2/14/2013
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The Coordinated Science Laboratory was proud to participate in the University of Illinois' Engineering Open House on March 12-13.
Our exhibits included:
Automated Traffic System - B14
An automated road traffic system may be possible in the future! Our research in control, wireless communication and software will help make it happen. This demonstration shows our automated driving system and some of the practical considerations involved in making this future technology a reality.
Controllerless Video Games - 369
We will demonstrate intuitive control of video games using only a depth camera. This will provide a higher level of immersion in a game than was previously possible with using controllers.
Eye Gaze Correction with Depth Cameras - 369
In the past, all we could capture with a camera was color. Not any more. This exhibit uses state of the art “depth” cameras, which have the ability to sense the depth of a scene and record it in picture format.
These depth cameras are used to correct mis-aligned eye gaze, which often troubles teleconferencing systems. The problem is that the person we are talking to is displayed on the screen but our camera is to the side of the screen. Thus, we do not seem to be making eye contact. With the depth cameras, we are able to create a virtual camera on the screen, so that it appears as if you are looking directly into the camera, while looking at the screen.
Lemelson-MIT Collegiate Student Prize at Illinois finalist displays – Lobby
The $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Collegiate Student Prize at Illinois is awarded on an annual basis to an undergraduate or graduate student who has created or improved a product or process, applied a technology in a new way, redesigned a system, or demonstrated remarkable inventiveness in other ways. Several finalists and the winner of the 2010 prize will demonstrate and display their innovations.
Mind-Reading: Novel brain-machine interfaces – Lower Level Lobby
Mind-reading isn’t just for fortune tellers! Students will demonstrate how mind-reading is possible using a novel brain-machine interface based on EEG technology. In this exhibit, demonstrators will spell sentences and control unmanned aerial vehicle using just thought. This technology could be applied to helping the disabled, military applications, search and rescue operations and video gaming.
Online Ouija Board - Lower Level Lobby
The Online Ouija Board will not allow you to speak with ghosts (sorry!). But it does borrow its concept from the Ouija game, which uses a board printed with the alphabet to help communicate with ghosts. A player asks a question and “answers” are spelled out by moving the glass from one letter to another, without any one person controlling the movement.
With the Online Ouija Board, each of five players is actively moving a token in an effort to spell a word that appears on the screen. The catch is that four other teammates are trying to spell the same word, but none of you knows what direction the others are pushing. In addition, you can only control the token in a single direction, with random forces (other players) also pushing on the token. In order to succeed, you will have to communicate with your teammates via a chat room.
The project’s aim is to explore how people and machines, with access to partial information and limited control, communicate and coordinate to achieve a common goal.
Robots - B16
Come see the latest in robotic research at the Coordinated Science Laboratory! Using advancements in information technology, researchers are investigating such tasks as remote construction, search and rescue, salvage operations, and exploration. These are too complex at the present time to be carried out by fully autonomous robots but may be carried out bynetworks of semi-autonomous robots, coordinated by human operators.
What if you were trying to drive a remote control car but there was a lot of delay between your command and the car’s execution? Understanding how human operators overcome these challenges is the focus of research in our lab.