Army, NPS Embrace Virtual and Augmented Reality
“The largest use has been in training. Maintenance is second — for example, goggles that allow a worker to have access to records and pictures of parts when he’s in the belly of an airplane.”
VR Lets Users Experience Historic Sites
Other agencies are turning to creative methods — and outside help — to develop AR/VR programs that enhance the customer experience.
The American Battle Monuments Commission created a smartphone app that allows people to take a virtual tour of the Normandy American Cemetery near Omaha Beach in northern France, the burial site for 9,387 Americans who died in the D-Day invasion. The app also gives tourists physically at the site more information about what they’re seeing.
The tiny agency, which maintains 26 cemeteries and 30 memorials around the world, outsourced production of the app, says Tim Nosal, ABMC chief of external affairs.
“The complexity of the technology is likely beyond the capability of most government agencies,” Ollig says. “We can give the public something they’ve never seen before when we find a partner who’s willing to work with us in a way that fits with our mission.”
See the full story here: https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2019/05/army-nps-embrace-virtual-and-augmented-reality
Epson’s new augmented reality BT-30C glasses can plug into your phone
Epson has a new pair of augmented reality glasses on the market — and while they’re not meant for everyday wear, they’re still supposed to be more convenient than their predecessors. The Moverio BT-30C glasses connect to an Android smartphone or a Windows PC over USB-C, unlike earlier Epson Moverio products, which plugged into a custom Android controller box. They cost $499, and they’ll ship in June of this year.
The glasses feature a 23-degree FOV, which is small even by those standards.
See the full story here: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/8/18535912/epson-moverio-bt-30c-augmented-reality-glasses-announce-pricing-release-date
Review: The Oculus Quest Is Virtual Reality’s Best Bet Yet
That’s not true of the Oculus Quest. The Facebook subsidiary’s newest portable headset ditches the wires and expensive hardware found on other high-end VR hardware, cramming it all into a self-contained headset with motion-tracking controllers. If the Quest is able to build up a library of quality VR games and experiences, it could turn into the coolest game console you’ll ever own. But it could also be the most painful game console you’ll ever own.
The $399 Oculus Quest ($499 for the 128GB version) is the company’s third major attempt at nailing virtual reality. Its first, the polarizing Oculus Rift, brought VR to high-end PCs, requiring users set up stationary sensors to play. Its second, the smaller, self-contained Oculus Go, ditched the PC for some newfound freedom, but its single controller, limited degrees of freedom, and underwhelming experience eventually left many bored of the entire affair.
Like the Go, the Quest is a self-contained VR headset — it has no wires to get tangled in and no cameras to mount or position for tracking purposes. The Quest supports six degrees of freedom: up, down, left, right, front, and back. Unlike the Go, the Quest’s integrated cameras and motion-tracking controllers do a great job of keeping you properly oriented, and allow you to move freely throughout a virtual environment with your actual body as long as you’ve got the space to do so.
There’s also the issue of space. After moving nearly every piece of furniture out of my way, and telling the Guardian where I planned on playing, I still felt cramped.
See the full story here: http://time.com/5584275/oculus-quest-review/
Here’s everything Google announced at the I/O 2019 Keynote
Google Pixel 3a and 3a XL 
To bring the price down, they’ve bumped the processor down a bit (from a Snapdragon 845 to a Snapdragon 670), capped storage at 64GB and dropped wireless charging capabilities. On the upside, they found room for a 3.5mm headphone jack!
The Pixel 3a will start at $399, and come with a 5.6″ display, 12.2mp rear camera and run Android P out of the box. The Pixel 3a XL will start at $479, and bumps the screen up to 6.0″.
Nest Hub and Nest Hub Max A new “Face Match” feature on the Nest Hub Max will recognize your face to customize its responses. In a blog post on the feature, Google says “Face Match’s facial recognition is processed locally with on-device machine learning, so the camera data never leaves the device.”
Augmented reality in search
Certain search results — like, say, a search for a specific shoe model, or “great white shark” — will now include 3D models. Tap the model and you’ll be able to place it in a view of the real world via augmented reality.
Google Lens upgrades
Google Lens is learning a few new tricks. Point Google Lens at a restaurant’s menu, and it’ll highlight the most popular items. Point it at your receipt, and it’ll automatically calculate things like tips and totals.
Duplex on the web
At I/O last year, Google launched Duplex, an AI-powered customer service tool meant to help small businesses (like restaurants and hair salons) field more phone calls, answering common questions and scheduling reservations or appointments.
This year it’ll expand on this by opening up Duplex to the web. Online car rental reservations were given as an example; you say “get me a rental car through [rental company]”, and it pulls up that company’s website and automatically starts booking your car. It can pre-fill things like trip dates from your calendar, and car preferences based on previous rental confirmations found in your Gmail.
Google’s “next-gen” Assistant
Google has managed to shrink its voice recognition models down from hundreds of gigabytes to half a gigabyte, making them small enough to fit right on a phone.
By storing it locally, they’re able to eliminate the latency involved with the back-and-forth pings to the cloud, making conversations with Assistant almost instantaneous. As it’s running on the device, it’ll work even in airplane mode.
Live caption and live transcribe
Android will soon be able to automatically generate captions for media on your phone, including podcasts you’ve got saved and videos you’ve recorded.
Through a feature the company calls “Live Relay,” it can also transcribe phone calls in real time, and allows users to respond via text.
Project Euphonia
Google is researching how it can adapt its AI voice algorithms to better understand users with speech impairments (such as those with ALS or who have had a stroke), custom tailoring its models to an individual user’s speech to better help them communicate.
Google Maps AR mode rolls out to Pixel phones
A few months back, Google showed off a new augmented reality mode that it’s been working on for Google Maps. The goal? Help make sure people start off their walks heading in the right direction. Hold your phone up and you’ll see a camera view of the world in front of you. Google Maps will compare this image to its Street View data to determine your exact position/orientation better than GPS alone can, then draw arrows that point you in the right direction.
This mode has been in beta for a while, and should start hitting Pixel phones later today.
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/07/heres-everything-google-announced-today-at-the-i-o-2019-keynote/?utm_medium=TCnewsletter&tpcc=TCdailynewsletter
Google brings AR and Lens closer to the future of search
Instead, Google's augmented reality vision this year is a double dose of attention to utility and assistance, as AR comes to Google Search and Google Lens aims to help people read. While it may seem tamer than years past, and it's not as showy as recent Google AR projects involving Marvel and Childish Gambino, Google's trying to be legitimately helpful. After dozens of smartglasses and AR headsets have come and gone, we need real reasons to use this tech. Can Google find a way forward?
"We think, with the technologies coming together in augmented reality in particular, there's this opportunity for Google to be vastly more helpful," saysClay Bavor, vice president of virtual and augmented reality, about the variety of AR updates Google has coming this year. You might also say that Google's laying the groundwork for its next big thing. The company has to become the digital glue for a world of services that don't quite exist yet. For now, that means putting computer vision to work even more, not just on Android, but on iPhones too.
Google Search with AR feels like instant holograms
Google is introducing AR to Search this year, and this is how it works: Compatible Android and iOS devices will see 3D object links in Search, which will bring up 3D models that can then be dropped into the real world at proper scale in AR. Google Search will incorporate 3D files using the glTF format, as opposed to Apple's USDZ format used by ARKit in iOS 12. According to Google, developers will need to add just a few lines of code to make 3D assets appear in Google Search.
Google Lens keeps evolving, starting with dining help
Using Google Lens, meanwhile, already feels like a pair of smartglasses without the glasses. The camera-enabled app can already be used for object recognition, translation, shopping and recognizing the world.
I peek down at a sample menu, and suddenly dishes on the menu are highlighted. They're popular dishes, according to Google Maps restaurant information. Tapping on the menu items brings up photos and review comments on the fly. It almost feels like annotated reality.
Google Lens translation comes to low-end phones
What Google's Bavor and Chennapragada are most excited about, however, is a use for Google Lens that's coming to low-end phones running Android Gosoftware. Instant translation and reading assistance is running on phones that aren't powerful enough for ARCore, leaning instead on cloud services. I snap a photo of a sign, and now the phone is reading what it sees back to me, highlighting each word. A tap, and I can translate it into another language.
'Future form factors'
Bavor admits that Google's in a phase of "deep R&D" towards new technologies beyond phones, but for now, the goal is to solve for uses on the phone first.
See the full story here: https://www.cnet.com/news/google-brings-ar-and-lens-closer-to-the-future-of-search-io/