BUSSINESS INFORMATION

Gamers will soon be able to interact with the virtual world using their thoughts and emotions alone.

A neuro-headset which interprets the interaction of neurons in the brain will go on sale later this year.

"It picks up electrical activity from the brain and sends wireless signals to a computer," said Tan Le, president of US/Australian firm Emotiv.

"It allows the user to manipulate a game or virtual environment naturally and intuitively," she added.

The brain is made up of about 100 billion nerve cells, or neurons, which emit an electrical impulse when interacting. The headset implements a technology known as non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG) to read the neural activity.


Ms Le said: "Emotiv is a neuro-engineering company and we've created a brain computer interface that reads electrical impulses in the brain and translates them into commands that a video game can accept and control the game dynamically."

Headsets which read neural activity are not new, but Ms Le said the Epoc was the first consumer device that can be used for gaming.

"This is the first headset that doesn't require a large net of electrodes, or a technician to calibrate or operate it and does require gel on the scalp," she said. "It also doesn't cost tens of thousands of dollars."

The use of Electroencephalography in medical practice dates back almost 100 years but it is only since the 1970s that the procedure has been used to explore brain computer interfaces.The Epoc technology can be used to give authentic facial expressions to avatars of gamers in virtual worlds. For example, if the player smiles, winks, grimaces the headset can detect the expression and translate it to the avatar in game.

It can also read emotions of players and translate those to the virtual world. "The headset could be used to improve the realism of emotional responses of AI characters in games," said Ms Le.

"If you laughed or felt happy after killing a character in a game then your virtual buddy could admonish you for being callous," she explained.

The $299 headset has a gyroscope to detect movement and has wireless capabilities to communicate with a USB dongle plugged into a computer.

The Emotiv said the headset could detects more than 30 different expressions, emotions and actions.

They include excitement, meditation, tension and frustration; facial expressions such as smile, laugh, wink, shock (eyebrows raised), anger (eyebrows furrowed); and cognitive actions such as push, pull, lift, drop and rotate (on six different axis).

Gamers are able to move objects in the world just by thinking of the action.

Emotiv is working with IBM to develop the technology for uses in "strategic enterprise business markets and virtual worlds"

Paul Ledak, vice president, IBM Digital Convergence said brain computer interfaces, like the Epoc headset were an important component of the future 3D Internet and the future of virtual communication.




By Darren Waters
Technology editor, BBC News website, San Francisco

Dubai: The local IT industry should receive a boost from new initiatives from the public and private sector.

Microsoft Gulf said it is talks with Dubai Government to set up a Microsoft Innovation Centre. The centre would be a partnership between academia, the public sector and the private sector.

The theme would be "digital lifestyle", and sponsor applications for digital homes, digital communities and the digital city, according to Vimal Sethi, developer and platform group director at Microsoft Gulf.

Recently Microsoft set up a similar centre in Kuwait focusing on government services.

"We are the final stages of conversations and many parties are involved," Sethi said.
The reasons for the lack of innovation locally are many. The low levels of venture capital (VC) funding for IT - ironic in a high liquidity market such as the Gulf - is exacerbated by a lack of awareness among college students, Sethi said.

"If you say VC, most students have no idea what you are talking about," he said.

Also, recent reports have warned that the fear of failure is another impediment to the growth of entrepreneurship.

"The UAE does not lack entrepreneurial capacity, it lacks entrepreneurial confidence and formal financial support facilities," noted a report called The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2006.

"The common stereotype of entrepreneurial activity within the UAE is that things are 'booming,'" the report stated. "However, this is a strong misconception and could not be further from reality."

"News of failure in an enterprise may well quickly permeate the close knit national community," it continued. Instead, "avoiding the risk of failure by not starting up a new enterprise seems to be the option of choice."

Sure to have an impact is the recent $10 billion education endowment from Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai.

In a May announcement, he described "knowledge-based" sprouting in the UAE and surrounding countries, and that spending on scientific research should be boosted.

The endowment should nurture a new generation of young businesspeople, said Charbel Fakhoury, general manager of Microsoft Gulf. "If you ask anyone in the Gulf, the greatest challenge today is staffing," he said.

DUBAI: India and Kuwait have reached an agreement on resolving a dispute on air traffic rights, over which the gulf state had threatened to stop Indian national carriers flying there from today. Just before the expiry of the deadline, an MoU was signed last night by the civil aviation authorities of the two countries in Kuwait city after a marathon negotiations lasting three days, Indian ambassador to Kuwait M Ganapthi said.

Ganapthi said after the MoU was signed that the flight services between the two countries will continue freely and unhindered, much to the benefit of the thousands of passengers who were fearing a disruptions in services between the two countries. He said the talks were held in a friendly and cordial atmosphere and the final result shows the depth of the relations between the two countries. "From the passenger and public view point, the MoU has been a big success," he added.

The points in agreement include additional 4,000 seat taking the total to 12,000 seats in each directions, but the fifth freedom destinations will apply to the earlier 8,000 seats. India has agreed to allow Kuwait carriers to operate flights to Hyderabad, Kolkata (both with immediate effect) and Bangalore (from the winter 2008 schedule).

The spat began when Kuwait decided to stop Indian carriers from flying into the country from July 1. In a bid to break the deadlock, a high-level Indian delegation comprising civil aviation ministry joint secretary R K Singh and representatives of A-I and IA arrived in Kuwait on Thursday and since then talks continued.

The agreement, reached between the Kuwait and Indian governments, would be a relief to thousands of passengers, booked on both Indian and Kuwait airlines, ending the uncertainty over their travel plans. The Indian delegation left for the country early today. Meanwhile, Air India regional director Freddie Vaz and Indian regional director Abhay Pathak have both said they would operate the flights from Kuwait as scheduled.

TOKYO (KUNA): Japan’s second-biggest trading house Mitsui Co said Tuesday it has won a $1.3 billion order from the Kuwait government to build a power and desalination plant at Shuaiba about 50 kilometers south of Kuwait City. Mitsui has received an unofficial notice from Kuwait’s Ministry of Electricity and Water, the firm said in a statement, adding that a formal agreement will be sealed in July, with the facility slated to go into operation as early as 2010. The project is one of Mitsui’s largest infrastructure orders in the Middle East.

Construct
The Tokyo-based trading giant will construct a cogeneration facility in which power is first generated through gas turbines and then exhaust heat spins stream turbines to generate more power. It will also build a desalination plant that boils seawater using exhaust heat from the steam turbines. The facility will have an output capacity of 750 megawatts of power, enough to supply the equivalent of some 300,000 households. It will also be able to produce about 200,000 tons of water daily, according to Mitsui. The Japanese firm will be the lead contractor in the full-turnkey project, and handle overall planning, procurement, engineering and installation. It plans to order the power generation equipment from South Korea’s Hyundai Engineering Construction Co and desalination equipment from Italian engineering firm Fisia Italimpianti. Mitsui has recently won projects in Abu Dhabi and Jordan for power generation plants, as well as a railway construction project in Saudi Arabia. A contract is to be signed between Kuwait and the second largest commercial company in Japan (Mitsui Company) toward the building of a power-generation station and a water desalination plant in the Shuaiba industrial region, south of Kuwait, announced in Kuwait City on Tuesday by Minister of Electricity and Water Muhammad Al-Olaim.


Project
The mega project will have the capacity of producing 750 megawatts of power and 45,000 gallons of water daily. The contract has been sent to the State Audit Bureau for routine procedural examination before final approval. The building of this project comes at a time when the country is facing some shortages in both power and water.

Google Inc. has expanded beyond a one-size-fits-all view of Web search to tie together its efforts to offer personalized Web searches under the iGoogle brand, officials said Monday.

In recent weeks, the Web search leader has introduced a variety of new customization features to its basic personalized home page, first introduced two years ago, which links users to thousands of regularly updated, optional features on one page.


New features include a choice of themes with custom colors that users of Google's (Charts, Fortune 500) personalized home page can select. Google also introduced the ability for users to refer back to their personal Web search history over the past several years.

"We are working to bring all this together," Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president in charge of search and user experience, told reporters during a briefing at the Googleplex, the company's Silicon Valley headquarters.

"iGoogle refers to what we formerly called the Google Personalized Home Page and the ecosystem we are building with thousands of gadgets [optional features] on your home page," Mayer said in an interview on the sidelines of the briefing.

As part of its effort to render more personally relevant Web search results, Google said Monday it has introduced a geographic aspect to search results based on the location that individual users select as their home location on Google Maps.

Web history is an optional feature and only available to users who have signed up and given permission to Google to track their Web surfing activity.

The new personalization features will begin to appear on Google user pages starting at midnight California time Monday.

NEW YORK (AP) -- Acrobatics, blaring music and plenty of hype accompanied Microsoft Corp.'s long-delayed debut of its new Windows Vista operating system.

Hours before the software went on sale in New York, dancers clad in Microsoft colors dangled from ropes high above street level Monday and unfurled flags to form the red, green, blue and yellow Windows logo against a building wall.

Later, two explosively loud, percussion-heavy rock bands riled up Microsoft enthusiasts amid flashing lights at the Nokia Theatre -- temporarily renamed the Windows Vista Theatre -- in Times Square. As employees at Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, headquarters watched live video feeds, company-colored balloons dropped from the ceiling, a few wielding prizes.

Vista went on sale in 70 countries Tuesday, along with new versions of Microsoft Exchange e-mail software and the flagship Office business suite, which includes Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Several retailers even held midnight openings.

But unlike the recent launches of next-generation game machines like Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3, customers haven't been camping out for days.

"When I look at Windows Vista, I see a technology that is interesting, that is relevant, but to some extent is evolutionary," said Al Gillen, an analyst at the technology research group IDC. "I do not believe it will create a lot of motivation for people to rush out and get a new operating system." (Watch a preview of Vista )

About a dozen people were at a CompUSA store in Raleigh, North Carolina, just before midnight to be among the first to get Vista. The store reopened at 10 p.m., offering customers coffee and discounts on other items including printers and recordable DVDs, and planned to stay open until at least 2 a.m.

"I guess I'm a geek at heart," said Chad Janko, 29, who showed up to buy Vista. "I wanted to process the whole thing myself before all the reviews surface about it."

Mike Johnson, 29, of nearby Rolesville, North Carolina, bought a laptop computer with the new software preinstalled.

"The biggest reason for me is the new interface. It looks so much better than XP," he said. "Apple computers have had nice graphical interfaces for some time. But it's the first time Windows has even approached that level."

The store advertised the special sale in Sunday newspapers and ran radio ads to let people know it was the only place in the area where people could get their hands on Vista at midnight.

"For geeks like us, this is very exciting," manager Damon Didier said, adding that he expected Vista's launch to boost computer sales. "It gives people a compelling reason to buy a computer now."

In an interview, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said the company wasn't pushing midnight sales events -- after all, consumers can download it over the Web for the first time