Headsets augment artists' reality

Artists and researchers at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague are using new visualization and tracking technologies to develop immersive environments for gaming, medicine, and the arts. One of the devices, the Visette45 SXGA, is the type of head-mounted display used by the artists creating literary hypermedia (a blend of text, sound, and image) in the 3D-VR cave at Brown University.

The Visette45 has a larger viewable area, higher resolution image support, and a see-through option for augmented reality applications, features not available in many headsets in the same price range, according to manufacturer Cybermind Nederland. The Visette45 is not cheap, about $10,000.

The Royal Academy artists are using the Visette45 to track real and virtual objects in its AR+RFID Lab (www.kabk.nl/lab), the first I've seen that explores these technologies simultaneously. In augmented reality, virtual objects are layered over real-world objects in your field of vision.

RFID is the reader-and-tag technology used for contactless payments and to track products and people. A modified AR headset in the AR+RFID Lab, for example, could detect the tags on real-world objects and prompt virtual objects to appear in the wearer's field of vision.

Some artists expect that AR and RFID will converge with GPS in coming years. That will probably blur our perceptions of what is real and what is virtual. "AR is about augmentation of real space with virtual objects, and RFID [is] about giving physical objects a digital identity," said Pawel Pokutycki, coordinator assistant of the AR+RFID Lab and a lecturer at the Royal Academy. "Both technologies connect and mix the physical [ analog ] and the virtual [ digital ] environments with each other."

Due next year: This face mask will snap pictures under the seas

Any New Englander who takes to the water before July deserves a medal. A new underwater mask with a built-in camera will help you prove you were there.

The Aquatic Explorer Underwater Camera Mask, from Zocker Toys, is waterproof to about 3 meters, which is perfect for exploring the shallows along the shore in Hyannis or the clam beds at Megansett Beach. The camera is built into the mask, like a third eye. You line up the camera by placing your subject in the crosshairs on the mask's lenses.

The Camera Mask, when completed, is likely to include a 2.0 megapixel camera and to support MPEG video recording, said Zocker vice president Melanie Pearson.

Aquatic shutterbugs will be able to download the images and videos to their PCs via a USB connection .

The first version of the Camera Mask will be for children age 6 and up. Later versions will include adult sizes and will be waterproof to depths below 3 meters. They will also have attachable lights, higher resolution image capacity, more built-in memory, and card expansion slots.

Zocker plans to release the camera mask in the United States in the second half of 2008.

Bluetooth adapter opens iPod gear to other players, even cellphones

Your iPod boombox may have just became more valuable: You will soon be able to mount a tiny module, the FIPO, into any iPod-ready device, making it available to your Bluetooth-enabled phone or MP3 player. In other words, you can use the iHome Alarm Clock for iPod not only to play music from your Apple device, but your new Nokia or Motorola music phone, as well.

The FIPO auto-pairs with other Bluetooth devices once you plug it into the clock radio or stereo system's iPod connector. You can then use your mobile music phone to stream (and play, pause, and skip) songs to the system.

The Bluetooth stereo FIPO, expected to cost about $100, will provide better sound quality than the FM transmitters you can plug into standard headphone jacks, which transmit an analog signal, says FIPO manufacturer Anycom Technologies AG (anycom.com). The module's range, I expect, will also be better than that of an FM transmitter.