philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Scope AR Snags $9.7 Million to Expand Its Enterprise Augmented Reality Platform

The funding will enable the company to extend the reach of its enterprise AR products, such as hands-free workflow guidance platform WorkLink and AR telepresence solution Remote AR, for mobile devices and AR headsets like HoloLens.

See the full story here: https://next.reality.news/news/scope-ar-snags-9-7-million-expand-its-enterprise-augmented-reality-platform-0194812/

GDC 2019: Unity “investing heavily” in augmented reality tech

Unity is investing heavily into both virtual and augmented reality as it looks to enable developers utilising the tech both in and out of the games industry.

Unity has already been used to develop AR games such as Niantic’s Pokemon Go and Ludia’s Jurassic World Alive.

But it wants to become a key partner for even more developers as it seeks to become a leader in the emerging technologies.

"A lot of opportunities"

As part of that mission, Unity has developed the AR Foundation, a toolset that lets creators build apps for both ARKit and ARCore through one platform. But it has a number of other tools powering AR development.

Unity, of course, wants to position itself right at the centre of AR’s growth.

“In general Unity is looking outside of gaming and we want to be there to enable these new platforms and new industries,” says Miller.

He adds that in the near future, he expects AR will work through mobile phones and on specialised headsets. But in future, he expects to see more head-mounted technology.

See the full story here: https://www.pocketgamer.biz/interview/70263/gdc-2019-unitys-augmented-reality-plans-were-investing-heavily/

Netflix’s next interactive show is called You vs. Wild, launches April 10th

Netflix has announced its next big interactive story — a choose-your-adventure TV series called You vs. Wild (emphasis on the “adventure” part, here), starring Bear Grylls, the survival TV personality best known for his Discovery Channel series Man vs. Wild, via Variety.

The eight-episode show was announced at Netflix’s press event in Los Angeles and will let viewers follow along with Grylls on adventures around the world as he tries to survive the great outdoors. The twist is that viewers will be able to choose Grylls’ decisions in each episode and see how they play out (presumably in a safe manner that doesn’t involve Grylls failing to survive in the wilderness should users choose poorly). Asked jokingly whether viewers could make choices that would kill Bear Grylls, Netflix Vice President of Original Series Cindy Holland laughed and said she doesn’t expect You Vs. Wild to be as “dark” as Netflix’s previous interactive project, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.

See the full story here: https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/18/18271372/netflix-interactive-show-you-vs-wild-bear-grylls-date?fbclid=IwAR3aXhKz61R7LOdnlcuPW42Uq2tbpJqYBtQR499KOxuDCnPkRpEIvr8fGsc

Industry Roadmap Outlines Path to Continued AI Dominance

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) released a draft of its 20-year roadmap for AI research in the U.S., with numerous proposed steps and a call for ongoing support from the federal government to maintain dominance. The roadmap was the work of companies and researchers who held workshops in fall 2018 and in early 2019. USC director of knowledge technologies Yolanda Gil and Stanford University professor Dr. Fei-Fei Li were two of the roadmap organizers. Last month, President Trump signed the American AI Initiative.

VentureBeat reports that CCC director Ann Drobnis “plans to invite the AI community to comment on the roadmap later this month, when a larger version of the report is released” in April. The CCC is also working closely with the National Science Foundation, which backs academic research projects. The draft proposes the creation of an Open AI platform “that includes a collection of data sets, knowledge repositories, and libraries available to and made in part by researchers in academia, government, and business.”

The roadmap proposes “the development of lifelong personal assistants to augment human ability in education, health care, and industry,” which can “enable an elderly population to live longer independently … broaden education opportunities … and dramatically accelerate the pace of discovery.”

See the full story here: http://www.etcentric.org/industry-roadmap-outlines-path-to-continued-ai-dominance/

Addressing the Cultivation of Teachers’ Reflection Skills via Virtual Reality Based Methodology

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) based approaches have emerged lately as a new learning and training paradigm. This paper addresses the possibility to cultivate teacher’s reflection skills using a VR based approach targeting to maximize their professional development. Reflection has been considered as a skill of paramount importance for teachers and an integral part of their professional development. The research aimed to investigate possible difference in cultivating reflection skills between participants who used a VR system and the control group who participated in a real classroom setting. The results indicate that the process of reflection is essential for the participants of all groups. However, the participants using the virtual classroom environment scored higher to the reflective items that the control group that tended to be undecided. Moreover, the VR system gave the participants the opportunity to enter the students’ virtual body and understand the different perspectives affecting at a higher level the reflection process than the control group.

See the full story here: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-11932-4_28

This Guy Spent an Entire Week in a VR Headset. Here’s How It Went Down

"This is quite possibly the dumbest thing I've ever done, but welcome to a week in the future," he said in a video about the experiment.

Wilmot worked, ate and exercised inside virtual reality. Sleeping in the headset turned out to be "more comfortable" than Wilmot anticipated, though his eyes burned a bit.

"If one is feeling stressed, they can load into a natural environment for ten minutes and relax," he said in the video.

See the full story here: https://www.sciencealert.com/this-is-what-happens-when-you-spend-a-whole-week-in-vr

Filament Games turns robotics into virtual reality

Robotics can be cool — and understandable — even if you’re not an engineer.

And if you learn how to control robots, you could beat the odds of having a robot take over your job some day.

That’s one of the messages of RoboCo, a project by Madison educational games development company Filament Games that’s drawing nearly $1 million in grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

It’s not meant to replace the physical act of piecing parts together and wiring circuitry but instead, to present an entrée to the concept of robotics.

Filament received a $225,000 grant to build a prototype in VR format and was recently notified the company has qualified for a phase 2, $750,000 grant to complete the project.

See the full story here: https://madison.com/wsj/business/filament-games-turns-robotics-into-virtual-reality/article_71ff90e6-8be8-5be0-9ca3-058990c46692.html

Handheld robotics and virtual reality converge in the operating room

Osso VR, maker of a VR surgical training platform, is now prepping orthopedic surgeons to use a handheld robotic device to perform implant surgeries.

The robot is called the NAVIO surgical system, and if you're squeamish, this thing is frankly terrifying. It looks like a gun and it's used by surgeons to remove bone surface semi-autonomously during knee replacement. As illustrated in the embedded video, it strikes this medical layman like a handheld torture gun.

See the full story here: https://www.zdnet.com/article/handheld-robotics-and-virtual-reality-converge-in-the-operating-room/

Khronos Releases OpenXR 0.90 Provisional Specification for High-Performance Access to AR and VR Platforms and Devices

The OpenXR 0.90 provisional release specifies a cross-platform Application Programming Interface (API) enabling XR hardware platform vendors to expose the functionality of their runtime systems. By accessing a common set of objects and functions corresponding to application lifecycle, rendering, tracking, frame timing, and input, which are frustratingly different across existing vendor-specific APIs, software developers can run their applications across multiple XR systems with minimal porting effort—significantly reducing industry fragmentation.

Many of these implementations are becoming available for developers to evaluate including the ‘Monado’ OpenXR open source implementation from Collabora and the OpenXR runtime for Windows Mixed Reality headsets from Microsoft shipping today. Additionally, the Unreal Engine from Epic plans to continue to support OpenXR.

The group has a wide array of supporters from across the hardware, software, and game industries. Among the supporters are Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, Nvidia, Microsoft, HTC, Samsung, Qualcomm, Valve, Oculus, Google, Unity, and others.

Notably absent is Apple.

See the full story here: https://www.apnews.com/Business%20Wire/80b803e294c74c3fa3ca9e0af2c869ef

and here: https://venturebeat.com/2019/03/18/khronos-group-releases-early-openxr-spec-for-ar-and-vr-hardware-standards/

‘East of the Rockies’: Reliving Japanese-Canadian internment

It is July 4, 1942, months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. A 17-year-old girl named Yuki and her family leave their home in Vancouver for the last time.

Like thousands of other Japanese-Canadians, they are forced inland by the Canadian government under the War Measures Act to internment camps in eastern British Columbia.

This depiction of a dark chapter in Canadian history is the subject of “East of the Rockies,” an interactive, augmented reality storytelling app launched on March 1.

Yuki is a second-generation Japanese-Canadian girl, and her story — a 50-minute journey through memories and words — is narrated by her granddaughter Anne, who reads Yuki’s diaries in the present day. The characters are fictional, but the history is behind the tale is true.

“It’s not a novel, it’s not a documentary,” says Kogawa, pointing out that using an app for the story has both strong and weak points. “But it’s a presentation of a piece of history and I hope that it will be helpful.”

See the full story here: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2019/03/17/digital/east-rockies-reliving-japanese-canadian-internment/#.XI63Uy2ZMnU