Aldebaran’s mission is to “…create and deliver affordable, autonomous, and easily programmable humanoid robots.” Though robots-for-the-home are most likely still quite a few years away, I always like to check out the new and emerging offerings robotic companies are producing. Nao seems pretty well sorted, but I can’t tell from the video how useful he’ll [...]

Some really clever researchers at the University of  Tokyo’s Shinoda lab have figured out how to rig up a haptic-feedback hologram system. Using two Nintendo Wii remotes (Wiimotes) to figure out a person’s location, an image is displayed on a convex mirror to generate a holographic effect. That’s been done before, but the the really [...]

Captology is a very interesting research area in human factors and human-computer interaction. The etymology of captology comes from ‘Computers as persuasive technologies’. The goal of captology is to understand how to use existing and emerging technologies to influence a person’s behaviors and beliefs. Check out the Stanford lab to find out more. From their [...]

Augmented cognition makes for some really cutting edge human factors research. Basically, the point of AugCog is to figure out how to use technology to overcome cognitive limitations. So how does it (will it) work? Well, using a very basic example, you first have to figure out some way of measuring a persons neurological and [...]

The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society is pretty much the place to be if you’re interested in HF or ergonomics. I like to think of HF as the pursuit to make life easier. Check it out, and don’t forget to read more about the technical groups – from the site: “The TGs provide a forum [...]

Apparently people could carry out mental arithmetic problems much better back in 1979. In a recent study, these Standford researchers found people could only correctly answer problems in the easy category, while those in 1979 could perform mental arithmetic in the medium and difficult categories. I think it all went down hill after the calculator [...]

One of my professors, Anne McLaughlin, co-runs this blog. Lot’s of interesting human factors related posts on news and trends. The commentary is quite good, definitely check it out if your interested in human factors and ergonomics.