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/
Wood can easily be turned transparent to make energy-saving windows
The researchers’ method stems from the recent discovery that lignin can be made transparent by removing only the parts of its molecules that give them their colour. They brushed hydrogen peroxide, which is often used as a disinfectant, over the surface of the wood and then left it under a UV lamp designed to simulate natural sunlight. After soaking the wood in ethanol to remove any remaining gunk, they filled the pores in the wood with clear epoxy, a step that is also part of making lignin-free transparent wood.
The final product is a piece of wood that allows more than 90 per cent of light to pass through it and is more than 50 times stronger than transparent wood with the lignin completely removed. “The transparent wood is lighter and stronger than glass. It could be used for load-bearing windows and roofs,” says Hu. “It can be potentially used to make a see-through house.”
A reality check on criminality in virtual reality
...In Japan, a 43-yearold woman grew so enraged after her online husband ‘divorced’ her in the interactive Maple Story game, that she committed a virtual murder by eliminating him. The woman, Mayumi Tomari, was later arrested by the Japanese police. Then, there was the killing in Russia of a 33-year-old member of the Platinum clan of an MMORPG guild by a 22-year-old member of the rivalrous Coo-clocks clan. When the two virtual gang members confronted each other in the physical city of Ufa, Russia, the 33-year-old got severely beaten to death. ...
Hezbollah has developed its own shooter computer game named Special Force 2, which acts as a radicalisation medium for young jihadis. In the game, players earn points by launching Katyusha rockets at Israeli towns and becoming ‘suicide’ martyrs. A document leaked by Edward Snowden revealed that both the US and UK were spying on gamers by creating undercover avatars to snoop, recruit informers and perform mass interception between players in various games. Most police officers in the world may not have investigated any case involving a virtual world or MMORPG.
Though it may be tempting to ignore MMORPG crimes considering them virtual, therefore not ‘real’; police must remember that virtual crimes have real-world victims. The psychological and economic impact of virtual crimes on their victims is every bit real to their inhabitants, as is the physical world to most investigators. Finally, VR could be akin to spiritual reality. Unlike in reality, when we die in a video game, it’s not game over. Besides, VR like spirituality helps us have adventures in consciousness and explore our psyches through the mind-altering, dream-changing, ego-breaking VR technology.
— The author is director, Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption (DVAC)
See the full story here: https://www.dtnext.in/News/City/2021/01/30235011/1273789/A-reality-check-on-criminality-in-virtual-reality.vpf
