Technology

PAGING Dr Google! The search giant has entered the medical arena with Google Health , a website which helps users find doctors and medical information. What’s more, if any of your healthcare providers have signed up to the service, Google Health allows you to import your medical records from them and share the data with other doctors.

But Bob Gellman, a privacy consultant in Washington DC, warns that if you use Gmail and Google’s search engine, and now entrust Google with your medical data, the company may have “more information about you than any other source”. Google Health, which is so far open to US residents only, and rivals such as Microsoft’s HealthVault are not covered by US privacy regulations concerning health records, although they do promise to protect personal data.

WHO’S got an eye on our spy satellites? The Pentagon wants to know, and is developing sensors that can tell when lasers are pointed at them.

Lasers can be used to burn out cameras on reconnaissance satellites, or destroy the craft completely. But from the ground it’s hard to tell if the unusual behaviour of a spacecraft is

1.4metres, or 28 times its own body height – the distance a 5-centimetre-high grasshopper robot can jump into the air

Special effects that use the movement of real actors to animate digital characters were once the preserve of movie studios with multimillion-dollar budgets. Now a new motion-capture technology could allow even low-budget film-makers to use sophisticated animation.

Existing vision-processing software captures an actor’s movements by tracking the path of visible markers placed all over their body. But it can lose track of them, creating errors that have to be corrected manually. “This contributes significantly to production costs,” says Christian Theobalt of Stanford University in Palo Alto.

Attempts to capture motion without using markers have so far produced inaccurate results, but Theobalt and his team from Stanford and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken,

Germany, claim to have cracked it. Their system first takes a laser scan of the actor to produce a 3D digital clone. Eight cameras then capture the actor’s movements from different angles as they act the scene. For each frame, vision-processing software finds the outline of the actor in the different images, which it uses to adjust the position and shape of the virtual clone.

As a finishing touch, the software compares the images again to record the changing position of details like creases in the actor’s clothing as they move. Previously actors needed to wear tight clothes to avoid confusing the marker-tracking software, but the new system can even capture the ruffle of a skirt to produce a more realistic animation. The work will be presented at the Siggraph conference in Los Angeles in August.

DIGITAL CLONES GET THE MOVES

caused by a laser or simply by space weather.

So the US air force has begun a research programme called Space Situational Awareness, which will launch experimental sensors into orbit in 2011.

The move is likely to be seen by many as a further escalation of the militarisation of space. In January 2007, China destroyed an orbiting satellite and in February 2008 the US did the same – raising fears that space may become a future battleground.

Need a hug? Brian Mullen at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst may have the answer. He has invented an inflatable vest that fits inside the lining of a jacket and delivers a “portable hug” to children with autism. Deep pressure touch stimulation, as the therapy is known, seems to ease these children’s anxiety, and Mullen’s device provides it without drawing attention to the wearer.

Now you can convince would-be burglars you are tucked up at home watching TV when you are actually sunning yourself on the beach. FakeTV, by Xenso of Malaysia, projects TV-like light patterns of flickering, fading, onscreen motion and ad-break transitions onto walls and ceilings. The device, which runs on just a few watts, has a small computer that sends the patterns to a bank of LEDs (www.faketv.com).

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Los Angeles film editor Lynzee Klingman, who has just leased a hybrid car for the first time. In April, sales of hybrids in the US jumped 58 per cent compared with last year, despite an overall slump in new vehicle sales, as the price of gasoline approaches $4 per gallon (Los Angeles Times, 23 May)

“You know that self-righteousness that Prius drivers exude? I love it!”

–Dancing has never looked easier–

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Google starts to play doctor

Watching who watches the spies

www.newscientist.com 31 May 2008 | NewScientist | 25