Integrating visible and infrared video could lead to more successful rescue and search missions, according to Brigham Young University’s Nathan Rasmussen, who has created a hybrid system that makes it easier to interpret video images. To calibrate feeds from visible and infrared cameras, Rasmussen filmed a grid of black wires on a white blackboard. Sending a current down the wires to heat them up enabled the infrared camera to “see” the wires. He also developed an algorithm to align the vertices of the grids and make up the differences in viewing angles. Warmer areas in natural environments picked up by the infrared camera appear magenta on the hybrid video stream. During tests, volunteers were asked to watch either the hybrid feed or the two separate visible and infrared video streams while a series of beeps was played. Both groups were able to identify objects in the footage, but the viewers of the hybrid video were more accurate in noting the number of beeps they had heard, which suggests the hybrid feed was easier to interpret.

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Queen’s University researchers have built the prototype of an interactive board game that enables users to touch tiles together or “pour” the contents of a tile onto another to make virtual villages rise up from the ground or soldiers swarm off a ship to do battle. Queen’s computer scientist Roel Vertegaal says the developers drew inspiration from the popular board game “Settlers of Catan,” in which players try to build settlements, cities, and roads that control certain resources. The researchers used blank hexagonal tiles that could serve as backgrounds for a digital projection. A computer then renders virtual board game action onto the tiles. Eventually, board games could use organic light-emitting diodes or E-Ink technologies, similar to those in ebook readers, which could turn each tile into a visual display. Such interactive board games could come to life in the next five to 10 years, Vertegaal says. Queen’s Human Media Lab also has experimented with projecting interfaces from smartphones onto three-dimensional objects such as Styrofoam.

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The electronics within today’s cars are under increasing scrutiny in the wake of the recent problems reported with some Toyota vehicles. Modern cars and trucks contain as many 100 million lines of computer code, more than in some jet fighters. “It would be easy to say the modern car is a computer on wheels, but it’s more like 30 or more computers on wheels,” says SAE International’s Bruce Emaus. The on-board computers control several functions, including the brakes, cruise control, and entertainment systems. Built-in electronics, as a percentage of total vehicle costs, rose to 15 percent in 2005 from five percent in the late 1970s, and likely is higher today, reports IEEE Spectrum. Throttle-by-wire technology has replaced cables or mechanical connections. These systems are designed to protect against the kind of false signals or electronic interference that could cause sudden acceleration. Emaus says the software controlling a car’s electronics is engineered with defensive programming to prevent problems, but he acknowledges it is nearly impossible to test for every eventuality.

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Researchers at Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) are designing computational tools to create maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). NERSC’s Julian Borrill, Radek Stompor, and Andrew Jaffe developed the Microwave Anisotropy Dataset Computational Analysis Package (MADCAP) with an emphasis on mapmaking. Mapping the CMB requires accurately accounting for the noise in the data. “To make a map it takes a special code to weigh and account for the noise in each pixel at each point in time,” Borrill says. The special code is called MADmap. Although MADmap was designed with CMB data in mind, “it was always intended to be independent of the specifics of any one experiment,” Borrill says. MADmap has been used in several different experiments, including MAXIMA, which mapped a portion of the northern sky in 1998, BOOMERANG, which circled the South Pole in 1999, and the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite. Another satellite, Herschel, carries a powerful infrared telescope, and two highly sensitive bolometers as part of the Photoconductor Array Camera and Spectrometer.

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