking at a VR concert, or action figures in a plexiglass block. Extremely surreal.

In Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, there's a group of ad-hoc theme park workers bringing a new technology to Disneyworld called "flashbaking". They use it in the Hall of Presidents to bring "Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln" to new life by cramming the experience, smells of gunpowder, sounds of his era, photos, etc, into your cerebral cortex. It makes you feel like you're right there with a living, breathing Lincoln and a stretch of time within minutes. This film is as close to approximating that (albeit without the smells, the added into, and without any baking of our grey matter).

Some people will decry that it's not a true concert experience, since you aren't being battered around by sweaty people, crammed towards the stage like sardines, straining to see over the heads of those in front of you, and being charged astronomical ticket prices. But, we won't miss most of that. True, there's a lot to be said for the human experience during a concert, but we're excited about the possibilities this technology brings. Virtual concerts for the masses, priced for you wholesale.

The film was shot during their "Vertigo" tour throughout South America over several dates, but it's been assembled into a seamless experience. Shot with over 18 cameras and using the 3ality 3D technology, this is the first time zoom lenses have been used in 3D, and the first time they've done layered visual effects in 3D. The movie premieres at the Sundance Film Festival next week, but you'll be able to see it starting January 23rd at theaters all over.

The series - English alternate title "Coil - A Circle of Children" - was awarded an Excellence Prize by a jury in last year's Japan Media Arts Festival, and had the newspaper Mainichi Shimbun suggesting that it would impact future development on future VR technology. A surprising reception for a kids' show, perhaps, but this was the first TV series from Mitsuo Iso, who's previously worked on well-known anime Gundam 0080 and Ghost In The Shell.

The series hasn't been licensed for Western audiences yet, but given the success of the show in its home country, it's only a matter of time. Start watching now before everyone knows about it. Search for "Denno Coil" on YouTube and you'll get several episodes worth.

Dennō Coil [Anime News Network]

Mara goes on "missions" where she meets lonely dorks in VR, teaches them about sex, and sends them back to the so-called real world. Each episode is punctuated by therapeutic interludes with God, who processes with Mara about the sexual issues raised by her escapades. In this clip, Mara (inexplicably dressed in awful PVC) has to teach a hacker how to make love to the girl he's had a crush on for years. The best part of this movie is catching all the hammy mid-1990s references to computers ("Holy megabyte!" one character exclaims) mixed in with soft-core sex. Plus, what could be more of a turn-on than watching Mara talk about her abandonment issues after having a hot threeway with a geek and a simulation of the girl he loves?