philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

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

USC Games Expo – Computer Science (Games) Entries

The USC Games Expo is the Wednesday the 8th of May 2019, 5pm to 10pm. The USC Computer Science (Games) Program, part of USC Games, will be showing games & technologies built in Spring semester. This will include work from the mobile, game engines, VR/AR & graduate advanced games courses.

AR/VR Experiencess

• BLK - a photorealistic, virtual reality tour through the Caribou diorama at the Natural History Museum.
• CA-R - Your Car in AR - an augmented reality based car showroom experience.
• Gold Rush - a fun VR game in the gardens of Springdale that employs speed and cognition to burn calories.
• Oculaxy - the galaxy of sights, is a platform to create location-based AR/VR challenges and collectibles to turn the environment into engagement battlefields filled with rewards supported by blockchain and challenges to be completed by players.
• Overcome - a VR therapy game designed for Parkinsons patients using treadmill, to improve their cognitive and motor functions. The therapy simulates a city enviroment with obstacles to tackle while completing a task.
• Pocket Pets - An AR game designed for users to adopt and raise their own pets which are capable of engaging with the user.
• ReviewAR - Product insights from customer reviews in Augmented Reality.
• Roger That! - is a two-player cooperative action-adventure VR game with stealth element.
• SmashVR - aims to bring the outdoor racket games sports experience into the comfort of your home but with a twist.
• Sole Survivor - is a VR horror game emphasizing on atmospheric horror. Player needs to find out a way to escape from the haunted school.
• Sparow - augmented reality digital audio workstation.
• The Catastrophe - a realtime simulation to escape the earthquake through a VR tutorial.
• TnVR - Immersive learning through VR Trivia Mini-Games.
• Udaan - Udaan is an immersive virtual reality game that simulates flying experiences of a fly in a challenging environment.
• UP - expect a wonder journey to explore VR game world.
• USC AiR - USC AiR is a mobile Augmented Reality data visualization app which communicates with IoT air quality sensors throughout the campus and displays the real-time data as immersive and interactive visualizations.
• Virtual Doll - a VR doll designed for users to watch different dances for entertainment, also check the weather, check the schedule.

See full event info here: http://gamepipe.usc.edu

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/

How Tribeca’s VR award winner The Key made magic out of metaphor

The Key integrates more than VR. You enter a misty room wearing a neckband speaker that begins the story's narration and music. You're alone with a woman in a simple tunic, and she acts out the first-person narrator's cues. She shows you a large key in her hand when the narrator mentions it, for example.

And she helps you put the VR headset on. The headset's soundtrack syncs with the speaker collar you're wearing -- one of the most clever ways I've seen for a VR project to ease the often-clunky transition from the real world into virtual reality.

The VR itself is an allegorical animation. Finding the look of the experience was important to Tricart: watercolor skies, primary colors, a bare lunar-like landscape. And as you go through the experience, in barely perceptible ways, you lose one color after another. Your world degrades.

But in a shocking transition, The Key's VR experience flips from its artistic presentation to blunt realism and explains the underlying truth to everything you just saw. Refugees aren't mentioned until the very end.

See the full story here: https://www.cnet.com/news/tribeca-film-fest-vr-award-winner-the-key-made-magic-out-of-metaphor/?fbclid=IwAR0grpv4kurj-oJ2j_RwLbn9NLHyu6wnxx2-BQQBjEJLyl1hG08hLUiVMjk#ftag=COS-05-10aaa0i

Rise in jobs and salaries for creative industries, finds research

For some of these design roles the increase was not just seen in numbers, but advertised salary too. UI designer (4.3 per cent), graphic designer (4.5 per cent) and UX designer (2.7 per cent) saw increases faster than the sector average of 1.3 per cent, demonstrating the value employers place on these skillsets.

King continued: “It’s not just senior roles that are receiving good news. We are also seeing a rise in salaries across assistant and exec level roles, which is a positive message to those wanting to enter the industry.  This generation has a native understanding of digital tech – something which our guides and the State of Skills tool highlight as a pre-requisite for success in this sector. But a constant desire to learn is required as this fast-paced, exciting industry continues to evolve.

“Finally, we are finding that marketing professionals are driven by a desire to work for an organisation based on culture, ethics and objectives – businesses should build on this to be best equipped to attract the best talent in the coming years.”

See the full story here: https://exhibitionnews.uk/rise-in-jobs-and-salaries-for-creative-industries-finds-research/

Apple CEO Tim Cook touts enterprise augmented reality as Apple, SAP further integrate

Apple CEO Tim Cook touted use of augmented reality in manufacturing, retail and other industries as part of an expanded partnership with SAP.

"AR and ML will be key to delivering the right information to the right person at the right time," said Cook.

Cook took the stage with SAP CEO Bill McDermott at SAP Sapphire. The companies are integrating Apple's Core ML, an on-device machine learning technology, with its SAP Cloud Platform SDK for iOS.

In addition, SAP said will also support the Mac platform. Here's the breakdown:

• The next version of SAP Cloud Platform SDK, available later this month will enable businesses to create iOS apps powered by SAP Leonardo.
• Machine learning models can be downloaded to iPhone and iPad to run offline.
• SAP's mobile apps for SuccessFactors, Concur and SAP Asset Manager run natively on iOS. SAP said that it will expand its native iOS approach to its broader portfolio starting with Ariba.
• SAP will also expand its app offerings to the Mac to run natively.

See the full story here: https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-ceo-tim-cook-touts-enterprise-augmented-reality-as-apple-sap-further-integrate/

UNCW Researchers Will Use Virtual Reality Technology to Encourage Students to Consider STEM Careers

Computer science assistant professor Toni Pence is leading a team of six UNCW scholars who will use virtual reality technology to enhance learning and encourage students from underrepresented groups to consider STEM careers. The project is funded by a $394,606 grant from the National Science Foundation.

The immersive experience is tied to the curriculum, and the students learn by stepping into the virtual shoes of a STEM occupation. The project will focus initially on grades 3-5 but eventually could expand to middle school curriculum, said Pence, the primary investigator.

Another goal is to prevent students from becoming disengaged as they approach middle school, Stocker said. The VR-enhanced curriculum is designed to support learning by helping students see where their education can lead them and how what they learn can be applied outside the classroom.

See the full story here: https://uncw.edu/news/2019/05/uncw-researchers-will-use-virtual-reality-technology-to-encourage-students-to-consider-stem-careers.html

At Tribeca Film Festival, Virtual Reality Attempts To Subvert Our Expectations

But even as VR bubbles up yet again with a legitimately astonishing (and astonishingly user-friendly) product in the Oculus Quest, few people are still talking about VR with the same fervor and sense of inevitability that they once did just a couple of years ago.

To put it plainly: Freed from just about any commercial expectations, VR creators are doing some downright amazing things.

So what is new and now in VR this year? If the exhibitions at Tribeca are any indication, it's the use of the tech to subvert our expectations about storytelling in ways that make things feel personal and real in surprising ways.

Take The Key (created by Celine Tricart and narrated by Search Party's Alia Shawkat), which won the festival's Grand Jury Prize for Best Virtual Reality Immersive Story. Like some of the more ambitious VR projects from last year’s Tribeca film fest, The Key features elements of immersive theater via the use of a live actor.

By luring us in with a sci-fi conceit, and then stripping away this layer, going through The Key feels almost as if you are awakened from a dream, only to find a nightmare in the real world.

Another highlight from Tribeca was Bonfire, produced by Baobab Studios, which has quickly established a reputation for producing high-end VR experiences with computer animation that rivals theatrical releases from Pixar and Dreamworks (it's no coincidence that co-founder Eric Darnell was the guy behind the Madagascar movies). 

As Bonfire begins, you (isn’t it great that VR can be written about in the second person?) find yourself marooned on an alien planet with nothing but a robotic servant to keep you company. Soon a strange (and highly adorable) alien approaches, leaving you free to interact with it as you please.

It may not be obvious, but your actions really do matter here. Depending on how you act towards the alien (Do you feed it? Taunt it? Play with it?), the creature treats you differently, and the story forks in ways both subtle and obvious.

Under the hood, Bonfire was built with advanced AI engine that allows the alien creature to respond to your behavior in ways that feel natural—all while driving the narrative around your actions.

Bonfire is also a clever deconstruction of the typical narrative format. If you’ve ever read a screenwriting book (or simply seen a lot of movies), you know that most stories involve characters going on a journey and coming out the other side changed in some fundamental way. ... What makes Bonfire so interesting is that you (again: the second person!) are the lead character who is forced to learn and adapt, before making a fateful decision which I won't spoil here. Academically speaking, this is fascinating. And from a pure experience level, it’s a joy. You aren’t rooting for some distant hero to do the right thing—you’re pulling that lever yourself.

See the full story here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/sethporges/2019/05/06/at-tribeca-film-festival-virtual-reality-attempts-to-subvert-our-expectations/#4bc29906921a