Duncan Geere

"We can turn any surface into a 3D touchscreen," explained Anup Chathoth, one third of Munich-based startup Ubi Interactive. Such claims typically conjure up images of floating Minority Report-style touchscreens made from curved glass, but that's exactly what this three-person team has developed.

Ubi's system uses a Microsoft Kinect sensor to turn a regular projector into a multi-touch PC projection system, where regular PowerPoints, web pages, even games no longer require clickers or wireless mice to be navigated. By using the motion-tracking and depth-perception cameras in the Kinect, Ubi is able to detect where a user is pointing, swiping and tapping on a surface and interpret these gestures as if they were being performed on a giant touchscreen or interactive whiteboard.

All well and good in principle, but does it actually work? Wired.co.uk visited Ubi Interactive at Microsoft's Westlake offices in Seattle this week for a hands-on demonstration. As you can see in the short video in this story, the answer is a resounding yes.

By: Nate Lanxon,

The board of directors for the world's largest space telescope has decided that it will be sited in both Australia and South Africa.

The Square Kilometre Array is an array of radio telescopes that measures -- you guessed it -- one square kilometre in size. When complete, it will be 50 times more sensitive than today's most-powerful radio telescope, the Atacama Large Millimetre Array, or Alma, located in the Chilean desert.

By: Duncan Geere,

Contactless ticket swiping -- as used with TFL's Oyster system -- could be coming to a smartphone near you.

Everything Everywhere, the new hybrid network of T-Mobile and Orange, has announced it plans to introduce such a system for its customers' phones.

By: Ian Steadman, Edited by: Duncan Geere

An array of local and global human statistics have been arranged in an installation at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford in piles of rice, where each grain represents one person.

Some 1033kg of rice -- with one grain representing each person in the UK (62 million) -- has been divided up into piles by a theatre company called Stan's Cafe. The piece -- called Of All The People In All The World -- changes over time, as a team of "auditors" rearrange the rice to represent different statistics, responding to current affairs in real time. The installation -- which has been touring for a few years -- is tailored to the site it resides in.

In this case, some of the rice is divided up to represent Shakespearian facts and figures as part of the RSC's World Shakespeare Festival. There are also statistics including the number of arrests made during the UK riots of August 2011 and the number of athletes competing in the 2012 Olympic Games.

By: Olivia Solon, Edited by: Duncan Geere

For the first time ever, a commercial craft has docked with the International Space Station (ISS).

The Dragon capsule, launched on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket on 22 May, was successfully captured by the ISS's robotic arm at 2:56pm BST. Earlier in the day it had flown 2.4km underneath the ISS as it maneouvered itself into its approach orbit.

By: Ian Steadman, Edited by: Duncan Geere

From 26 May, UK websites are required by law to comply with the EU "Cookie Law" which means that companies must gain the consent of web users before serving them web cookies. The problem is, most people don't really understand what cookies are and how they are being used already.

According to a study by PWC from 2011, just 13 percent of people fully understand how web cookies work and 45 percent had "some understanding" of them. Meanwhile a KPMG study reveals that 95 percent of websites aren't yet compliant with the EU's new law. While we are confident that Wired.co.uk readers are highly likely to understand how cookies generally work, we recognise that most of us have friends, family members and associates who may not. As such, we've created a simple guide to cookies, the EU "Cookie Law" and how to comply with it.

By: Olivia Solon, Edited by: Nate Lanxon

One of the unfortunate memes that has made repeated appearances in the climate debate is that money isn't just influencing the public debate about science, but it's also influencing the science itself. The government, the argument goes, is paying scientists specifically to demonstrate that carbon dioxide is the major culprit in recent climate change, and the money available to do so is exploding.

Although the argument displays a profound misunderstanding of how science and science funding work, it's just not going away. Just this week, one of the sites where people congregate to criticise mainstream climate science once again repeated it, with the graph accompanying this story. That graph originated in a 2009 report from a think tank called the Science & Public Policy Institute (notable for using the serially confused Christopher Monckton as a policy advisor).

By: John Timmer, Edited by: Ian Steadman

US space agency Nasa has a message for space-faring countries that are planning to visit the Moon: keep away from our stuff.

At the Global Space Exploration Conference in Washington this May, both Japan and Russia made clear their intentions for lunar exploration. Yuichi Yamaura, an associate executive director at Japanese Space Agency Jaxa, said "we are looking at the Moon as our next target for human exploration."

By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere

On the show this week we discuss SpaceX's successful rocket launch, an Italian supervolcano, whether you can patent a steak and why Oxford University wants people to send them bits of 'yeti'. Plus, the rest of the week in Wired news

By: Nate Lanxon,

An enormous band of indie game makers has dropped the prices of their wares as part of a week-long celebration of developer independence. It's called "Because We May", and the sale includes top games from online stores that allow developers to set and tweak their own prices.

By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere

Facebook has launched an iPhone app called "Facebook Camera" which focuses on photography, and lets you add Instagram-style filters to your snaps.

The app's home screen is a custom version of your Facebook feed that shows nothing but photos and their captions. From there, you can take your own photographs or pull shots from your camera roll to tweak and upload.

By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere

Today's photography from the Wired Aperture -- beautiful daily images of the Wired world around us, curated every day by Wired.co.uk. Subscribe to the Wired Aperture RSS feed or follow the @WiredAperture Twitter account to make sure you never miss a picture.

View at high-resolution and full-screen in our gallery.

By: Nate Lanxon,

Medical products move slowly. The first wheelchair was invented in 6th-century China. That basic design lasted until the first collapsible "X-frame" model was developed in 1933. If there's a logical continuum, we are around 1,400 years away from the next major breakthrough in wheelchair technology. At least we were, until New Zealand design student Oscar Fernandez submitted his entry to the Dyson Design Competition.

Fernandez's product isn't a wheelchair, exactly. It's a motorised add-on called the IWA (Independent Wheelchair Assist) that attaches to one, turning it into a small automobile.

By: Joseph Flaherty, Edited by: Ian Steadman

Each month, Google removes more than 1 million links to infringing content such as movies, video games, music and software from its search results -- with about half of those requests for removal last month coming from Microsoft.

The search and advertising giant revealed the data Thursday as it released sortable analytics on the massive number of copyright takedown requests it receives -- adding to its already existing data on the number of times governments ask for users' personal data.

By: David Kravets, Edited by: Ian Steadman

Living through what is -- slightly datedly -- referred to as the information age, we are constantly looking for new ways to take in more data more easily -- to spot those all-important trends, to pinpoint success and failure and to speak knowledgably about reports we've barely had time to digest. As such, infographics have really stepped up their game, moving from blocky Excel-generated pie charts and bar graphs to sumptuous feats of illustration and design. But, with these advanced forms of data representation, the distance between the data and the visualisation can be noticeable large. Attempting to bridge that gap we find FatFonts.

FatFonts is an information visualisation project by Miguel Nacenta, Uta Hinrichs and Sheelagh Carpendale which aims to visually represent the relative values of numbers. This means creating a numerical typeface where, for example, the number four takes up twice the number of pixels or amount of printer ink on the page as the number two. By building some of the concepts that numbers represent into their visual structure the team hope to eliminate the distance between data and graphical expression.

By: Philippa Warr, Edited by: Duncan Geere

I have seen aggressive drivers in many cities around the world. Often, if two cars arrive at an intersection, one driver will honk his horn and try to engage the intersection before the other. From an evolutionary perspective, honking is a selfish act: it benefits the individual who performs it and imposes a cost on the other. Selfish behaviour is no mystery for evolutionary biologists; it can easily evolve by natural selection or the analogous process of cultural evolution.

To curb drivers' selfish tendencies, some countries such as the US have made honking illegal, unless it's justified by an emergency. Giving a ticket raises the cost of honking and has made it rare. With one exception: when I drive on the streets of California and I ignore a stop sign, other drivers honk at me even though they are not directly affected by my actions. These drivers are willing to risk getting a ticket for honking to increase the chance that I will get a ticket for violating another traffic rule. Behaviour that carries a cost to the actor and a cost to the recipient is not selfish -- it's spiteful.

By: Dario Maestripieri, Edited by: Ian Steadman

Facebook is different from Apple or Google or Amazon or Microsoft, says Mark Zuckerberg, because it doesn't build products. It seeks to improve the products built by everyone else.

"If Apple or Google want to build a product, they typically go build it," the Facebook CEO told Charlie Rose in Autumn 2011. "Whereas, you know, we want to help rethink the way that people listen to music or watch movies.

By: Cade Metz, Edited by: Ian Steadman

If Woody Guthrie were protesting now, he wouldn't be singing songs he'd be making video games. For almost as long as they've been around, games have been co-opted as a vehicle for protest. Balance of Power from 1985, for example, was about the dangers posed by the geopolitics of the Cold War. 

"Games can be one of the most effective ways to discuss a serious topic, as they cast the player in the role of active participant," says Simon Parkin, head of games at developer Littleloud. "They can be a powerful tool for educating and informing." 

By: Duncan Geere, Edited by: Ian Steadman

Imagine if theatre were a video game, where the audience could shape the plot and participate online from anywhere in the world. This is what immersive theatre company Punchdrunk is aiming to do with its latest production, an online version of its hit New York show Sleep No More -- a mash-up of Shakespeare's Macbeth with film noir and set in a 1930s hotel.

By: Natalie Woolman, Edited by: Ian Steadman

MIT computer scientists have developed a system that can distinguish between real smiles of happiness and fake smiles trying to mask frustration. The findings could be used to help train those who have difficulty interpreting expressions, such as people with autism, to recognise emotion.

A team at MIT's Media Lab first conducted experiments where volunteers were asked to act out their expressions of delight or frustration, with webcams recording their facial expressions. The study found that when subjects were asked to feign frustration, 90 percent of them did not smile. They were then asked to fill out an online form designed to cause genuine frustration -- it deleted all the filled-in information after the user pressed the "submit" button. When this happened, 90 percent of subjects smiled despite being clearly frustrated. 

Subjects were also invited to watch a video of a cute baby designed to make them genuinely delighted. This was also recorded using a webcam.

By: Olivia Solon,

"Steve Ballmer has an 80-inch Windows 8 tablet in his office. He's got rid of his phone, he's got rid of his note paper. It's touch-enabled and it's hung on his wall."

This description of the Microsoft CEO's workspace, given to Wired.co.uk in Redmond this morning, came from Microsoft VP Frank Shaw. But while it conjures an amusing image of Ballmer using his mighty palms to bat at a Windows Phone-like Metro interface, it's a scenario Shaw said is eventually going to be available to the public.

By: Nate Lanxon,

We've all experienced it: that niggling feeling that you might be spending a bit too much time flicking and swiping at your iPhone. But if Telegraph blogs editor and author Damian Thompson is right, the amount of time we spend attached to our devices these days isn't just an irritating twenty-first century habit: it's a sign that compulsive behaviours of all kinds are exploding in the modern world.

When Thompson asked to interview me for the online gaming chapter of his book, I was sceptical about his thesis of cross-pollination between the social gaming companies of Silicon Valley and the gambling emporia of Las Vegas. But I came to be convinced: the flow of engineers, for one thing, between the two industries is staggering -- though understandable, when you think about what each is up to.

By: Milo Yiannopoulos, Edited by: Nate Lanxon

Goal-line technology might be coming to football a lot sooner than you think, as FIFA announces that the friendly matches between England and Belgium, and Denmark and Australia, on 2 June will be used to trial the two systems under consideration.

For years the international governing body for the sport has resisted the introduction of technology that could let officials know without doubt whether a ball crosses the line or not. The fear is that it will interfere with football's pace and fluidity, and the notion of letting play continue after a foul if the fouled player's team has an advantage. A video referee, as in rugby, isn't an option because of this.

By: Ian Steadman, Edited by: Duncan Geere

My kids recently picked up on the fact that we were only allowed to send a certain amount of text messages each month on our phone contract, and that there are limits to the amount of data we can download on our broadband package.

With an increasing number of devices streaming media in the house we had been talking about cutting down our usage. My son quickly twigged to the fact that the main TV had no such limitations. "Can't we just connect the TV to the iPhone?" was his suggestion.

By: Andy Robertson, Edited by: Duncan Geere

Beleaguered internet conglomerate Yahoo has released a series of apps and browser extensions called "Axis", which aim to make searching the web a faster and more visual experience.

The iPad app, which is currently only available in the United States, is essentially a Yahoo-branded browser with a focus on search. We downloaded it from the North American App Store to have an early peek.

By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere

Not many media events begin with a speaker describing the kind of porn they were looking at the night before. Perhaps more should.

Amanda Platell of the Daily Mail not only admitted to having visited the erotic site Pornhub, but suggested that the audience should visit it on their phones if they thought internet pornography was not a problem: "It's full of the most debasing, sado-masochistic pornography that no child should ever see." How many of the audience followed this suggestion is unclear.

By: Daniel Nye Griffiths, Edited by: Duncan Geere

A startup called Makielab is hoping to disrupt the toy market by 3D-printing customised dolls to your exact specifications and offering an identical online avatar doppelganger. Or dollpelganger.

"Makies is currently what looks like an action-figure builder, but it's a bit more than that," explains Alice Taylor, CEO of the company and former commissioning editor for education at Channel 4, in an email to Wired.co.uk. "While Makies means a customer can come and build and create the action doll of their choosing, they also get an avatar version too, which happens to be standing in a 3D space. Stuff that you do digitally will result in physical unlockables, and vice versa."

By: Duncan Geere, Edited by: Olivia Solon

Growth occurs as a series of jolts: your first kiss, your first drink, your first pay packet. As the technology industry matures, it's no different. But just as in real life, some people aren't too good at dealing with change.

For the best part of two years now, parts of the online media industry have been complaining about EU Directive 2009/136/EC, which requires users to consent before web sites harvest data from them.

After the government's year-long pause on enforcement, in the wake of a highly successful industry-led campaign for common sense enforcement, implementation is now only days away. In the UK, the new rules kick in on Saturday 26th May.

Yet the moaning continues. Some still view the Directive as an infernal doomsday machine that will "kill online sales" and " kill the internet". Robert Bond of the law firm Speechly Bircham describes the effects as "far-reaching and incredibly onerous" for "all UK companies." Simon Davis of Privacy International argues that proper enforcement would "destroy the entire industry".

By: Peter Kirwan, Edited by: Olivia Solon

The American defence department's research wing, Darpa, has awarded $500,000 (£319k) to form the 100 Year Starship initiative and help make interstellar travel a reality.

Former Nasa astronaut Mae Jemison, who flew on the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1992, will head the new independent organisation that will strive to turn Star Trek from fiction into something resembling fact.

By: Paul Sutherland, Sen.com, Edited by: Duncan Geere