Shinoda Lab uses ultrasound so you can feel holograms.

Called the Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display, the specially calibrated ultrasound emitter gives you the impression of physical pressure at the location of a holographic object. Because you aren’t actually touching the hologram, there’s no decrease in the quality of the image. Unlike a traditional speaker, the ultrasound can be focused at a particular location, so you only feel pressure at a certain point. This precision allows AUTD to let you feel individual drops of virtual rain, a bouncing ball, or even a tiny animal running across your palm.

I think it is hilarious and awesome that a key component of  the Shinoda Lab setup is a remote control from the Nintendo Wii. Two wiimotes serve as IR sensors that track the movement of your hand in the hologram space. In order to see your hand, you have to have a tiny marker place on your finger that is very reflective to IR light. As far as hand-tracking goes, it’s a remarkably simple setup. There are some obvious limitations you can see from the video. The size of the hand isn’t well preserved in the virtual space (probably because only one part of the hand is tracked in IR). Still, I’m sure Nintendo is overjoyed with the inventiveness of the Shinoda Lab. Especially since Shinoda just exhibited AUTD at the SIGGRAPH conference in New Orleans.

The guys at Tokyo University are really knocking it out of the park these days. First they made super fast robot hands play baseball, now they could let us play catch with a virtual team. I applaud their innovation and am excited by how many different ways it can be applied. I mean, the AUTD seems custom fit to be integrated into Augmented Reality technology, haptics, and human-computer interfaces. How versatile can you get?

Interacting with visual object is going to be a big development in the fields of computing, gaming, and art. Just looking at the AUTD from the video you can see how they could be easily adapted into a multi-directional 3D setup. When that happens, the AUTD will go from a novelty to a tool that brings about full immersion virtual reality. In the meantime, I look forward to seeing more demonstrations of Tokyo University’s current setup, including its limitations and what it sounds like. Damn, this stuff is cool. I’m going to go get some wiimotes, lasers, and a subwoofer and see if I can’t  battle some Klingons.

I hesitate even to call the 40 attendees of the University “students”, for this term brings to mind images of youths in high school or undergraduate studies that are still at the very beginning of their learning curves.  Nearly all of the 40 attendees of Singularity University are at the Ph.D level or beyond in their professional and academic careers.  Visiting scholar or simply professional might be a more appropriate term.

The University is a new entity, and as such it is creating traditions and customs as it goes along.  In a presentation to the students and staff, Peter Diamandis presented several ideas aimed at creating a sense of community and tradition within the University.  A class ring, inscribed with symbolism and geekiness (the year is written in binary) will be given to each of the students and staff.  A class t-shirt will be designed and also a class poster.  Will a school song emerge at the end of the summer?  How about a student created yearbook, online or otherwise?  It is up to the students and staff to decide on these traditions as they plot out the important first year of Singularity University.

A slew of team building events and activities are in store for the students, and yet their timing and even their exact nature is still being defined.  Proposals include a sort of talent or tech show where students will volunteer to present a unique object, skill, or piece of knowledge with the rest of the class.  Given the caliber of individuals attending the University such a show is sure to uncover some pretty interesting ground.  Another event will be the “machine building” challenge, in which students will be divided into teams of 8 and given a large box of random components.  Teams will be given 6 hours to build a singularity rube goldberg device of 32, 64, or 128 moving parts to perform a specified objective.  Of course events and activities don’t have to be abstract or sensational.  There will be plenty of ultimate frisbee, night parties, and pranks to fill in the time in between the intense lectures, debates, and workshops.

Singularity Unversity (SU) is modeled after the successful International Space University (ISU) and it is not a coincidence that ISU is also being hosted this year at the NASA Ames campus in Silicon Valley.  The SU students and ISU students will have many opportunities to interact socially, further enhancing the academic and social experience for both schools.

Singularity Hub will have more coverage in the coming days and weeks.  In the meantime, below is some edited footage of first day highlights:

Disclosure: Keith Kleiner is an associate founder of Singularity University

In the eyes of many, yes. David Wiley, a professor at Brigham Young University, recently claimed that the modern university “will be irrelevant by 2020.” Why pay for expensive, boring lectures when you can tap the same vein – for free – with lectures on your iPod? What use are pricey textbooks when their content is widely available online? Critics see the ivory towers of higher education crashing down, quickly replaced by the pillars of the information age. But are these predictions prophetic, or simply alarmist?

It isn’t a new argument. Remember that scene in Good Will Hunting? “You wasted $150,000 on an education you could have got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.” Theoretically, this is true: the informational content offered at a university could be acquired elsewhere, for free – assuming, of course, a tremendous amount of time and dedication on the part of the self-taught student. The general argument being made nowadays is that the increased ease-of-access ushered in with the information age will make this sort of thing more common. You don’t have to get a library card, I guess.

Well, if history is any indication, the self-made scholar is a rare breed. This is because education isn’t really reducible to its informational content. Universities offer more than the bulk of knowledge dumped into its students’ brains; otherwise, we would just buy the textbooks and skip the tuition. William Yeats once said “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” If we allow that teachers can accomplish more than simply presenting material – something like those inspirational scenes from Dead Poets’ Society – it’s difficult to see Google replacing the classroom anytime soon.

This is not to say that education isn’t changing. The structure and approach of universities will have to evolve alongside the information age (e.g. Singularity U). Mark Taylor argued recently in a New York Times op-ed that a radical overhaul of the university – abolishing both disciplines and tenure, to name a few – is needed to preserve its relevance. David Bell’s convincing rebuttal in The New Republic outlined many of the ways in which the best universities are already adapting and changing to the times.  It’s unlikely that the university will – to use Taylor’s analogy – go the way of Detroit.  Instead, we’ll see some things start to change, while others undeniably remain the same.

One institution that will persist is the high standard of quality placed in a university degree. Suffice to say, most of us don’t want our dams and bridges being built by someone with an engineering degree from Wikipedia. Yes, students may find themselves enrolled in more online classes.  But the real-world applications of this knowledge, the kind that comes from smelly chemistry labs and gross dissection tables, won’t come digitally anytime soon.  Rigid and static universities that fail to adapt will fall to the wayside, perhaps replaced by their online counterparts. But the best universities will integrate digital technologies into their traditional curriculum, and emerge all the better for it.

Here we find a paradox within the argument as to universities’ collective fate.  The same technologies that are proposed as replacements for teachers and classes are actually improving both.  Recorded lectures don’t really replace the educational experience of taking a class, but they sure help when you’re trying to remember what your professor said at the beginning of the semester.  New media don’t teach students by themselves, but they are excellent resources in the hands of a capable educator.  If a technology can teach a certain topic better than a human can (say, a game to teach foreign language), it will be deployed to that purpose – but the teacher still take over where the technologies fail (which is to say, they are tools). Even as new technologies are offered as the new teachers, they make the traditional teachers even better at their work.

Maybe someday, an online degree will produce the same quality and expertise as Stanford or MIT.  But I wouldn’t bet on it. Education is about getting students to think critically.  It’s about climbing up on the table to get a different perspective. And until the glow of your computer screen or an mp3 lecture can light that fire, the university won’t be pushing up the daisies anytime soon.

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Full Disclosure: The author will be attending graduate school in the fall.  Heh.