Word: virtualization
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...humans - an interface that might allow paralyzed people, who generally have healthy limbs that they are unable to use due to spinal cord damage (which prevents brain signals from reaching their limbs), to control their own biological limbs. It could also give people extended senses, allowing them to have virtual limbs in cyberspace or robotic limbs in the physical world. "The brain knows that it has an arm and a hand because it is connected to these things and gets feedback from them," Nicolelis says. "The same could be true for robotic or virtual appendages. If you control a remote...
...Instead of continuing to feel the presence of a limb that is no longer there, people equipped with a brain-computer interface could operate new appendages, and the brain would eventually come to regard these as its own. But what could a person do with a remote robotic or virtual limb? The possibilities range from the mundane to the otherworldly. In the virtual realm, these appendages would dispense with the bulky technology of conventional haptics and allow Web shoppers to squeeze a peach online to see if it's ripe. Video conferences and chats might start with actual handshakes...
...place where brains and computers are truly coming together is in the lab of Miguel Nicolelis, associate professor of neurobiology at the Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina. He has trained two owl monkeys to control a robotic arm via brain signals - giving glimpses of how the virtual and physical worlds may merge...
Kyriakakis' Ping-Pong trick is part of a technology he calls "virtual miking." The goal is to create textured, three-dimensional sound through digital mastery. And it offers applications more practical than simulating table tennis in the dark. Like remastering music: a mono or stereo recording can be transformed into multichannel audio approximating concert-hall quality. With stereo the sound seems to come from in front. Virtual miking projects sound from front and back, above and below. Kyriakakis achieves this with a little legwork: visiting concert halls and placing microphones all around. After testing how they pick up sound...
...this is stupid. But what if technology could digitally capture precise shapes and textures and allow us to "feel" them as if we were handling them directly? That goal is helping to spur research in the field of "haptics," the art of virtual touch...