New Technology

MicroOLED, a developer of efficient organic light emitting diode technologies (OLED),has announced the release of a new high-definition multimedia interface allowing its high-resolution microdisplays to connect to the Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) OMAP™ platform.

A groundbreaking innovation for mobile gaming and video entertainment, the new interface enables 3D video or 3D gaming while using specially-designed video glasses. Leveraging a single HDMI connection to the mobile phone, the solution generates both left and right SD video streams onto the microdisplays embedded within the glasses, thus allowing gamers and video enthusiasts to view and/or interact with their favorite multimedia content while on the go.

The new system also features the MicroOLED wide video graphics array plus (WVGA+) high-resolution OLED microdisplay withRGB video interface. This microdisplay is based on MicroOLED’s proprietary OLED-on-CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor) technology, which delivers high-resolution video while offering an extremely small footprint, low power consumption and outstanding image picture quality. This advancement makes the technology ideally suited for high-end video glasses that support best in class 3D image quality and mobile entertainment, whether at home or on the move.

MicroOLED’s technology successfully connects to TI’s proven OMAP platform via a single HDMI connection, delivering optimal processing performance to decode high definition video streams along with power from which MicroOLED’s technology generates two 873 x 500 pixels videos. This dual-technology combination will empower mobile telecommunications carriers to sell full, DVD-quality 3D content on their video-on-demand portals for mobile applications. The result of this effort is the creation of technologies for 3D mobile devices and applications enabling life-like user experience.

“By integrating our energy-efficient microdisplay into 3D video glasses and this 3D interface, we are enabling a full range of new mobile entertainment applications ranging from 3D gaming to HD mobile video. This is made possible only by combining TI’s OMAP platform and MicroOLED’s microdisplays, two leading technologies that deliver low power consumption and high performance,” explained Eric Marcellin-Dibon, CEO of MICROOLED.


http://www.cea.fr/

With much of the mobile world yet to migrate to 3G mobile communications, let alone 4G, European researchers are already working on a new technology able to deliver data wirelessly up to 12.5Gb/s.

The technology – known as ‘millimetre (mm)-wave’ or microwave photonics – has commercial applications not just in telecommunications (access and in-house networks) but also in instrumentation, radar, security, radio astronomy and other fields.

Despite the quantum leap in performance made possible by combining the latest radio and optics technologies to produce mm-wave components, it will probably only be a few years before there are real benefits for the average EU citizen.

This is thanks to research and development work being done by the EU-funded project IPHOBAC, which brings together partners from both academia and industry with the aim of developing a new class of components and systems for mm-wave applications.

The mm-wave band is the extremely high frequency part of the radio spectrum, from 30 to 300 gigahertz (GHz), and it gets it name from having a wavelength of one to 10mm. Until now, the band has been largely undeveloped, so the new technology makes available for exploitation more of the scarce and much-in-demand spectrum.

New products from Europe

IPHOBAC is not simply a ‘paper project’ where the technology is researched, but very much a practical exercise to develop and commercialise a new class of products with a ‘made in Europe’ label on them.

While several companies in Japan and the USA have been working on merging optical and radio frequency technologies, IPHOBAC is the world’s first fully integrated effort in the field, with a lot of different companies involved. This has resulted in the three-year project, which runs until end-2009, already having an impressive list of achievements to its name.

It recently unveiled a tiny component, a transmitter able to transmit a continuous signal not only through the entire mm-wave band but beyond. Its full range is 30 to 325GHz and even higher frequency operation is now under investigation. The first component worldwide able to deliver that range of performance, it will be used in both communications and radar systems. Other components developed by the project include 110GHz modulators, 110GHz photodetectors, 300GHz dual-mode lasers, 60GHz mode-locked lasers, and 60GHz transceivers.

Truly disruptive technology

Project coordinator Andreas Stöhr says millimetre-wave photonics is a truly disruptive technology for high frequency applications. “It offers unique capabilities such as ultra-wide tunability and low-phase noise which are not possible with competing technologies, such as electronics,” he says.

What this will mean in practical terms is not only ultra-fast wireless data transfer over telecommunications networks, but also a whole range of new applications (http://www.iphobac-survey.org).

One of these, a 60GHz Photonic Wireless System, was demonstrated at the ICT 2008 exhibition in Lyon and was voted into the Top Ten Best exhibits. The system allows wireless connectivity in full high definition (HD) between devices in the home, such as a set-top box, TV, PC, and mobile devices. It is the first home area network to demonstrate the speeds necessary for full wireless HD of up to 3Gb/s.

The system can also be used to provide multi-camera coverage of live events in HD. “There is no time to compress the signal as the director needs to see live feed from every camera to decide which picture to use, and ours is the only technology which can deliver fast enough data rates to transmit uncompressed HD video/audio signals,” says Stöhr.

The same technology has been demonstrated for access telecom networks and has delivered world record data rates of up to 12.5Gb/s over short- to medium-range wireless spans, or 1500 times the speed of upcoming 4G mobile networks.

One way in which the technology can be deployed in the relatively short term, according to Stöhr, is wirelessly supporting very fast broadband to remote areas. “You can have your fibre in the ground delivering 10Gb/s but we can deliver this by air to remote areas where there is no fibre or to bridge gaps in fibre networks,” he says.

Systems for outer space

The project is also developing systems for space applications, working with the European Space Agency. Stöhr said he could not reveal details as this has not yet been made public, save to say the systems will operate in the 100GHz band and are needed immediately.

There are various ongoing co-operation projects with industry to commercialise the components and systems, and some components are already at a pre-commercial stage and are being sold in limited numbers. There are also ongoing talks with some of the biggest names in telecommunications, including Siemens, Ericsson, Thales Communications and Malaysia Telecom.

“In just a few years time everybody will be able to see the results of the IPHOBAC project in telecommunications, in the home, in radio astronomy and in space. It is a completely new technology which will be used in many applications even medical ones where mm-wave devices to detect skin cancer are under investigation,” says Stöhr.


http://cordis.europa.eu./ictresults/

The Mathematical Institute of the University of Cologne conducts research within in the European project ICESTARS (Integrated Circuit/Electromagnetic Simulation and design Technologies for Advanced Radio Systems-on-chip). New mathematical algorithms for the next radio chip generation will be developed under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Caren Tischendorf.
According to Prof. Tischendorf: "In the future, mobile devices will provide customers with services ranging from telephony and internet to mobile TV and remote banking, anytime, anywhere. It is impossible to realize the necessary, extremely high data transfer rates within the frequency bands used today (approximately 1-3GHz)." The project serves to enable the development of low-cost wireless chips that can operate in a frequency range of up to 100GHz.

The leader of the ICESTARS project, Marq Kole of NXP Semiconductors says: "By the end of the project in 2010 we aim to have accelerated the chip development process in the extremely high frequency range by new methods and simulation tools in order to actively maintain the European chip developers on a top position over the whole spectrum of wireless communications." The ICESTARS project is funded by the European Commission within the EU 7th framework program and lead by Dutch company NXP Semiconductors. The German semiconductor company Qimonda will develop advanced analog simulation techniques in the framework of this project.

Additional partners are the software developing companies AWR-APLAC from Finland with a focus onto frequency-domain simulation algorithms and MAGWEL from Belgium with a focus onto electromagnetic simulations. Besides the University of Cologne, the university partners Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences, the University of Wuppertal from Germany and the University of Oulu from Finland are concentrating on modeling questions, algorithmic problems and simulation issues to be solved for a robust and accelerated automated testing of analog circuits with digital signal processing in the extremely high frequency range.


http://www.uni-koeln.de/

MIT engineers have built a fast, ultra-broadband, low-power radio chip, modeled on the human inner ear, that could enable wireless devices capable of receiving cell phone, Internet, radio and television signals.
Rahul Sarpeshkar, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and his graduate student, Soumyajit Mandal, designed the chip to mimic the inner ear, or cochlea. The chip is faster than any human-designed radio-frequency spectrum analyzer and also operates at much lower power.

"The cochlea quickly gets the big picture of what's going on in the sound spectrum," said Sarpeshkar. "The more I started to look at the ear, the more I realized it's like a super radio with 3,500 parallel channels."

Sarpeshkar and his students describe their new chip, which they have dubbed the "radio frequency (RF) cochlea," in a paper to be published in the June issue of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits. They have also filed for a patent to incorporate the RF cochlea in a universal or software radio architecture that is designed to efficiently process a broad spectrum of signals including cellular phone, wireless Internet, FM, and other signals.

The RF cochlea mimics the structure and function of the biological cochlea, which uses fluid mechanics, piezoelectrics and neural signal processing to convert sound waves into electrical signals that are sent to the brain.

As sound waves enter the cochlea, they create mechanical waves in the cochlear membrane and the fluid of the inner ear, activating hair cells (cells that cause electrical signals to be sent to the brain). The cochlea can perceive a 100-fold range of frequencies -- in humans, from 100 to 10,000 Hz. Sarpeshkar used the same design principles in the RF cochlea to create a device that can perceive signals at million-fold higher frequencies, which includes radio signals for most commercial wireless applications.

The device demonstrates what can happen when researchers take inspiration from fields outside their own, says Sarpeshkar.

"Somebody who works in radio would never think of this, and somebody who works in hearing would never think of it, but when you put the two together, each one provides insight into the other," he says. For example, in addition to its use for radio applications, the work provides an analysis of why cochlear spectrum analysis is faster than any known spectrum-analysis algorithm. Thus, it sheds light on the mechanism of hearing as well.

The RF cochlea, embedded on a silicon chip measuring 1.5 mm by 3 mm, works as an analog spectrum analyzer, detecting the composition of any electromagnetic waves within its perception range. Electromagnetic waves travel through electronic inductors and capacitors (analogous to the biological cochlea's fluid and membrane). Electronic transistors play the role of the cochlea's hair cells.

The analog RF cochlea chip is faster than any other RF spectrum analyzer and consumes about 100 times less power than what would be required for direct digitization of the entire bandwidth. That makes it desirable as a component of a universal or "cognitive" radio, which could receive a broad range of frequencies and select which ones to attend to.

Biological inspiration

This is not the first time Sarpeshkar has drawn on biology for inspiration in designing electronic devices. Trained as an engineer but also a student of biology, he has found many similar patterns in the natural and man-made worlds. For example, Sarpeshkar's group, in MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics, has also developed an analog speech-synthesis chip inspired by the human vocal tract and a novel analysis-by-synthesis technique based on the vocal tract. The chip's potential for robust speech recognition in noise and its potential for voice identification have several applications in portable devices and security applications.

The researchers have built circuits that can analyze heart rhythms for wireless heart monitoring, and are also working on projects inspired by signal processing in cells. In the past, his group has worked on hybrid analog-digital signal processors inspired by neurons in the brain.

Sarpeshkar says that engineers can learn a great deal from studying biological systems that have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to perform sensory and motor tasks very efficiently in noisy environments while using very little power.

"Humans have a long way to go before their architectures will successfully compete with those in nature, especially in situations where ultra-energy-efficient or ultra-low-power operation are paramount," he said. Nevertheless, "We can mine the intellectual resources of nature to create devices useful to humans, just as we have mined her physical resources in the past.


http://www.mit.edu/

Does playing violent video games make players aggressive? It is a question that has taxed researchers, sociologists, and regulators ever since the first console was plugged into a TV and the first shots fired in a shoot 'em up game.


Writing May 14 in the International Journal of Liability and Scientific Enquiry, Patrick Kierkegaard of the University of Essex, England, suggests that there is scant scientific evidence that video games are anything but harmless and that they do not lead to real world aggression. Moreover, his research shows that previous work is biased towards the opposite conclusion.

Video games have come a long way since the simplistic ping-pong and cascade games of the early 1970s, the later space-age Asteroids and Space Invaders, and the esoteric Pac-man. Today, severed limbs, drive-by shootings, and decapitated bodies captivate a new generation of gamers and gruesome scenes of violence and exploitation are the norm.

Award-winning video games, such as the Grand Theft Auto series, thrive on murder, theft, and destruction on every imaginable level explains Kierkegaard, and gamers boost their chances of winning the game by a virtual visit to a prostitute with subsequent violent mugging and recovery of monies exchanged. Games such as '25 To Life' remain controversial with storylines involving violent gangs taking hostages and killing cops, while games such as World of Warcraft and Doom are obviously unrelated to the art of crochet or gentle country walks.

Kierkegaard points out that these violent games are growing more realistic with each passing year and most relish their plots of violence, aggression and gender bias. But, he asks, "Is there any scientific evidence to support the claims that violent games contribute to aggressive and violent behaviour?"

Media scare stories about gamers obsessed with violent games and many research reports that claim to back up the idea that virtual violence breeds real violence would seem to suggest so. However, Kierkegaard has studied a range of such research papers several of which have concluded since the early 1980s that video games can lead to juvenile delinquency, fighting at school and during free play periods and violent criminal behaviour such as assault and robbery. Evidence from brain scans carried out while gamers play also seem to support a connection between playing video games and activation of regions of the brain associated with aggression.

However, Kierkegaard explains, there is no obvious link between real-world violence statistics and the advent of video games. If anything, the effect seems to be the exact opposite and one might argue that video game usage has reduced real violence. Despite several high profile incidents in US academic institutions, "Violent crime, particularly among the young, has decreased dramatically since the early 1990s," says Kierkegaard, "while video games have steadily increased in popularity and use. For example, in 2005, there were 1,360,088 violent crimes reported in the USA compared with 1,423,677 the year before. "With millions of sales of violent games, the world should be seeing an epidemic of violence," he says, "Instead, violence has declined."

Research is inconclusive, emphasises Kierkegaard. It is possible that certain types of video game could affect emotions, views, behaviour, and attitudes, however, so can books, which can lead to violent behaviour on those already predisposed to violence. The inherent biases in many of the research studies examined by Kierkegaard point to a need for a more detailed study of video games and their psychological effects.

http://www.inderscience.com/

A new study -- presented last month at the inaugural seminar sponsored by Iowa State University's Center for the Study of Violence -- showed effects of violent video games on aggression over a 3-6 month period in children from Japan as well as the United States.


ISU Distinguished Professor of Psychology Craig Anderson -- director of the Center for the Study of Violence -- presented the results from the study, which is published in the November issue of Pediatrics, the professional journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The research links an earlier ISU study of 364 American children ages 9-12 with two similar studies of more than 1,200 children between the ages of 12-18 from Japan. It found that exposure to violent video games was a causal risk factor for aggression and violence in those children.

"Basically what we found was that in all three samples, a lot of violent video game play early in a school year leads to higher levels of aggression during the school year, as measured later in the school year -- even after you control for how aggressive the kids were at the beginning of the year," said Anderson, who was recently elected president-elect for the International Society for Research on Aggression (IRSA).

ISU Assistant Professor of Psychology Douglas Gentile, the center's associate director, and Akira Sakamoto -- an associate professor of psychology at Ochanomizu University and a leading violent video games researcher from Japan -- collaborated with Anderson and additional Japanese researchers on the study.

Studying kids video game habits and aggression

Researchers assessed the children's video game habits and their level of physical aggression against each other at two different times during the school year.

"The studies varied somewhat in the length of time between what we're calling time one and time two (times between the reports of video game use and physical behavior)," Anderson said. "The shortest duration was three months and the longest was six months.

"Each of the three samples showed significant increases in aggression by children who played a lot of violent video games," he said.

Anderson began collaborating with Japanese researchers on the study several years ago when he visited Japan to give an invited address at the International Simulation and Gaming Association convention. He says Japan's cultural differences with the U.S. made it attractive for the comparison studies.

"The culture is so different and their overall violence rate is so much lower than in the U.S.," Anderson said. "The argument has been made -- it's not a very good argument, but it's been made by the video game industry -- that all our research on violent video game effects must be wrong because Japanese kids play a lot of violent video games and Japan has a low violence rate.

"By gathering data from Japan, we can test that hypothesis directly and ask, 'Is it the case that Japanese kids are totally unaffected by playing violent video games?' And of course, they aren't," he said. "They're affected pretty much the same way American kids are."

"It is important to realize that violent video games do not create schools shooters," Gentile said. "They create opportunities to be vigilant for enemies, to practice aggressive ways of responding to conflict and to see aggression as acceptable. In practical terms, that means that when bumped in the hallway, children begin to see it as hostile and react more aggressively in response to it. Violent games are certainly not the only thing that can increase children's aggression, but these studies show that they are one part of the puzzle in both America and Japan."

Nicholas Carnagey, an Iowa State psychology instructor and research assistant, and ISU Distinguished Professor of Psychology Craig Anderson collaborated on the study with Brad Bushman, a former Iowa State psychology professor now at the University of Michigan, and Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam.

They authored a paper titled "The Effects of Video Game Violence on Physiological Desensitization to Real-Life Violence," which was published in the current issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. In this paper, the authors define desensitization to violence as "a reduction in emotion-related physiological reactivity to real violence."

Their paper reports that past research -- including their own studies -- documents that exposure to violent video games increases aggressive thoughts, angry feelings, physiological arousal and aggressive behaviors, and decreases helpful behaviors. Previous studies also found that more than 85 percent of video games contain some violence, and approximately half of video games include serious violent actions.

The methodology

Their latest study tested 257 college students (124 men and 133 women) individually. After taking baseline physiological measurements on heart rate and galvanic skin response -- and asking questions to control for their preference for violent video games and general aggression -- participants played one of eight randomly assigned violent or non-violent video games for 20 minutes. The four violent video games were Carmageddon, Duke Nukem, Mortal Kombat or Future Cop; the non-violent games were Glider Pro, 3D Pinball, 3D Munch Man and Tetra Madness.

After playing a video game, a second set of five-minute heart rate and skin response measurements were taken. Participants were then asked to watch a 10-minute videotape of actual violent episodes taken from TV programs and commercially-released films in the following four contexts: courtroom outbursts, police confrontations, shootings and prison fights. Heart rate and skin response were monitored throughout the viewing.

The physical differences

When viewing real violence, participants who had played a violent video game experienced skin response measurements significantly lower than those who had played a non-violent video game. The participants in the violent video game group also had lower heart rates while viewing the real-life violence compared to the nonviolent video game group.

"The results demonstrate that playing violent video games, even for just 20 minutes, can cause people to become less physiologically aroused by real violence," said Carnagey. "Participants randomly assigned to play a violent video game had relatively lower heart rates and galvanic skin responses while watching footage of people being beaten, stabbed and shot than did those randomly assigned to play nonviolent video games.

"It appears that individuals who play violent video games habituate or 'get used to' all the violence and eventually become physiologically numb to it."

Participants in the violent versus non-violent games conditions did not differ in heart rate or skin response at the beginning of the study, or immediately after playing their assigned game. However, their physiological reactions to the scenes of real violence did differ significantly, a result of having just played a violent or a non-violent game. The researchers also controlled for trait aggression and preference for violent video games.

The researchers' conclusion

They conclude that the existing video game rating system, the content of much entertainment media, and the marketing of those media combine to produce "a powerful desensitization intervention on a global level."

"It (marketing of video game media) initially is packaged in ways that are not too threatening, with cute cartoon-like characters, a total absence of blood and gore, and other features that make the overall experience a pleasant one," said Anderson. "That arouses positive emotional reactions that are incongruent with normal negative reactions to violence. Older children consume increasingly threatening and realistic violence, but the increases are gradual and always in a way that is fun.

"In short, the modern entertainment media landscape could accurately be described as an effective systematic violence desensitization tool," he said. "Whether modern societies want this to continue is largely a public policy question, not an exclusively scientific one."

The researchers hope to conduct future research investigating how differences between types of entertainment -- violent video games, violent TV programs and films -- influence desensitization to real violence. They also hope to investigate who is most likely to become desensitized as a result of exposure to violent video games.

"Several features of violent video games suggest that they may have even more pronounced effects on users than violent TV programs and films," said Carnagey.