Rovio CEO — Taking Angry Birds to movies, augmented reality, and beyond
GamesBeat: How big of an investment is that? Is AR a big thing on your radar?
Levoranta: It’s one of the things we’re exploring as part of our future of gaming strategy pillar. We’re looking at AR and MR. We want to be ready when it seems like the time is right.
GamesBeat: At this point you can spread things across a number of platforms. You don’t have to pick a particular AR platform.
Pelletier-Normand: You need to start somewhere. For us, when we started working on the game, we wanted to focus on one platform, on ARKit, so we could focus more on the content. But now that it’s out we’re investigating what we can do with Google as well.
GamesBeat: I know Magic Leap isn’t selling these things in very large numbers. But is there some value that comes back to you as far as learning how to make this kind of game?
Pelletier-Normand: Yes. As Kati pointed out, we have a whole pillar of our strategy around exploring the future of gaming. When you do this, when you’re part of the people who are shaping the market, not just following after a while, you need to take some risks. You need to be able to explore those different platforms with some investment. As you pointed out yourself, the investment we did with the Magic Leap means we have something we can deploy on different AR and VR platforms.
See the full story here; https://venturebeat.com/2019/03/30/rovio-ceo-taking-angry-birds-to-movies-augmented-reality-and-beyond/
Five Emotionally Draining VR Films
Arden's Wake: Tide's Fall
Crow: The Legend
Cycles
Dear Angelica
Gloomy Eyes
The newest film on our list, Gloomy Eyes is an adorable reimaging of the classic ‘ugly duckling’ tale. Narrated by Colin Farrel, Atlas V’s three-part adventure follows Gloomy, a tiny half-human, half-zombie hybrid struggling to find a place in a world fractured by an ongoing war between zombies and the humans who hunt them. Eventually Gloomy falls in love with an equally adorable human girl; the only issue is her uncle, who just so happens to be the most celebrated zombie hunter in history.
YouTube’s child viewers may struggle to recognise adverts in videos from ‘virtual play dates’
YouTube’s highest earning star in 2018 was a seven-year-old boy named Ryan. That’s right – a child out-earned the likes of the infamous Logan Paul, video game vlogger PewDiePie, and even make-up mogul Jeffree Star. Between June 2017 and June 2018, Ryan is estimated to have earned an impressive US$22m from the platform.
Guided by his parents, Ryan presents his own YouTube channel, Ryan ToysReview, where he unboxes and plays with the latest toys. Since joining YouTube in 2015, Ryan has amassed more than 18.5m subscribers, the majority of whom are, unsurprisingly, children. Discussing the appeal, Ryan’s mother explained that viewers feel like they’re “on a play date with him and going on fun, pretend play adventures”.
Talking to children about their favourite vloggers, and explaining that they promote toy products via their YouTube channel in order to earn money, will also sensitise them to the vlogger’s role as a marketer, making them more aware and critical of their embedded marketing messages. In the long term, however, YouTube must work with regulators to establish consistent disclosure mechanisms that can be easily identified and understood by their growing child user base.
See the full story here: https://theconversation.com/youtubes-child-viewers-may-struggle-to-recognise-adverts-in-videos-from-virtual-play-dates-113969
Inmates in Finland are training AI as part of prison labor
“Prison labor” is usually associated with physical work, but inmates at two prisons in Finland are doing a new type of labor: classifying data to train artificial intelligence algorithms for a startup. Though the startup in question, Vainu, sees the partnership as a kind of prison reform that teaches valuable skills, other experts say it plays into the exploitative economics of prisoners being required to work for very low wages.
Vainu is building a comprehensive database of companies around the world that helps businesses find contractors to work with, says co-founder Tuomas Rasila. For this to work, people need to read through hundreds of thousands of business articles scraped from the internet and label whether, for example, an article is about Apple the tech company or a fruit company that has “apple” in the name. (This labeled data is then used to train an algorithm that manages the database.)
That’s no problem for articles in English: Vainu simply set up an Amazon Mechanical Turk account to have people do these small tasks. But Mechanical Turk is “not really that useful when you want to do something [with the] Finnish language,” Rasila says, and the company had only one trainee tagging lots of data in the Finnish language.
Advanced AR app brings Mauritshuis museum Rembrandt painting to life
Users can observe Dr Tulp and his fellow physicians, as well as the subject of their examination, the corpse of Aris Kindt.
Rather than simply overlaying information on a screen, actors were hired to recreate the scene.
In a nice touch, users go through a virtual archway to begin the experience.
See the full story here https://blooloop.com/news/augmented-reality-app-rembrandt-painting-mauritshuis-ar/
EON Reality and Toyota Academy Announce Partnership to Utilize Augmented and Virtual Reality Solutions
EON Reality Inc., the world leader in Augmented and Virtual Reality-based knowledge transfer for industry and education, and Toyota Material Handling, the world leader of material-handling solutions, today announce the establishment of the partnership to bring Augmented and Virtual Reality (AVR) technology for both training purposes and to support Toyota’s Customer Lean Transformation.
The pairing will combine EON Reality’s flagship AVR Platform with the Toyota Production System, a methodology developed by Toyota to maximize efficiency in production. The first collaboration is dedicated to 5S training, but the companies’ shared vision of Industry 4.0 will allow high-end AVR solutions to be used for training, sales, and maintenance purposes.
At this month’s EON Experience Fest 2019 in Bologna, Italy, EON Reality and Toyota Material Handling Italia will demonstrate the first beta product and better outline the partnership’s ultimate goals. Early AVR training modules will focus on forklift operators and drivers before moving into areas such as Toyota’s automated warehouses. The two companies will then work together in joint workshops to decide how to best accelerate the use of AVR technology in Toyota’s portion of the industrial sector.
See the full story here: https://www.eonreality.com/press-releases/eon-reality-toyota-academy-avr/
The Ancient World through virtual reality
For example, if the user was walking through the Colosseum or the ruins of the forum in Rome, they would be able to visualize it exactly as it would have looked 2,000 years ago. The technology allows visitors to walk among the ruins, exploring different areas, while seeing the recreated city right in front of them.
Many tour operators across the world offer various forms of enhanced virtual reality experiences, bringing the ancient past to life for a new generation of visitors. This new technology is transforming the way in which we think about, and access, the ancient world.
See the full story here: https://www.thevintagenews.com/2019/03/28/virtual-reality/