Positive Technology Journal

Via Brainblog

The SenseCam is a badge-sized wearable camera that captures up to 2000 VGA images per day into 128Mbyte Flash memory. In addition, sensor data such as movement, light level and temperature is recorded every second. According to developers Lyndsay Williams, Ken Wood or Steve Hodges from the Sensors and Devices Group at Microsoft Research Cambridge (UK), the camera might have some potential as a cognitive aid device. For example, it could help with memory recall, by doing a rewind of the days events. Future SenseCams will also capture audio and possibly heart rate or other physiological data.

Via Siggraph 2005 Emerging Technologies web-site

Color-Enhanced Emotion is a system that recognizes facial expressions and controls skin-pigment components using a real-time processor to enhance them.

Developed by Toshiya Nakaguchi and coll. from Chiba University, the installation uses computer vision techniques to recognize feelings expressed in facial images, and then implements a hardware-accelerated real-time processing system to control the pigment components of the skin by replicating a broad range of conditions with color enhancements: fair, suntanned, pale, red-faced, etc. Registration cameras decompose the surface reflection of the face to enhance it with the colors associated with commonly observed emotions.

According to Nakaguchi and his colleagues, the Color-Enhanced Emotion project may impulse the development of a new communication paradigm and a lead to the creation of new generation of video-editing technology.

From August 2005 the new issue of PsychNology Journal is available on-line (table of Contents below)

Volume 3, Number 2, 114-222

Special Issue on Space, place and technology: Human Presence in Mediated Experiences (#2)

Editorial Preface
Luciano Gamberini, Giuseppe Riva, & Anna Spagnolli

A Review of How Space Affords Socio-Cognitive Processes during Collaboration
Nicolas Nova

Presence, Place and the Virtual Spectacle
Shaleph O'Neill

Learning Together "There"-Hybrid "Place" as a Conceptual Vantage Point for Understanding Virtual Learning Communities in Higher Education Context
Johanna Pöysä, Joost Lowyck and Päivi Häkkinen

Presence and Mediated Spaces: A Review
Lucia A. Renò

Other Contents

Some Reflections on Learning and E-learning
Cristina Zucchermaglio and Francesca Alby