philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Expo 2020 Dubai unveils pavilions for Australia, Canada, India and Malaysia

Latvia

This pavilion is an open space for imagination and thought, with an Arabian desert sandscape, industrial-speed internet and 3D stereo sound.

See the full story here: https://blooloop.com/news/expo-2020-dubai-pavilions-australia-canada-india/?fbclid=IwAR0Ap2TTQQilE61FuPwvVEp1lWHUa_UfZM6aPJxaT31I2b4MNNE8kVU1Ohk

Low Barrier, High Quality: Welcome to Public Interest Virtual Reality

Created in 2015, the Public VR Lab is “a collaborative effort to facilitate public dialogue around new VR related technologies and support the community creation of 360 virtual and augmented content.” It’s the first publicly accessible XR content creation lab and training center in the U.S. and offers programs and professional training to youths and adults in Brookline, Massachusetts, and beyond. Participants in the Lab’s programs have access to XR filmmaking equipment, educational workshops, production grants, fellowships, hackathons, and more.

One avenue for exploration is their VR Toolkits, which can be shipped directly to customers and contains everything an organization needs to implement VR in their daily operations. To date, Lab collaborators have included the STAT news team at the Boston Globe, the United Nations Environmental Programme, the Alliance for Community Media, and the MIT Open Documentary Lab, where Bisbee is a research fellow. A partnership with Discovery Education is currently in the works.

While the Lab is relatively new, Bisbee’s start in community advocacy began decades ago in 1992: “Right out of college, I was a community organizer on environmental justice issues. I segued into teaching technology and developing accessible internet programs, and moved into developing community story-based technology tools at a startup in Silicon Valley.”

This year, Bisbee was awarded the 2019 Nextant Legacy Award by Tom Furness—the grandfather of AR/VR—and the Virtual World Society (VWS) during the Augmented World Expo. The award honors living inspirations who show ways to better the world through XR.

“In the context of our work, black communities in Boston have been and are historically, disproportionately, being left behind.”

In 2017, the Boston Globe sought to answer the following question in a seven-part series: “Does Boston still deserve its reputation as a place unwelcoming to blacks?” Findings included that the average median net worth of Black Bostonians is $8 compared to white counterparts whose average median income is $240,000+.

See the full story here: https://msmagazine.com/2020/02/13/low-barrier-high-quality-welcome-to-public-interest-virtual-reality/

IEEE calls for standards to combat climate change and protect kids in the age of AI

The IEEE Standards Association has released a report calling for engineers to consider the impact their work will have on climate change, children, and society. It’s a push toward “utilizing emerging technologies in a way that prioritizes people and planet over power and profits.”

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is one of the largest organizations for computer scientists in the world. With hundreds of thousands of members, the group undertakes initiatives to create common standards and often consults organizations like the European Commission and OECD on matters of ethics and design principles.

At Andover Senior Center, A Virtual Reality Cupcake Lesson

Residents at Stone Hill Senior Living Center got a special virtual reality cupcake-making lesson as a Valentine's Day treat Thursday.

The residents strapped on VR goggles, transporting them to Magnolia Bakery in Boston's Faneuil Hall, where they watched a baker give a step-by-step lesson on how to make fancy Valentine's cupcakes.

Then, they got to eat fancy Valentine's Day cupcakes in real life.

It's a project by Somverville-based company Rendever. The company's CEO, Kyle Rand, told WBZ NewsRadio's Madison Rogers they use virtual reality to reduce social isolation in communities like senior centers.

"We actually saw decreases in depression, increases in feelings of trust, and increases in social health, because what happens is, they're experiencing these things together," he said. "They're laughing together, they're smiling together. They take their headsets off, and you have this new connection."

See the full story here: https://wbznewsradio.iheart.com/content/virtual-reality-cupcakes-andover-senior-center-stone-hill-vr-goggles-valentines-day/

Sony imagines a world full of artificial intelligence, from kitchen bots to games

In 1997, Hiroaki Kitano, a research scientist at Sony, helped organize the first Robocup, a robot soccer tournament that attracted teams of robotics and artificial intelligence researchers to compete in the picturesque city of Nagoya, Japan.

Kitano now leads a new effort at Sony, announced in November, to infuse cutting-edge artificial intelligence throughout the company.

Sony will focus its artificial intelligence on three domains, says Kitano: games, sensors and, more interestingly, culinary arts. These areas reflect the company's current commercial focus and an aspirational direction for the future.

See the full story here: https://newsdio.com/sony-imagines-a-world-full-of-artificial-intelligence-from-kitchen-bots-to-games/49703/

Quantum entanglement over 30 miles of fiber has brought super secure internet closer

In a paper in Nature today, Pan Jian-Wei at the University of Science and Technology of China, in Hefei, and his colleagues describe an experiment in which they demonstrate entanglement through more than 30 miles of fiber coiled in a lab, with lower transmission errors than previous attempts. “This is a big improvement,” says Pan, who is sometimes called the “father of quantum.”

The trick was to find efficient ways to entangle two particles. The team used an atom, which stayed put, and a photon, which was sent down the fiber. They found that they were able to create an entangled pair of nodes much more reliably than was demonstrated in previous experiments—including the one setting the mile benchmark, which it beat by five orders of magnitude. 

How big a deal is this result? “It’s nice, but not nearly as big as it sounds,” says Stephanie Wehner, a researcher at QuTech, a quantum computing and quantum internet research centre in Delft in the Netherlands. Pan’s team used 30 miles of coiled fiber, which still demands an impressive degree of control over the whole system, but demonstrating entanglement between two nodes in one location is much easier than when they are actually 30 miles apart. 

See the full story here: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615191/quantum-entanglement-over-30-miles-of-fiber-has-brought-super-secure-internet-closer/?utm_source=newsletters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement

2019 Was a Major Inflection Point for VR—Here’s the Proof

by Tipatat Chennevasin

VR adoption is accelerating thanks to the Oculus Quest. We’ve seen over 100 VR titles break $1 million in revenue, growing the total VR software market by 3x in 2019. Top grossing VR titles have cleared $10 million in revenue, and can reach up to $60 million in sales given the current distribution of headsets in the market so far. Though still small, VR is a growing and sustainable platform  for developers.

Oculus proved that VR was more than a product when they officially released numbers about their ecosystem last September at Oculus Connect 6. During the convention, they announced that VR software sales on their platform had exceeded $100 million; $20 million of that just from the Oculus Quest ecosystem, which launched only four months prior. But that’s not the only signal we have that VR is a growing and sustainable platform.

See the full story here: https://www.roadtovr.com/2019-major-inflection-point-vr-heres-proof/?fbclid=IwAR2rSKxz6Gvx0dVMhsQY6cldTWT-Dh8FPd-D3723M5Zq8N1KY94OQ34UWiA

The Future of Deep Learning Is Unsupervised, AI Pioneers Say

“How do we learn with fewer labels, fewer samples or fewer trials?” asked Mr. LeCun, speaking at an event organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. “My suggestion on it…is to use self-supervised learning, which is basically learning to fill in the blanks. Basically it’s the idea of learning to represent the world before learning a task, and this is what babies do.”

Mr. LeCun was speaking during a session with Yoshua Bengio, of the University of Montreal and the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, and Geoffrey Hinton, of AlphabetInc.’s Google, the Vector Institute and the University of Toronto. The three shared the 2018 A.M. Turing Award for their work advancing the field of deep learning, a technique that powers image-recognition systems, natural-language understanding and more. The Turing Award, bestowed annually by the Association for Computing Machinery, recognizes lasting, major contributions to the field and comes with a $1 million prize.

Self-supervised machines will be able to better handle new situations they encounter, Mr. Bengio said. That would be comparable to the way people figure out how to drive in an area where they’ve never been or when construction activity forces them to change a familiar route.

Self-supervised learning works well when it is applied to natural-language problems, such as filling in the blanks of missing words in a sentence. But it doesn’t work so well with predicting the next frame of a video image, Mr. LeCun said. Humans can predict what’s going to happen next in a video of a ball dropping, but machines struggle with that sort of intelligence, he said.

Efforts to get to the next level in AI face three challenges, Mr. LeCun said. Researchers want to develop AI that can learn with fewer labels, reason more like people and “plan complex action sequences.”

See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-future-of-deep-learning-is-unsupervised-ai-pioneers-say-11581330600?shareToken=st5970843246c840d2a21815e7fc53a423&fbclid=IwAR2ZDcquDywkbpBZs4gK2g4hxqdi0CgTXYChPIMg_GNRe1-mSW111VHX5Wo

How tech companies are trying to make augmented and virtual reality a thing, again

See the full story here: https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/11/21121275/augmented-virtual-reality-hiring-software-engineers-hired

This NYC pop-up uses augmented reality to teach visitors about sustainability

It’s one thing to tell someone about sustainability, but it’s another thing entirely to show them.

And that’s exactly what Arcadia Earth aims to do. The New York City pop-up features 15 high-tech (and highly photogenic) rooms that let visitors feel, smell, hear and see their way through a lesson in environmental awareness.

The 14,000 square foot exhibit was created by designer Valentino Vettori, who got the idea after visiting a sustainability event in Los Angeles.

But the exhibit does a lot more than telling. Arcadia Earth uses virtual reality and augmented reality — through an iPhone-friendly app that lets visitors “see” deer prancing around them or walk through an ocean full of fish.

See the full story here: https://sports.yahoo.com/2020-02-11-arcadia-earth-new-york-sustainability-pop-up-recycle-vettori-23923638.html