Philips Emotions Jacket lets audiences feel what actors emote

Is there such a thing as too much realism in our movies? If frights could kill, Stephen King horror flick Carrie did just that when it claimed its victim of terror at a Singapore screening. Then there was that little episode during the action thriller The Negotiator when someone in the audience had an epileptic fit, most likely brought on by the show. Fortunately, a doctor was on hand to help. So it won't be too much of a surprise that Philips' Emotions Jacket could fall under the same warning as smoking. That is, this could be hazardous to your health. Wear at your own risk.
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Robotic arm to help kids with motor deficit

A robotic arm is lending a hand to children with dyspraxia, a motor-skills deficit also known as Developmental Coordination Disorder or Clumsy Child Syndrome.

The system, under development at the U.K.'s University of Leeds, combines a robotic arm with software that lets children with coordination problems practice therapist-prescribed exercises at home using an interactive desktop setup. It can also monitor how the kids move, measuring factors like smoothness, speed of movement, and joint configurations.

Guided by the robotic arm, for example, kids use a pen to push objects along a 3D track displayed on a computer screen. The system applies guiding forces to the child's arm and hand to help control movements. The strength of the forces can be altered to shape movements and vary the difficulty of the exercises.

"We originally started with a hospital-based system, but our user group of children said they'd much prefer to be able to use it at home after school, so we adapted it to a more suitable laptop-based system that fits inside a small holdall," said Mark Mon-Williams, a University of Leeds professor of cognitive psychology who is leading the research, in a statement. "They also got involved in the design of the games and exercises."
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SnackBot: A humanoid robot that brings you food

Cravers, I'd like to introduce you to SnackBot. He is exactly what he sounds like: A robot that brings you snacks. He wanders around a place, say a hotel lobby during a convention, with a tray of sweets.

This, people, is what robots are for: Bringing me food. Or beer. Or making sure I don't have to wait in line at the counter for something. This has always been the promise of full robotics--they are made to be servants. They'll happily navigate crowds doing jobs nobody else wants to do (could you imagine this guy answering your door on Halloween?").

That is, of course, until they become sentient and decide they are superior. Then they're all about finding Sarah Conner and killing us all. Naturally.

But this mobile, humanoid robot--which was created by an interdisciplinary team at Carnegie Mellon University--isn't just a toy. It's a prototype for studying human-robot interaction (PDF) in the real world.
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KLM's magnificent whale of a flying machine

Having managed to catch the animation flick Battle for Terra on a super-long flight to San Francisco recently, KLM's Spruce Whale brings to mind the blue mammals innocuously flying around planet Terra's stratosphere. Now, it looks like we could have our own metallic "Jonah and the whale" machines cruising the skies at a hard-to-imagine 1,000km/h (given its less than streamlined figure), while ferrying 1,500 passengers in its belly.
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First glimpse of iRobot's putty-like ChemBot

We're getting a first glimpse of that shape-shifting ChemBot we first told you about last year, and well, it looks like the love child of a beating heart and a wad of Silly Putty.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the US Army Research Office awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to iRobot to create the flexible military bot. The maker of the Roomba and Scooba, along with University of Chicago researchers, showed off the oozy results at the Iros conference (the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) in the US this week.
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