philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Can virtual reality boost positive feelings in patients with depression?

The University of California, Los Angeles, psychiatry researcher and her colleagues are testing whether virtual reality can curb anhedonia, a symptom of depression and other serious mental health conditions that’s marked by a lack of interest or ability to feel pleasure. They’re putting patients into pleasant scenarios — like a stroll through a sun-soaked forest while piano music plays — and coaching them to pay close attention to the positive parts.The idea is to help patients learn to plan positive activities, take part in them, and soak up the good feelings in the process.

It’s an unconventional strategy — not just for its use of virtual reality, but also for how it approaches a patient’s symptoms. Treatments for depression and other serious mental health conditions primarily target negative symptoms, like hopelessness, sadness, and anxiety — but they often don’t help with the lack of positive feelings that some patients experience.

There aren’t data yet to determine whether virtual reality treatment can make a meaningful difference in anhedonia. But the technology is increasingly popular in mental health care.

The foundation of Craske’s approach is an intervention developed by Craske and her colleagues known as positive affect therapy. The gist: put a person into a situation that might be pleasurable, talk to them about it in painstaking detail, repeat.

See the full story here: https://www.statnews.com/2019/04/22/using-virtual-reality-boost-positive-feelings-patients-depression/

10 augmented reality apps for iPhone and iPad you should be using right now

Table of Contents

• Sky Guide ($2.99)
• Sun Seeker Sun Tracker Compass ($9.99)
• JigSpace (Free)
• Smash Tanks! ($1.99)
• AR Runner ($0.99)
• AR Dragon (Free)
• Zombie Gunship Revenant AR (Free)
• Vuforia Chalk (Free)
• IKEA Place (Free)
• Dance Reality (Free)

Vuforia Chalk (Free)

Whenever I imagine AR becoming part of our everyday future lives, I think of something like Vuforia Chalk. It’s a little like FaceTime in that it’s basically a video call, but in this case you can “circle” items you’re looking at through the camera and draw arrows, all the better to, say, point out faulty pieces of equipment or to show someone which buttons to press.

It’s a little wonky sometimes, perhaps because the rear iPhone lenses still don’t have proper TrueDepth sensors that can accurately map out a surface. Both of the people on the call need to have a Chalk account, so there’s some setup involved. And then the free version only lets you use it for three minutes at a time. Still, it’s fun to try out.

Once this kind of technology gets built into FaceTime itself, I think we’ll be taking a giant leap toward the AR-powered future that Apple wants us to get excited about.

See the full story here: https://www.macworld.com/article/3390180/best-augmented-reality-ar-apps-for-ios-iphone-ipad.html

Mosque ventures into virtual reality

AT&T store demos pit Magic Leap versus VR in a tech game of thrones

There are more reasons why it isn't exactly a fair fight between the two technologies. Even bereft of the sensory augmentation, the HTC Vive gets to call upon a powerful desktop PC to generate its visuals. In contrast, the Magic Leap One must rely on a puck worn at one's side powered by an SoC with tighter thermal constraints. The VR experience also takes more time and results in an unpleasant ending for the wearer's character, which could have also contributed to the greater emotional reaction. Calibration difficulties encountered while trying the Magic Leap One led to my hearing the simulation's introduction four times, which also likely reduced some of its impact.

Removed from the souped-up VR comparison, however, the Magic Leap One experience impressed. The Game of Thronesscenario reminded me somewhat of one of the first-gen HoloLens games -- but with a field of view closer to that of the second-gen HoloLens. And while the emotional reaction was not as intense, it was palpable.

See the full story here: https://www.zdnet.com/article/at-t-store-demos-pit-magic-leap-versus-vr-in-a-tech-game-of-thrones/

Zillow uses VR to try to make online real estate more authentic

Real estate is getting a bit more virtual with 3D immersive tours at Zillow, a major player in online home sales.

The company added a feature called 3D Home to its site and app Monday that lets you step from virtual room to virtual room as you're shopping online. Real estate agents can capture the imagery using an iPhone or Ricoh's 360-degree cameras like the Theta V and Theta Z1.

The result, Zillow hopes, is you should get a better feel for what might well be one of the most expensive purchases in your life. Virtual reality has limited mainstream appeal, even among gamers, but it still holds potential for when you want to be transported to a different realm.

For now, stepping through the 3D home is like using Google Maps' Street View: you see arrows that let you click or tap around to different rooms. You won't be swooping through a 3D zone like you might in a VR video game.

Zillow's 3D Home tool is designed to be easy for photographers to use so home sellers and their agents can add the 3D views affordably to ordinary homes for sale, not just luxury mansions, Weisberg said. Photographing a 3,000-square-foot home takes about 10 or 15 minutes, with shots taken for each room.

See the full story here: https://www.cnet.com/news/zillow-3d-home-uses-vr-make-online-real-estate-more-authentic/

SeeingVR, a New Toolkit from Microsoft will improve the Virtual Reality Experience for People with Low Vision

Every person has its own vision preferences, therefore a tool kit has been worked on by the researcher so each player can customize it to their convenience. The kit has 14 tools consisting of magnifier, bifocal lens, edge enhancement, depth measurement and controls that let players adjust the brightness and contrast level. It also facilitates players by providing an option that will describe the objects in a scene or read it aloud.

In a testing process, 11 people with a vision problem were asked to use SeeingVR, a new toolkit. This resulted in participants completing their tasks quickly using the toolkit rather than with the default mode. The kit is accessible to Unity VR developers only, but because it is the biggest VR development platform, the technology is likely to be widely adopted by the public soon.

Paper titled as "SeeingVR: A Set of Tools to Make Virtual Reality More Accessible to People with Low Vision" is a joint effort of Microsoft Researchers Ed Cutrell, Christian Holz, Eyal Ofek, Andrew Wilson and Meredith Ringel Morris, whose results with be presented by Microsoft intern Yuhang Zhao at the CHI the conference, to be held this year in Glasgow.

See the full story here: https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2019/04/microsoft-seeing-vr-advancing-accessibility-on-the-web-in-virtual-reality-and-in-the-classroom.html

The Best 360 Cameras You Can Get For Under $200

After all, the world isn’t flat – why should your videos be?

1. Samsung Gear 360

2. Ricoh Theta SC 360° Video and Still Camera

3. YI 360 VR Camera

4. Insta360 ONE 360 Video Action Camera

See the full story here: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/best-360-cameras-affordable-825036/

AI IS SMART. CAN WE MAKE IT KIND?

“Even though AIs can do amazing feats, they do what they’ve been trained to do, and they don’t understand what it is that they’re doing.”

This disregard for humans is taken to an extreme in a famous thought experiment dreamt up by Nick Bostrom, the University of Oxford philosopher. The “paperclip maximizer” scenario starts innocently enough, with a hyperintelligent AI assigned to teach itself to maximize a factory’s production of paperclips. But things turn dark when the AI goes on to pursue its assigned task with such single-minded devotion that its factory robots end up converting humanity, the world, “and then increasingly large chunks of the observable universe into paperclips.” That future machine didn’t mean to eradicate humanity, but that wouldn’t matter much to us.

Scheutz and his group are focused more on problems that could arise in the foreseeable future, when we’ll be living and working with robots that may not be able to recognize the consequences of their actions.

For more than fifteen years now, the HRI lab has been working on a solution that sounds like something out of science fiction but is becoming more real every day: Equip AI and AI robots with a core of ethics and awareness about the world. Program machines with a sense of empathy, and right and wrong and socially appropriate, so they can reason their way through a sticky situation. In short, the lab is trying to teach robots to be more like humans. And accomplishing that, it turns out, is just as difficult as it sounds.

DIARC uses some machine learning, too, but what makes it different is that it was designed from the start to fundamentally interact with—and account for—humans. Everything the lab does includes a dissection of the consequences that could follow when robots and humans interact.

More likely, they’d wind up hurting us because they’re not designed to understand the consequences of their actions.

Harms don’t have to be physical, either—they could be psychological. Scheutz often points to the emotional risks posed by a future elder-care robot. If it’s unequipped to show compassion or make small talk when its lonely charge tries to connect—as humans invariably do—hurt feelings could result.

. The two robots didn’t need to issue verbal commands, because they’re operating with a hive mind: one DIARC, two bodies. Some people, according to the lab’s research, may find robots silently communicating a little creepy, but Scheutz hasn’t ruled it out as a useful function, given how efficient it could be during complicated and stressful missions spanning many robots working in multiple locations.

Graduate student Daniel Kasenberg, EG18, is in the beginning stages of studying how to represent moral and social norms—the often unspoken rules we live by—in a language machines can understand and learn. This means reducing actions and effects into algorithmic equations and symbols. “What we have right now are small components of this architecture at a very rudimentary level,” Kasenberg cautioned. “But the ultimate goal is to develop a system that can represent these moral and social norms, and evaluate potential courses of action based on [them].”

See the full story here: https://tuftsmagazine.com/issues/magazine/2019/spring/ai-smart-can-we-make-it-kind?utm_source=email&utm_medium=university&utm_campaign=news_alumni_04202019_1164_(MAG)(AS)

Despite cuts, White House looks to agencies to advance AI priorities

Parker said that while overall research and development budgets have been cut, "AI was protected."

On the civilian side, the White House's budget does specifically propose $850 million for AI funding between the Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Science Foundation -- all agencies that face overall and R&D cuts.

Parker also pointed out that the administration wants to see agencies reporting their investments in AI because tracking AI projects is "so hard" right now. "We can begin to get a better holistic view of what our agencies are spending in this area."

See the full story here: https://fcw.com/articles/2019/04/18/ai-workforce-gunter.aspx

This Pop-Up Uses AI to Make Perfect KitKat and Sake Pairings

When you try to think of two great tastes that taste great together, what comes to mind? Peanut butter and chocolate? How about a KitKat bar and a nice glass of sake?

You might not know where to begin, but that’s no big deal. The folks at Nestle Japan have just unveiled a pop-up “bar” that utilizes the power of artificial intelligence to determine the perfect KitKat and Sake pairing for customers.

See the full story here: https://www.geek.com/culture/this-pop-up-uses-ai-to-make-perfect-kitkat-and-sake-pairings-1783666/