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We have finished study of Portrait Catalog under the disguise as Most Wanted during the Ung08 youth festival! The festival lasted four 5 days during which a countless number of teenagers visited the tent, more than 400 had their picture taken and around 300 installed the app!
We are now analysing the data from the study.

Mattias Jacobsson, Ylva Fernaeus and Rob Tieben made a rendezvous in Aarhus, Denmark where they presented the paper entitled "The Look, the Feel and the Action: Making Sets of ActDresses for Robotic Movement" at the Designing Interactive Systems conference. Plenty of amazing research were presented together with live demonstrations of art and technology pieces e.g. lumiBots. The contrasting artistic music like the improvisational jazz and the ambient live band during the wonderful -probably the best in the world- conference dinner are things that attendees will remember for quite some time.

An existing surgical robot could be used to perform complex regional anesthesia procedures -- in theory, allowing expert anesthesiologists to perform robot-assisted procedures from remote locations, according to a new study.

A robotic wheelchair is being developed that will help children learn to 'drive'. In a new article, researchers describe the testing of ROLY -- robot-assisted learning for young drivers -- in a group of children without disabilities and one child with cerebral palsy.

FAL and Kulturskolan are running a mobile mugshot competition for youths 13-19 years at the Ung 08 festival! You can get your photo taken and share it using our mobile app, the Portrait Catalog. The best networker (who shares the most pictures) will win a phone from our partner Sony Ericsson. The event runs until Saturday, July 14. Here are some pictures from the Most Wanted tent in Kungsträdgården, Stockholm...

The first prototype robots capable of developing emotions as they interact with their human caregivers and expressing a whole range of emotions have been finalized by researchers.

Wielding two claws, a motor and a tail that swings like a grandfather clock's pendulum, a small robot named ROCR ("rocker") scrambles up a carpeted, 8-foot wall in just over 15 seconds -- the first such robot designed to climb efficiently and move like human rock climbers or apes swinging through trees.

The Portrait Catalog is a mobile phone app that lets you share a picture of yourself with your friends. The twist is that you can only get a picture directly from another person via Bluetooth, so to collect pictures you have to meet people in real life! We will be giving away the Portrait Catalog at the Ung 08 festival, a 5-day event for youths between 13 and 19 organized by the City of Stockholm. Users will also have a chance to get their personal photo taken, and share this through Facebook and become the festival's Most Wanted. To encourage the use of the app we are giving away Sony Ericsson Xperia phones as the prize for the coolest photo and for the best networker - the person who has shared the most photos during the festival! You can find us at Kungsträdgården in Stockholm during August 8 to 14.

This week has been about researching the next steps for the germination x design. Principally looking at how we can use the game to demonstrate and exploit some of the work on the Lirec project. I’ve had a speculative look at how we could use companions to fit the theme of a permaculture game, and ended up with some strange combination of bickering greek gods and plant spirits.

I’ve also been playing with the AgentMind code from our partners at Heriot Watt and got some of my own AI agents running and interacting with objects in a test world. At the other end, the client game code is now free from flash dependencies, so it should be possible to target HTML5 canvas and flash in the same code.

I’ve also switched from svn to git for everything and moved to gitorious. Germination X is here and all the rest of my mess is now located here.

The loneliness of the long-distance robot: A robot named Ranger walked 14.3 miles in about 11 hours, setting an unofficial world record. A human -- armed with nothing more than a standard remote control for toys -- steered the untethered robot.

Feasibility studies conducted by bioengineers have demonstrated that a robot -- without any human assistance -- can locate a man-made, or phantom, lesion in simulated human organs, guide a device to the lesion and take multiple samples during a single session.

What can a wide-eyed, talking robot teach us about trust? A lot, according to psychology professors who are conducting innovative research to determine how humans decide to trust strangers -- and if those decisions are accurate.

Engineers have built an insect-like robot with hundreds of tiny legs. Compared to other such microrobots, this new model excels in its ability to carry heavy loads -- more than seven times its own weight -- and move in any direction.

A swarm of flying robots soars into a blazing forest fire. With insect-like precision and agility, the machines land on tree trunks and bound over rough terrain before deploying crucial sensors and tools to track the inferno and its effects. This is a scenario one researcher thinks may not be so far off.

Lars Erik Holmquist recently held a remote lecture on Designing Digital Artifacts, as part of the course Advanced Contextual Design at Keio University. The lecture was recorded (as PowerPoint slideshow with voiceover) and is now available for viewing in two 30-minute segments. You can view the lectures by clicking on the links below, or download the files to view later.

The first part of the lecture introduces the concept of digital artifacts and puts in in the context of the development of interactive and embedded computing systems.Click here to view the first part or download for offline viewing (307 MB .mov file)

The second part gives a number of examples of digital artifacts designed by the author and collaborators, drawn from over ten years of research.Click here to see the second part or download for offline viewing (299 MB .mov file)

Two robotics events were designed to prove the viability of advanced technologies for robotic automation of manufacturing and microrobotics.

Robot soccer players are warming up to compete in this month's RoboCup 2010 world championship in Singapore. A new algorithm will help newly created robots to predict the ball's behavior based on physics principles.

Between 6th and 19th of June we will present the Digital Flowerwall at the Stockholm LOVE festival together with KTH. Please come and visit us at the ICT pavilion set up at "Skeppsbron" and try it out! Kudos to GoldWare for providing additional hardware.

Lars Erik Holmquist has a guest post at CrunchGear (also featured on TechCrunch) about the past, present and future of mobile and ubiquitous computing. It relates ubicomp research - including many FAL projects - to the possibilities that have opened up with new infrastructures, and argues that the rate of innovation in mobile services is about to take a quantum leap. Follow the link to read the whole article:The Age of the Mobile Mash-Up by Lars Erik Holmquist

Researchers have made an important fundamental advance in robotics, in work that should lead toward robots that not only can walk and run effectively, but use little energy in the process. By achieving an optimal approach with robotic mechanisms, studies are moving closer to robots that could take on dangerous missions in the military, create prosthetic limbs for humans that work much better, or even help some people who use wheelchairs to gain "walking" abilities.