Wolves In The Walls’ Lucy Steps Beyond VR Into Sundance Film Festival
PhilNote: AI Lucy at Sundance, including videos
See the full story here: https://www.vrfocus.com/2021/02/wolves-in-the-walls-lucy-steps-beyond-vr-into-sundance-film-festival/
The State of the Virtual Reality Movie in 2021
In Rodney Ascher’s latest documentary, A Glitch in the Matrix, the filmmaker explores the increasingly widespread belief that what we perceive to be the real world is, in fact, some type of complex simulation.
The scarier implications of simulation theory’s desensitizing effects are also examined through one of the documentary’s interviewees, Joshua Cooke, who chillingly recounts how he murdered his parents in 2003 because he thought he was living in The Matrix.
In Mike Cahill’s Bliss—which, in what is either a strange coincidence or a minor hiccup in the simulation we call life, was released the same day as A Glitch in the Matrix—Owen Wilson plays Greg, a sad-sack divorcée who’s having the worst day of his life. Greg is called into his boss’s office and promptly fired, and then he accidentally (and somewhat comically) kills his boss. After hiding the body, Greg goes to the bar across the street where he meets Isabel (Salma Hayek), an eccentric homeless woman who tells him they’re living in a virtual world and almost everybody around them is, in video game parlance, a non-player character—including Greg’s children.
It’s easier to buy Isabel’s story once she uses telekinetic powers to shape their reality; Greg is able to do the same after he takes these mysterious orange crystals.
Read the full story here: https://www.theringer.com/movies/2021/2/5/22264715/virtual-reality-movies-tv-glitch-in-the-matrix-bliss
How Metalenses Can Advance Virtual Reality
A principal advantage of meta-optics in general is that the phase, amplitude and polarization state of transmitted light can be manipulated with subwavelength resolution by choosing the shape of the elements and the way they are arranged within the structure. In this way, Li and his colleagues were able to design a multizone dispersion-engineered metalens that achieves controlled focusing at different frequencies of light and eliminates chromatic aberration.
see the full story here: https://www.osa-opn.org/home/newsroom/2021/february/how_metalenses_can_advance_virtual_reality/
Apple’s mixed reality headset could cost $3,000 and include 8K displays
Those cameras will enable the device to track eye movements as well as hand gestures. It’ll also have LiDAR sensors, like those found on the iPhone 12 Pro and iPad Pro, to help measure the distance between objects in the real world and properly scale and present virtual objects in a real-world space.
The headbands for the device are said to be interchangeable and will include “spatial audio” technology, similar to what’s in the AirPods Pro and AirPods Max. And it sounds like Apple is working on its own in-house chips to power its headset — no big surprise given that it makes the silicon powering nearly all of its hardware these days.
See the full story here: https://www.engadget.com/apple-mixed-reality-headset-price-specs-rumor-145412503.html
JFK Airport’s Terminal 4 Launches ‘This is New York’ Virtual Reality Experience
Terminal 4 at John F. Kennedy International Airport – one of the world’s most modern and efficient air terminals – is now the home of “This is New York,” a virtual reality (VR) experience. This interactive journey will allow customers at the terminal to experience New York City’s landmarks and destinations – from a safe distance.
“This is New York" is a VR experience dedicated to highlighting the hidden and monumental destinations within the five boroughs of New York City, including the Queens Unisphere, the Staten Island Ferry, Brooklyn Bridge Park, the Prospect Park Boathouse, and the 191st Street Subway Station. The experience, hosted by JFKIAT and designed by Christian Rietzke and Jourdan Ferguson, can be accessed through a mobile device with the help of VR goggles.
See the full story here: https://www.aviationpros.com/airports/press-release/21208570/jfk-international-air-terminal-llc-jfkiat-jfk-airports-terminal-4-launches-this-is-new-york-virtual-reality-experience
Just to recap, design patents last 15 years, cost a one-time fee of about $2,000-$3,000, they are all public material, and can be found conveniently on Google Patents. You can patent icons, static screens, animated interactions, and “ornamental” designs to existing functions. You cannot patent something purely for function.
Have you noticed that chat messaging apps that use bubbles all look a bit different? Perhaps that wasn’t “to be unique” but rather they (legally) hadto. Companies can claim the visual shape of a message bubble to make them theirs, like Apple’s patent on their iMessage chat tails. But you cannot patent the function of being able to send messages.
...let’s look at some of the new patents in play and explore some trending companies.
Lyft
Pickup animation
...
See the full story here: https://onezero.medium.com/the-ui-ux-patterns-you-literally-cant-use-64875a5c965f
‘Weird new things are happening in software,’ says Stanford AI professor Chris Re
"But where these models still fall down, and also where I think the most interesting work is going on, is in what I call the tail, the fine-grained work."
The battleground, as Re put it, "are the subtle interactions, subtle disambiguations of terms," what Re proposed could be called "fine-grained reasoning and quality."
That change in emphasis is a change in software broadly speaking, said Re, and he cited Tesla AI scientist Andrej Karpathy, who has claimed AI is "Software 2.0." In fact, Re's talk was titled "machine learning is changing software."
Re speaks with real-world authority over and above his academic legacy. He is a four-time startup entrepreneur, having sold two companies to Apple, Lattice, and Inductiv, and having co-founded one of the many fascinating AI computer companies, SambaNova Systems. He is also a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship recipient. (More on Re's faculty home page.)
To handle the subtleties of which he spoke, Software 2.0, Re suggested, is laying out a path to turn AI into an engineering discipline, as he put it, one where there is a new systems approach, different from how software systems were built before, and an attention to new "failure modes" of AI, different from how software traditionally fails.
See the full story here: https://www.zdnet.com/article/weird-new-things-are-happening-in-software-says-stanford-ai-professor-chris-re/
