8th Wall Brings Image Targets to Its Web-Based Augmented Reality Platform
Release 11 of 8th Wall Web brings Image Targets, the company's take on image recognition for AR activations. The capability enables creators to define a 2D image as a marker and embed AR content, such as 3D models or video, which can be accessed through mobile web browsers on iOS and Android.
"Unlike other web-based image recognition technology, the image detection and tracking for 8th Wall Web is all performed directly on-device, in the mobile browser," the company announced in a blog post.
While both tech giants also have their own web AR options, Apple's AR Quick Lookonly works on iOS, and Google's web-based capability for ARCore is still experimental, so 8th Wall maintains an advantage in being cross-platform.
See the full story here; https://mobile-ar.reality.news/news/8th-wall-brings-image-targets-its-web-based-augmented-reality-platform-0196339/
Paul Allen’s legacy includes a virtual reality “Holodome”
The centerpiece of the dome movement is Holodome, which was a pet project of the late Microsoft co-founder.
- At TED, Vulcan debuted 2 new experiences: one is a live-action film that takes you to the top of Mount Everest and another takes you inside the Impressionist works of Claude Monet as you step inside the artist's world.
- The video is not just all around you, but also above you and at your feet.
My thought bubble: Both new exhibits do exactly what good VR should — that is, convincingly take you to a place you couldn't go, somewhere either inaccessible, like Everest, or unreal, as with Monet.
Details: The centerpiece of the technology is 4 very-high-resolution projectors.
- There are 2 Holodomes already in the wild, one that was used for consumers at the Museum of Popular Culture (MoPop) in Seattle and another in Venice, California, where Vulcan has been showing the technology to creators.
- At MoPop, 40,000 consumers have been through the Holodome since last May.
See the full story here: https://www.axios.com/paul-allen-legacy-virtual-reality-holodome-e86d85d4-fb47-415a-8fa8-7349390b807b.html
Virtual Reality Experience Takes Audience Back to 10,000 BC at This Year’s Tribeca Film Festival, April 24-May 5
The film experience moves forward while looking backward with the U.S. premiere of CAVE, a shared virtual-reality experience that transports audiences back thousands of years, April 24 through May 5 at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival.
In this multi-faceted virtual reality experience—co-created by Ken Perlin, Kris Layng, and Sebastian Herscher at NYU’s Future Reality Lab—viewers journey to 10,000 BC, when stories were told around a campfire and the history of our ancestors was written on the walls of caves.
The piece whisks its audience into the past and drops them into a dilemma faced by Ayara, a young woman who is struggling to decide whether to accept her role as her tribe’s only emissary to the spirit world.
CAVE was designed from the ground up to challenge the status quo of how audiences collectively experience immersive arts and entertainment. The coming-of-age tale is told using the cutting-edge Parallux system, a fundamentally new kind of shared VR technology that allows virtual experiences to be shared by many people in the same location.
Unlike conventional 360-degree VR, viewers see and hear the story—as well as one another—from a unique point-of-view within the same virtual environment, letting them feel as physically present in the shared world as they would when attending a live theater or concert event.
See the full story here: https://www.newswise.com/articles/virtual-reality-experience-takes-audience-back-to-10-000-bc-at-this-year-s-tribeca-film-festival-april-24-may-5
Lightelligence releases prototype of its optical AI accelerator chip
Accelerator chips that use light rather than electrons to carry out computations promise to supercharge AI model training and inference. In theory, they could process algorithms at the speed of light — dramatically faster than today’s speediest logic-gate circuits — but so far, light’s unpredictability has foiled most attempts to emulate transistors optically.
Boston-based Lightelligence, though, claims it’s achieved a measure of success with its optical AI chip, which today debuts in prototype form. It says that latency is improved up to 10,000 times compared with traditional hardware, and it estimates power consumption at “orders of magnitude” lower.
The chip in question — which is about the size of a printed circuit board — packs photonic circuits similar to optical fibers that transmit signals. It requires only limited energy, because light produces less heat than the electricity, and is less susceptible to changes in ambient temperature, electromagnetic fields, and other noise. It’s designed to slot into existing machines at the network edge, like on-premises servers, and will eventually ship with a software stack compatible with algorithms in commonly used frameworks like Google’s Tensorflow, Facebook’s Caffe2 and Pytorch, and others.
See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/2019/04/15/lightelligence-releases-prototype-of-its-optical-ai-accelerator-chip/
New York City’s AI task force stalls
Nearly one year after its founding, the Automated Decision Systems Task Force hasn’t even agreed on the definition of an automated decision system
In May 2018, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the formation of the Automated Decision Systems Task Force, a cross-disciplinary group of city officials and experts in artificial intelligence (AI), ethics, privacy, and law. Established by Local Law 49, the goal of the ADS Task Force is to develop a process for reviewing algorithms the city uses—such as those for determining public school assignments, predicting which buildings should be inspected, and fighting tenant harassment—through the lens of equity, fairness, and accountability.
“Algorithms should be subject to the same scrutiny with which we treat any regulation, standard, rule, or protocol. It is essential that they are highly vetted, transparent, accurate and do not generate injurious, unintended consequences,” Stringer wrote. “Without such oversight, misguided or outright inaccurate algorithms can fester and lead to increasingly problematic outcomes for city residents, employees, and contractors.”
This lack of progress to date reflects the overall difficulty of regulating technology, a field that’s coming under increased scrutiny at federal, state, and local levels. This month, the House and Senate introduced the Algorithmic Accountability Act, which, if passed, would require the FTC to create rules for assessing the impact of automated decision systems. HUD recently sued Facebook for housing discrimination in its ads, the New York Civil Liberties Union is suing ICE for its immigrant risk assessment algorithm, and a Connecticut judge recently ruled that tenant screening companies that use algorithmic risk assessments must comply with fair housing rules.
See the full story here: https://ny.curbed.com/2019/4/16/18335495/new-york-city-automated-decision-system-task-force-ai
EU Votes For Copyright Rules Opposed by Nativist Groups
In a vote of 348 to 274, nineteen out of the European Union’s 28 member countries voted in favor of reformed laws to protect content creators. Critics of the reform — including large tech companies — argue that the rules will reduce free speech online, with Articles 11 and 13 of particular concern. European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker declared that the new copyright rules are “fit for the digital age.” In the lead-up to the vote, nativist groups in many countries worked to defeat the new rules.
VentureBeat reports that Article 11, the so-called link tax, “requires websites to pay publishers a fee if they display excerpts of copyrighted content” or even a link to it; and Article 13, the so-called upload filter, “makes digital platforms legally liable for any copyright infringements on their platform.”
See the full story here: http://www.etcentric.org/eu-votes-for-copyright-rules-opposed-by-nativist-groups/
Disney, Rutgers Scientists Use AI to Generate Storyboards
The system first “determines if a given snippet contains a particular syntactic structure and subsequently splits and assembles it into simpler sentences, recursively processing it until no further simplification is possible,” then applies a “coordination step and a lexical simplifier, which “matches actions in the simplified sentences with 52 animations (expanded to 92 by a dictionary of synonyms) in a predefined library.”
The content is fed to the pipeline, dubbed Cardinal, which turns the actions into previsualizations in the Unreal video game engine. The system has been trained with “scene descriptions from 996 screenplays drawn from over 1,000 scripts scraped from freely available sources including IMSDb, SimplyScripts, and ScriptORama5.” The system is made up of “525,708 descriptions containing 1,402,864 sentences, 920,817 (over 40 percent) of which had at least one action verb.”
See the full story here: http://www.etcentric.org/disney-rutgers-scientists-use-ai-to-generate-storyboards/
Sony Just Filed A Patent For Watching Live eSports Via PlayStation VR Like You’re Actually There
Filed in 2017 and 2018, respectively, the two patents were published just last week. The first one illustrates a way for owners of Sony's VR headset to virtually join a live event — and not just join, but be there. The proposed feature would anchor spectators to a physical location in the venue to virtually spectate and feel as though they're really there, participating in the event, crowd and all.
The second patent, on the other hand, would allow players to turn their friends into NPC crowds so they can spectate as the user players their games. "Generic spectators" don't quite match the realism of other elements in current-generation gaming, Sony stated in the patent, and it wants to populate NPC crowds with pals for "a more entertaining and engaging experience."
See the full story here: https://www.techtimes.com/articles/241520/20190415/sony-just-filed-a-patent-for-watching-live-esports-via-playstation-vr-like-you-re-actually-there.htm