An e-commerce solution developed for Alpine tourism combining geographical 3D information with actual offers for visitors has met with success and is being extended to other tourist regions.

In the pilot version created by IST-Project TourServ, a portal site was developed and tested in the Italian winter resort of Scopello, available for use by foreign travel agents and tourists on site to prepare actual and relevant information tips. Among the information supplied is lodging, travel, weathe

Planning a visit to one of Europe’s remote nature reserves? An information system under development by the REGEO project will allow you to plan hiking routes in 3D from your PC or access local restaurants over a PDA once you have arrived.

Four different nature parks in Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany and Poland tested a geo-multimedia information system developed by IST project REGEO, based on mainly four components that can work independently.

The Web application is bas

Being able to predict customer trends has just become much easier thanks to new research sponsored by the ESRC into the use of website and other new media data.

A project led by Dr Bruce Hardie of the London Business School has resulted in the development of simple systems – or mathematical models – which can enable companies to describe, diagnose and forecast the behaviour of subscribers to these services.

Dr Hardie said: “Website operators are collecting volumes of data all the ti

A new initiative to implement open, ontology-based software on 12 European travel websites, creating an electronic market place for tourism is set to allow the travel industry to share information across geographical, linguistic and technological boundaries.

The Tourism Harmonisation Network (THN), a consortium open to public and private organisations set up by the Harmonise project partners with funding from the European Commission ’s IST programme, is currently in the process of launc

Draw a picture on the computer and it immediately shows up on the screen of a hand-held computer in Africa. The person with the palm computer can then use the tiny screen to access a supercomputer in France to perform advanced graphic calculations that a number of logged-on people can see simultaneously. This solution is called Verse, a new protocol for 3D graphics created by a 27-year-old with no previous knowledge of programming at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. Verse was re

University of Central Florida researchers are looking into how people form opinions about others through e-mail

Online romantics trying to win over valentines and businesspeople seeking to impress colleagues and clients may get some help from University of Central Florida research looking into how people form opinions about others through e-mail.

Professor Michael Rabby of UCF’s Nicholson School of Communication and graduate student Amanda Coho want to find out what mes

Potential applications in robotic surgery, more

The bubbly clarinet solo that opens a 1940s swing classic begins, setting a pair of dancers in motion. They move in constant rhythm, varying their steps to the song’s changing tempo. Slight pushes and pulls of the dancers’ hands allow seamless transitions between swing-outs, tuck turns and Texas Tommies.

You might call this swing dancing. Or you might call it a highly evolved system of communication and control via haptic (touc

Long considered an ivory-tower technology, virtual reality (VR) is beginning to fulfil its promise. VR tools are becoming accessible to everyone, thanks in part to hardware and software advances driven by the computer gaming industry. The result is mainstream-applications that range from entertainment to information delivery and even medical rehabilitation.

“Virtual reality technology has progressed considerably over recent decades,” says Hungarian-born Dr Barnabás Takács, founder/President

Visually-impaired visitors to the National Railway Museum in York will be able to find their way around the buildings more easily and enjoyably from today, thanks to specially designed ’tactile guides’ produced by the University of York.

Visitors use their fingertips to trace their way around the building and its famous engines following the guide, a two-dimensional picture of lines, shapes and textures.

The guide has been tested by visually impaired people, who were so

Work to develop new methods of digitally restoring archive film footage could breathe new life into old recordings and improve on the quality of the originals.

The new approach aims to make the whole process cheaper, faster and more effective than current methods. The work could also dramatically improve public access to previously unavailable historic, artistic and cultural material.

Many historic events are captured on celluloid but its fragile nature means we are gradually los

It is well known that unborn babies can recognize their mothers’ voices and distinguish music from noise. But exactly what they hear remains unclear.

Now, scientists at the University of Florida have added a piece to the puzzle. In a series of unique experiments on a pregnant ewe designed to record exactly what sounds reach the fetal ear, UF research has bolstered previous findings suggesting that human fetuses likely hear mostly low-frequency rather than high-frequency sounds. That mea

A federally funded online absentee voting system scheduled to debut in less than two weeks has security vulnerabilities that could jeopardize voter privacy and allow votes to be altered, according to a report prepared by four prominent researchers invited to analyze the system. All experts in cyber-security, they say the risks associated with Internet voting cannot be eliminated and urge that the system be shut down.

The report’s authors are computer scientists David Wagner, Avi Rubin a

You bring questions to your physician, but if your doctor has questions about how to best provide care for you, where does he or she go for answers? Physicians still use paper-based resources, however, a University of Iowa Health Care study focused on pediatricians shows that, in comparison, it takes less than one-third of the time to use the computer to find an answer.

The study, which also shows the effectiveness of training physicians to use computer resources for patient care questions,

By continously adapting the receiver settings of a mobile phone to the current conditions, the advantage is twofold; facing bad reception, the connection can be improved while in good conditions, the energy consumption can be reduced. This is possible by an automatic controller developed by Lodewijk Smit of the University of Twente in The Netherlands. Smit did his PhD work on this, within the Centre of Telematics and Information Technology (CTIT).

The mobile connection can be optimized by fr

In the future, powering up your laptop may require that you unroll it first.

Engineers at the University of Toronto are the first Canadian team to construct flexible organic light emitting devices (FOLEDs), technology that could lay the groundwork for future generations of bendable television, computer and cellphone screens. “It opens up a whole new range of possibilities for the future,” says Zheng-Hong Lu, a professor in U of T’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering. “Ima

The first prototype of personalised UMTS Services was tested on the TU Delft campus. A number of congress visitors and a group of students were able to use UMTS and GPS to find their way to a lecture or restaurant, contact other visitors, get a tour of the campus, play a game together or watch a movie clip on internet. Both groups reacted enthusiastically.

UMTS will be introduced in the Netherlands this year. UMTS makes fast and wireless transmissions of large amounts of digital information