As it builds more evidence to support its virtual reality therapeutic for managing pain, startup AppliedVR picked up $36 million in fresh funding to fuel its growth.
The Los Angeles-based company also is awaiting a decision from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on its first de novo submission. The company is preparing for full market launch of its flagship product, EaseVRx, after FDA approval. ...
“For too long, we’ve relied on the notion that people need to take pills or rely on surgery to feel better and lead a better quality of life. At AppliedVR, we’re building an unparalleled body of evidence for providers and payers to demonstrate that immersive therapeutics can fill the massive unmet need for patients who are frustrated by current treatment paradigms. And, we are starting with chronic pain, one of the most complex, costly conditions,” said Matthew Stoudt, co-founder and CEO of AppliedVR, in a statement. ...
AppliedVR's goal is to make immersive therapeutics accessible to everyone, he said, "and this funding will help further expand our body of evidence, infrastructure and distribution platform, enabling patients and providers to take advantage of this next-generation therapeutic—while also bringing down costs for payers.”
AppliedVR's platform has been used by more than 30,000 patients in more than 240 of the top health systems globally. ...
... AR is a spectrum, and the Air Glass falls way on the “simple notification machine” side of it, not the realistic holograms you’ll find in products like Microsoft HoloLens. The device is a single lens equipped with a monochrome Micro LED projector and a waveguide that projects its light, plus a plastic stalk with a small speaker and a trackpad that accepts swipes, taps, and presses. ...
To use it, you put on a pair of custom-designed metal glasses frames that have a matching magnetic nub on the temple. The frames are ordinary glasses but fit the lens system along the right side, and you’ve got a monocular AR display similar to Google Glass. When you’re done using the AR component, you use that magnetic divot to snap it against a curved charging case that looks a bit like a shoe horn, which in turn charges over USB-C. ...
I love the theory behind Oppo’s design because it’s a strong tactic for offering lots of style options while also mitigating the perennial AR creepiness factor. ...
The Air Glass, by contrast, is more like an earbud for your eyes. ...
Netflix has announced that, beginning today, it’s rolling out spatial audio for select original programming. The feature should deliver more immersive sound, particularly for customers who are listening to a TV show or movie with headphones. Netflix has collaborated with Sennheiser to convert surround sound mixes into an expansive spatial audio presentation that can be played through stereo speakers or headphones; you don’t have to buy anything new or own a proper surround system for this to work. According to Netflix, spatial audio “is compatible with all devices, all streaming plans, and does not require surround sound speakers or home theater equipment.” ...
... He also saw the solution: AI that builds a new kind of operating system. One that learns faster than anything most humans could imagine. It learns so fast that you only need to show it a few times how to do something and it’ll do that thing from then on. One that enables new lower-cost components to be used. Ones that are less precise
When I watch the Universal Worker move, I can see how the tendons that make it work create a very different, animal, sort of motion. It is kind of springy. This would be a non-starter for a traditional robot, but the AI control, just like with a person, manages this and makes it all work out. Dr. Kaehler tells me that the use of this sort of tendon system is central to how the robot can be so light and dexterous, as well as why it can be so much less expensive than traditional robots. ...
In the video Kaehler goes into some depth about what it’s doing and how it works. ...
Each robot had a humanoid form. Even a smile on the face. And the head moved in a very unique way that I had never seen before. Strangely human like. Which, Adrian says in the video embedded here, is part of its ability to learn quickly and also get the trust of the human working aside it. ...
... there are many other similarities between what runs under robots, virtual beings, autonomous vehicles, augmented reality headsets and glasses. Kaehler is the only human that I know that has built three of those and he says that they all are strongly connected underneath in how they perceive the world, let others see the perceived and synthesized world.v ...
The Universal Robots feel the same a bit to me. At least at first. Until I started watching that this was real AI learning how to grasp and drop things. It felt humanlike as it dropped a rod onto a machine yet another time in a row without dropping it. ...
It “sees” the world in a new way, using something the AI engineers call “Neural Radiance Fields.” A new form of 3D scenes that you can walk through. In Giant AI’s case it moves the hands through these radiance fields, which are unlike any 3D data structure we’ve ever seen before. ...
A new report has claimed the Chinese government is now implementing cutting edge artificial intelligence to monitor the minds of dozens of Communist party officials.
Researchers in China claimed to have developed software that can acutely analyze facial expressions and brain waves to monitor if subjects were attentive to “thought and political education.”
China’s stringent police state has been radically upscaled over the past decade, using big data, machine learning, face recognition technology and artificial intelligence to build what many have labelled the world’s most complex digital dictatorship. ...
“On one hand, it can judge how party members have accepted thought and political education,” the article said. “On the other hand, it will provide real data for thought and political education so it can be improved and enriched.” ...
“Tapping on a person marked on the map reveals their personal information, including their full name, court-case number and the reason they have been labelled untrustworthy. Identity-card numbers and home addresses are also partially shown,” according to media reports.
There are also reports citizens whose social credit score falls too low are pre-emptively arrested and sent to re-education camps, not because they have committed a crime but because they are “likely to.” ...
In recent weeks, China has reportedly aimed at standardizing a rewards system to motivate the public to report crimes and boost their score. ...
Multi-modal AI is a new AI paradigm, in which various data types like image, text, speech and numerical data are combined with multiple intelligence processing algorithms to achieve higher performances. Multi-modal AI often outperforms single-modal AI in many real-world problems. ...
Multi-modal systems, with access to both sensory and linguistic modes of intelligence, process information the way humans do. ...
Multi-modal learning pieces together disjointed data into a single model. Since multiple sensors are used to observe the same data, multi-modal learning offers more dynamic predictions compared to a unimodal system processing more datasets translates to more intelligent insights. The ability to process multi-modal dataconcurrently is vital for advancements in AI. ...
DALL.E: It is an AI program developed by OpenAI that creates digital images from textual descriptions.
FLAVA: It is a multimodal model trained by Meta over images and 35 different languages.
NUWA: This model is trained on images, videos, and text, and given a text prompt or sketch, it can predict the next video frame and fill in incomplete images.
MURAL: It is a digital workspace for visual collaboration and helps everyone on the team imagine together to unlock new ideas, and solve hard problems.
ALIGN: It is an AI model trained by Google over a noisy dataset of a large number of image-text pairs.
CLIP: It is a multimodal AI system developed by OpenAI to successfully perform a wide set of visual recognition tasks.
Florence: It is released by Microsoft research and is capable of modeling space, time, and modality.
... The first model is a set of deep neural networks which predict respondents’ chronological age and psychological well-being over 10 years using information from psychological surveys. This model depicts the trajectories of the human mind as it ages. It also shows that the ability to form meaningful connections, as well as mental autonomy and environmental mastery, develop with age. He also notes that the focus on personal progress is constantly decreasing, but the sense of having a purpose in life fades after only 40-50 years. These findings add to the growing body of knowledge about social and emotional selectivity and tasteful adaptation in the context of adult personality development. ...
The second model is a self-organizing map created to serve as the basis for a recommendation engine for mental health applications. This unsupervised learning algorithm divides all responders into groups depending on the likelihood of developing depression and identifies the shortest path toward a set of mental stability for any individual. Alex Zhavoronkov, Chief Sustainability Officer at Deep Longevity, explains, “Existing mental health apps offer general advice that applies to everyone yet doesn’t work for anyone. We’ve built a scientifically sound system that provides ultra-customization.” ...
“This study provides an intriguing perspective on psychological age, future well-being, and depression risk, and demonstrates new application of machine learning approaches to mental health issues. It also broadens our view of aging and shifts across life stages and emotional states.” ...
... A recent challenge issued by NASA’s Spacesuit User Interface Technologies for Students (SUITS), launched in 2017, tasked students with designing and creating spacesuit information displays that share vitals, location and more within augmented reality environments.
USC’s and University of Arizona’s “Team Aegis” was one of 10 finalists in the SUITS challenge. Their display uses the Microsoft HoloLens 2 platform, a hands-free holographic device, and would host AR applications through the Unity game engine. For an astronaut exploring the moon, the user-friendly interface would share crucial information such as location tracking of the astronaut and rover, and vitals such as heart rate and oxygen levels. ...
Founded by Darlene Villicaña, a USC visual anthropology master’s student researching extravehicular interfaces, Team Aegis began as a group of 11 students. In December 2021, after its proposal was accepted by the NASA SUITS program, the team grew quickly to over 60 students from multiple disciplines and experience levels. Advised by USC Viterbi Professors David Barnhart and Garrett Reisman — as well as University of Arizona Assistant Professor Jessica Barnes — the students created an ambitious set of goals, a schedule and smaller teams that could work together to meet milestones. ...
Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut, said, “Our USC/Arizona team did a great job and learned some very important real-world engineering lessons. Plus we had the best sizzle-reel video. ...
... As architectural designer Xiaohang Hou outlined, the infinite nature of XR space allows people to interact with the virtual world through the real world, changing the demand for public space and making urban design more complex. "When people perceive metaverse architecture as an extension of the real world, it influences their perceptions and expectations, causing a revolution in the real world." ...
Fologram has recently built the world’s first pavilion-scale steel structure using the HoloLens, displaying the possibilities of integrating standard CAD workflow with augmented reality. By displaying the generative design model through holographic instructions rather than traditional 2D drawings, it explores the potential of revolutionizing the bridge between design and construction. ...
... The image is just that, with paintings of two crowned raccoons — one wearing what looks like a yellow dress, the other in a blue-and-gold jacket — in ornate gold frames. But as Holland Michel noted, the raccoons are sporting Western-style royal outfits, even though the prompt didn't specify anything about how they should appear beyond looking "royal."
Even such "subtle" manifestations of bias are dangerous, Holland Michel said.
"In not being flagrant, they're really hard to catch," he said.
