philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Vanderbilt Univ. – VandyHacks VI: Where dreams become (virtual) reality

Beginning Nov. 1, the Wondr’y will be filled with 36 hours of hacking, creativity and community. The sixth annual student-run and self-funded VandyHacks hackathon will allow college students to explore their creativity in developing any project that makes use of their programming skills, regardless of experience level. 700+ students will have the chance to win prizes, interact with professionals, expand their programming abilities and bond with fellow students at this year’s VandyHacks VI: Art Edition, challenging students to “code a masterpiece.”

VandyHacks is a student programming organization started by Sam Pepose and Carolyn Zeng in 2014. Students desired a program similar to other hackathons beginning around the country and wanted a way to engage programmers outside of the classroom. Now, co-presidents Matt Leon and Nidhi Mehta, with Nidhi being the first female president of the club, are challenging programming stereotypes and working to expand VandyHacks even further, VandyHacks organizer sophomore Sophia Chen said.

The competition officially begins at 10 p.m. Friday Nov. 1 and the expo to display the completed projects will take place at 10 a.m. Sunday Nov. 3. Events in between include Zumba, networking, a morning walk, a typing competition, a hand spa and 1:30 a.m. karaoke on Nov. 3, according to the event schedule on the Vandyhacks VI website.

See the full story here: https://vanderbilthustler.com/27820/featured/vandyhacks-vi-where-dreams-become-virtual-reality/

Snapchat Now Lets You Draw Your Own 3D Augmented Reality Filters

Snapchat is introducing one more way for you to get creative in AR – a new 3D Paint feature that lets you draw 3D objects on your face – or on objects in your environment. This is done using only your mobile device’s front or back-facing camera to capture the scene, and your finger to draw.

If you want to try the feature, go to Lenses and press the “Create” button to access.

It is currently only available on iOS at the moment – and will be rolling out on Android as well, soon.

See the full story here: https://wersm.com/snapchat-now-lets-you-draw-your-own-ar-filters-in-3d/

The Teens Are Making History on TikTok

On TikTok, you can find a delightful collection of DIY #history parodies set to hip hop, Soviet anthems, and Rick and Morty sound bytes, shot in dorm rooms on iPhones, with TikTok text stickies indicating the date and event. (TikTok is an app for teens in which users can pair up to 15 seconds of video to samples from pop music or self-recorded audio, which is common knowledge at the time of this writing, but given the lifespan of apps–R.I.P. Vine–I feel it necessary to explain.). Teens and twenty-somethings (mostly dudes) use the tools God gave them–Nerf guns, washcloths for wigs, a flashcard marked “HAT”–to depict bickering nations at war, colonial invasion, and institutional racism in America. (Costumes vary in realism, but a high-quality World War I uniform suffices just as well as a bedsheet for a Medieval shawl.) They’re often one-man shows, switching camera angles to signal different characters. They range from both hilariously weird one-liners to sobering commentary: in one, a 16th-century layman, voiced by Spongebob, shrieks against the backdrop of a Catholic church when Martin Luther, voiced by Patrick, interjects “I know: Let’s leave!” In the next, an African in 1400 is interrupted from his hunt when a series of European countries dance through the door to Lil Keed’s “It’s Up Freestyle.” The civil rights movement features prominently: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and John Lewis have a dance party in hoodies, and a guy labeled “white guy” walks in on Rosa Parks sitting on a chair in the bedroom to the lyric “get the fuck up.” (The caption is “Its a joke.”) Sometimes they’re off-color, like Anne Frank sneezing in a closet while a Nazi hunts for her downstairs. Sometimes they’re funny in the implicit acknowledgment that our forebears perished on the shores of Normandy so we can make TikToks about them from our bedrooms.

He added, surprisingly: “Obviously, the way things are now, someone’s going to get offended. But if they do, it’s their fault, because that’s history, and that’s the way things work.”

See the full story here: https://gizmodo.com/the-teens-are-making-history-on-tiktok-1839453860

TikTok has broken rap music

Musicians are changing their songs for viral success on TikTok. But it's infantilising rap music

At a recent show in Los Angeles, the rapper onstage made the crowd wiggle their fingers and “sit down, stand up, sit-stand, si-sta...” like a game of musical chairs, as bright cartoons coloured the stage. It smacked of a six year old’s birthday party rather than the sweaty, fleshy rout of LA’s live rap scene. The artist responsible for the jamboree was Philly rapper Tierra Whack, whose debut album Whack World is a perfect companion to TikTok, the app that’s currently taking Gen Z by storm, and which now seems to be changing the entire genre of rap music.

Known as musical.y in an earlier incarnation (which the New York Times referred to as “the youngest social network we’ve ever seen”), the app merged with Bytedance in 2018 to become the singing-dancing conglomerate that the world is now struggling to make sense of. It has upwards of 500 million active users, and every day, teens and tweens are uploading millions of fifteen-second videos of themselves lip-syncing to music.

TikTok also seems to be stripping music of any of its severity. “Even the really dark scary songs are all made out of fun; even the really serious songs aren’t taken seriously anymore,” says Llusion, a popular producer on the app who posts videos almost daily. "For some reason, our ears just absorb all the songs we hear on TikTok and they just get stuck in our heads and we fall in love with them.”

See the full story here: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/tiktok-baby-rap

NBCUniversal rolls out its ShoppableTV ads

NBCUniversal has been testing a new ad unit that allows viewers to buy — directly from their phone — products featured on the show they’re watching.

We’ve written about other companies creating shoppable video technology, but that usually means adding links or other elements to online videos — very different from NBCU’s ShoppableTV, which connects the programming on your living room TV with a shopping experience on your phone.

The company is using QR codes to achieve this. An ad with the code will pop up at on the bottom of the screen during relevant moments of the show. If you’d like to purchase the product, you can point your camera at the code and you’ll end up following an affiliate link to the sponsor’s e-commerce site.

See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/28/nbcuniversal-rolls-out-its-shoppabletv-ads/

MIT Taught Self-Driving Cars to See Around Corners with Shadows

The new MIT system is simpler because it just looks for subtle changes in light and shadow on the ground that indicate another vehicle is approaching.

This work comes from MIT’s famous Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). The team thinks this approach to monitoring the environment around a vehicle could be the equivalent of x-ray vision for cars. Whereas the LIDAR used for object mapping in current self-driving cars has high resolution and collects more data than a visible light camera, it can only objects that are directly visible. A shadow, however, might be enough to trim as much as half a second off the car’s reactions. That could be the difference between a major accident and a near miss.

ShadowCam uses a sequence of four video frames from a camera pointed at the region just ahead of the car.

See the full story here: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/301073-mit-taught-self-driving-cars-to-see-around-corners-with-shadows

Spreading the Love of Classical Music Through Virtual Reality

PlayStation VR made a Joshua Bell VR experience for music lovers and tech enthusiasts. Owners must use a VR headset and any pair of headphones to indulge in the full experience. Once set up, the app takes users to the Lyndhurst hall in London. There, Bell performs the Hungarian Dance No. 1 by Brahms, along with pianist Sam Haywood.

Developers leveraged binaural audio processing technology, as well as directional surround sound to make everything come to life. In other words, users will hear the sound in exquisite detail the closer they move to Bell. If they step back, they will experience the hall’s natural reverb.

Owners of a PlayStation headset can download the VR experience for free.

How VR Is Transforming Classical Music

Another up and coming VR application is the Four Strings Around the World project. Featuring Romanian violinist, Irina Muresanu, the app takes its audience around the world as she plays beautiful melodies with her violin.

Through the app, users can have a one-on-one lesson with Muresanu. They can see and observe the movement of her hands and her bow arms in great detail.

See the full story here: https://arpost.co/2019/10/30/spreading-love-classical-music-virtual-reality/

(Vancouver) Tetsuro Shigematsu’s new play explores lives swallowed up by the lure of virtual reality

In Kuroko, a co-production between the Cultch and Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre, Maya (Kanon Hewitt) is a young woman who has secluded herself in her room for the better part of six years. But when a mysterious stranger challenges her to help save her dying father, she is forced to come to terms with the outside world.

Rather than delve too deeply into the latest developments in virtual reality tech, which would have dated the play (“It would be the equivalent of doing a show about MySpace,” he said), he was more fascinated by the phenomenon of hikikomori — people, like Maya, who opt out of society and retreat into their rooms.

“We realized that even if you’re watching what someone is doing in virtual reality on a screen, it’s still a solitary experience to behold. So we decided to go completely analog — using theatrical conventions of gestures and no masks or goggles at all, and letting audience members use their imagination.”

See the full story here: https://vancouversun.com/entertainment/local-arts/tetsuro-shigematsus-new-play-explores-lives-swallowed-up-by-the-lure-of-virtual-reality

Moving-tolerant Augmented Reality Surgical Navigation System using Autostereoscopic 3D Image Overlay

[PhilNote: they seem to be inventing a specialized system at the same time the AR hardware industry is developing a general purpose device that can do the same thing; ex. Oculus Quest.]

Augmented reality (AR) surgical navigation systems based on image overlay have been used in minimally invasive surgery (MIS). However, conventional systems still suffer from a limited viewing zone, a shortage of intuitive three-dimensional (3D) image guidance and can’t be moved freely. To fuse the 3D overlay image with the patient in situ, it is essential to track the overlay device while it is moving. A direct line-of-sight should be maintained between the optical markers and the tracker camera. We propose a moving-tolerant AR surgical navigation system using autostereoscopic image overlay, which can avoid the use of the optical tracking system during the intraoperative period. The system captures binocular image sequences of environmental change in the operation room to locate the overlay device, rather than tracking the overlay device directly. Therefore, it is no longer required to maintain a direct line-of-sight between the tracker and the tracked devices. The movable range of the system is also not limited by the scope of the tracker camera. Computer simulation experiments demonstrate the reliability of the proposed moving-tolerant AR surgical navigation system. We also fabricate a computer-generated integral photography (CGIP)-based 3D overlay AR system to validate the feasibility of the proposed moving-tolerant approach. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that the proposed system can always fuse the 3D image with the patient, thus increasing the feasibility and reliability of traditional 3D overlay AR surgical navigation systems.

See the full story here: https://jbhi.embs.org/2019/10/30/moving-tolerant-augmented-reality-surgical-navigation-system-using-autostereoscopic-3d-image-overlay/

Why AI Needs Human Input (And Always Will)

The reality is that we are still far from achieving generalized AI that is functionally equivalent to the human mind. As the cofounder and CEO of a customer support automation platform that helps enterprises launch and train virtual agents, I've realized that whether the first generalized AI is born a year or 100 years from now, AI will always require human input and expertise — technical and otherwise — to operate at its full potential in a way that's ethical, responsible and safe.

Below, we'll take a look at some examples of how AI relies on human input across a variety of established and emerging applications and explain why even the smartest AI will still require human assistance.

Social media: Humans course-correct for algorithmic extremism.

Unfortunately, according to a report published by Social Media Today, these algorithms were found to have helped instigate political divisions by favoring divisive content to drive engagement.

Medicine: Combining human and machine intelligence.

Self-driving cars: AI handles corners, while humans handle corner cases.

See the full story here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2019/10/30/why-ai-needs-human-input-and-always-will/#8c8acf75ff7d