At its biggest conference of the year, Apple quietly laid the groundwork for a pair of smart glasses
...toward the end of its two-hour keynote last week, Apple announced a handful of developer tools designed for building augmented-reality experiences.
Apple announced three major AR tools at WWDC 2019: ARKit 3, RealityKit, and Reality Composer.
ARKit 3, announced at WWDC 2019, is focused on how people actually interact with AR.
RealityKit is a new developer tool set that offers photo-realistic rendering, environment mapping, and realistic effects such as animation, 3D audio, and motion blur.
Reality Composer is a new app that Apple built for iOS, Mac, and the new iPadOS. It lets developers build and prototype their AR experiences even if they've never built a 3D app before, thanks to simple tools like dragging and dropping.
Each of these tools — ARKit 3, RealityKit, and Reality Composer — is readying developers for a huge AR wave. It's as if Apple knows AR is going to be very popular soon.
See the full story here: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-glasses-hints-from-wwdc-2019-2019-6
Mary Meeker’s 2019 Internet Trends report highlights China’s short-form videos and super apps
In particular, this year’s report highlighted short-form videos as a key driver of Internet usage growth in China, leading user and usage growth across all app categories. Users spent a total of nearly 600 million hours per day watching short-form videos on mobile in April 2019, more than in any other category. Short-form video leaders included Douyin (known as Tik Tok in international markets), Kuaishou and Haokan.
Another major video trend is live-streaming, especially for e-commerce platforms. Taobao got more than $14 billion GMV through live-streaming in 2018, while fashion e-commerce and social media platform Mogu attributed 24% of its GMV to live-streaming, which also had a four times repeat purchase rate.
Meituan Dianping’s “super app” is growing increasingly huge. It now includes more than 30 services (for example, restaurant reviews, reservations, movie tickets, home rentals, hotel bookings, payments, travel booking, food delivery and grocery ordering), although restaurant-related services and travel make up as much as 88% of its revenue. The company’s annual transacting users grew 26% year-over-year to 412 million.
The influence of these “super apps” can be seen outside of China in apps like Grab, Rappi and Uber, which are adding more services (for example, Uber’s app now lets you order food, reserve e-bikes and find promotions at other businesses).
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/12/mary-meekers-2019-internet-trends-report-highlights-chinas-short-form-videos-and-super-apps/
Google Scientists Generate Realistic Videos at Scale with AI
The systems are based on a neural architecture known as Transformers, as described in a Google Brain paper, and are autoregressive, “meaning they generate videos pixel by pixel.”
VentureBeat reports that the scientists, in a paper titled “Scaling Autoregressive Video Models” on preprint server arXiv.org, described that the group’s “[AI] models are capable of producing diverse and surprisingly realistic continuations on a subset of videos from Kinetics, a large scale action recognition data set of … videos exhibiting phenomena such as camera movement, complex object interactions, and diverse human movement.”
“This marks a departure from the often very narrow domains discussed in the video generation literature to date, such as artificially generated videos of moving digits or shapes, or videos depicting natural, yet highly constrained environments, such as robot arms interacting with a small number of different objects with a fixed camera angle and background,” they wrote.
See the full story here: http://www.etcentric.org/google-scientists-generate-realistic-videos-at-scale-with-ai/
The 5 biggest announcements from UploadVR’s 2019 E3 VR showcase
PISTOL WHIP IS A RHYTHM SHOOTER THAT MAKES YOU FEEL LIKE JOHN WICK
Pistol Whip is a fast-moving action / rhythm game from Cloudhead, the studio that worked with Valve on its Portal-themed Aperture Hand Labs. It’s described as a mashup of Beat Saber, Superhot VR, and John Wick, wrapped in a stylish neon package. It’s coming out for major VR platforms later this year.
See the full story here: https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/10/18656517/e3-uploadvr-vr-biggest-announcements-after-the-fall-budget-cuts-2-2019
Business Writing Gets A Boost From Big Data
Simply put, Harris told PYMNTS, “augmented writing is applying data to words. The difference between successful business writing and failing is the words that you use.”
In general, here is what augmented writing entails: By analyzing millions upon millions of words from actual communications – emails, cover letters, marketing copy and so on – machine learning can predict what types of words and sentences work best in a specific context. The data analysis keeps track of which messages lead to positive and desired results, Harris said. When someone is writing a message with the augmented writing technology in the background, the software helps the person select the right copy, learning from every keystroke in what Harris called a “positive learning loop.”
The idea is to bring a new level of craft and efficiency to business communications, including job postings and candidate applications. The predictive engine that powers the technology can help produce more precise copy for those tasks, which can making hiring less of a hassle, and even less expensive over time. The technology also recognizes context and makes appropriate suggestions.
“The language that works in Denver is different from the language that works in New York or London or San Francisco,” Harris said. “The way you would talk to an engineer is different than the way you would talk to a fashion designer or someone in financial services.”
See the full story here: https://www.pymnts.com/innovation/2019/business-writing-big-data-augmented-reality-textio/
Google Helps Tell the Story of Stonewall in Augmented Reality
About four miles southwest of New York's iconic Flatiron Building, which is getting its own Pride makeover via Snapchat's Landmarker AR, Stonewall National Monument is also receiving some augmented reality treatment by way of the Stonewall Forever mobile app published by the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center (better known as The Center) in partnership with Google.
See the full story here: https://mobile-ar.reality.news/news/google-helps-tell-story-stonewall-augmented-reality-0198594/
How Is Augmented Reality Being Used In Education?
Overall AR acts as a great facilitator in active learning through doing in a way that engages students and aids teachers.
The clear watch-outs are that most teachers are stretched already so giving structured narrative driven content that can be plugged directly into their existing resources and curriculum requirements are critical.
See the full story here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2019/06/10/how-is-augmented-reality-being-used-in-education/#4df088845028
How does mobile AR work today and how will it work tomorrow
[PhilNote: this is an excellent CliffNotes-style AR technology primer.]
AR experiences can seem magical but what exactly is happening behind the curtain? To answer this, we must look at the three basic foundations of a camera-based AR system like our smartphone.
- How do computers know where it is in the world? (Localization + Mapping)
- How do computers understand what the world looks like? (Geometry)
- How do computers understand the world as we do? (Semantics)
One day, we will create a machine-readable, 1:1 scale model of the world known as “The AR Cloud”. The AR Cloud has many alternative names such as “the world’s digital twin”, “the mirror world” or “magicverse”. Personally, I’d like to think of it as a digital replica of our world that perfectly overlays on top of our real world.
See the full 5000 word essay here: https://arvrjourney.com/reality-check-the-marvel-of-computer-vision-technology-in-todays-camera-based-ar-systems-69b00947f954?sk=0070a49f213064d70f6f104f443c33ef
Jeffrey Katzenberg, Meg Whitman Offer Details on Quibi Launch, Pricing
The company currently has projects in the works from A-listers like Guillermo del Toro, Antoine Fuqua, and Sam Raimi. Each series is expected to be two to four hours in length, with each one divided into segments that will be no longer than 10 minutes each.
According to Katzenberg, the service will have two pricing tiers at launch on April 6, 2020. The first will cost $4.99 with one pre-roll ad before each video segment — a 10-second ad if the video is less than 5 minutes and a 15-second ad for 5-10 minute videos. The ad-free option will cost $7.99. Whitman also said they expect to have approximately 7,000 pieces of content available within the first year.
“I said to Meg that, until day one, every decision that we make around content will be driven by instinct,” Katzenberg said. “Minutes after we launch, everything will be driven by data.”
See the full story here: https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/quibi-jeffrey-katzenberg-meg-whitman-produced-by-1203236854/