Over the course of a decade, robotics engineer David Hanson has been working with great minds to create robots that are as socially interactive as humans.

Microsoft’s Project Natal, the gesture-recognition technology shown off at E3, is now coming to the office to boost productivity.  In a demonstration to CNET, Microsoft showed off a futuristic desktop solution that transforms the entire office into a collection of displays and input devices.
The hardware is in the later stages of development, but it remains to be seen what applications will be most efficient in this gesture control environment.  The massive displays allow for multiple work spaces, like notes or photos, but we wonder how such a complex control center will work in the everyday office.  The potential for the [...]

Swedish software and design company The Astonishing Tribe are currently developing Augmented ID, an augmented reality concept for mobile phones. This utilizes facial recognition software (supplied by Polar Rose) to visualize the digital identities of those around you.
By simply aiming your mobile device at someone, you would be able to access that individual’s pre-selected information through floating icons that would appear around their image. These could contain anything from a phone number and email address to links to their favorite content or social networking platforms.
Here’s a short video demonstration:

[via Engadget]

The Keihin Electric Express Railway Co. in Japan is scanning the smiles of employees every day to improve customer service. The facial recognition system detects eye movements, lips, wrinkles, and rates the smile from 0 to 100. It then gives suggestions to employees on whether they are too serious and not smiling enough.
The Mainichi Daily News reports:
The smile-measuring software has been developed by Kyoto-based precision equipment maker Omron Corp.
…For those with low scores, advice like “You still look too serious,” or “Lift up your mouth corners,” will be displayed on the screen.
Some 530 employees of the Tokyo-based railway company will [...]

At this week’s E3 exhibition in Los Angeles, Microsoft is showing off a device they’re claiming will both revolutionize video gaming and render obsolete its hitherto requisite accessory—the controller. Dubbed “Project Natal,” the peripheral is an array of microphones, an RGB camera, and a depth sensor, that work in concert to pull off sophisticated face, voice, and gesture recognition that allows full-body movement to translate into intricate on-screen commands. Microsoft is proclaiming the device not just a quantum leap in gaming, but also the next step in making its Xbox the pinnacle of home entertainment, allowing Natal to hook up [...]

The City of Ely Community College in the UK is using facial recognition technology to take attendance. Instead of doing a roll call, students check in and out of the building by having their faces scanned by an infa-red light. The scanned image is then compared against an archived image, and matched up to make sure it’s  them.
It’s reported both students and teachers are loving the new system. The school’s principal claims the staff saves about an hour and a half a day that would have been normally used to manually record attendance data, and that students enjoy the [...]

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