philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Google employees are lining up to trash Google’s AI ethics council

The newly-launched independent council was meant to help guide the ethics of Google’s AI projects. But the blowback shows just how fraught—and politicized— AI is becoming, writes Will Knight.

What’s happening: Almost a thousand Google staff and other workers in tech have signed a letter protesting the makeup of the council. One member of the council has also declined an invitation to take up the role.

Specifically: They’re worried about two members. One is Dyan Gibbens, CEO of Trumbull, a company that develops autonomous weapons system. But they're particularly unhappy at the inclusion of Kay Coles James, president of the Heritage Foundation, a thinktank which opposes regulating carbon emissions and takes a hard line on immigration. There has also been criticism at the board’s lack of any civil rights activist who has expertise in the ways that AI can neglect or harm minorities.

See the full story here: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613253/googles-ai-council-faces-blowback-over-a-conservative-member

PTC Improves Workforce Efficiency with Launch of Breakthrough Vuforia Expert Capture Augmented Reality Solution

Vuforia Expert Capture provides up-to-date, relevant information when and where workers need it most – in the real-world context of their daily work environment. Knowledge can be captured on-the-fly as needs arise, without causing disruption to high-value workers. No advance preparation or development efforts are required to easily create step-by-step instructions for hands-on training and task guidance.

Captured procedures can be fine-tuned in a secure, SaaS-based environment and then dynamically delivered on RealWear HMT-1, Microsoft HoloLens, and mobile devices to front-line workers across the enterprise. Spatial intelligence from HoloLens’ location-aware functionality can be leveraged to safely guide front-line workers through multi-step procedures at different locations without compromising speed and accuracy.

Vuforia Expert Capture is a valuable solution in manufacturing environments where existing service/maintenance/changeover procedures for equipment are unavailable.

See the full story here: https://www.nonpareilonline.com/ptc-improves-workforce-efficiency-with-launch-of-breakthrough-vuforia-expert/article_8fab6e5c-a52d-5429-b65c-4977cb27922c.html

The Top 5 Virtual/Simulated Characters and How They Foretold the Future

Virtual Character #3: Virtual Influencers: Kizuna Ai and Lil Miquela

This spot goes to two (real life?) virtual characters that never existed on TV or in the movies. They are among the biggest YouTube stars – in fact, the days of YouTube celebrities being human may be a thing of the past.

The trend stated In Japan, with Kizuna Ai, an anime-inspired character who looks cartoonish, is a major star in Japan. In 2018, the character has not one but two YouTube channels and has over 2 million subscribers. She was known as the first “virtual YouTuber” and later, Mattel launched virtual Barbie as a real character. Today YouTube estimates over half a billion views that have been attributed to virtual influencers on the platform.

See the full story here: https://variety.com/2019/tv/features/the-top-5-virtual-simulated-characters-and-how-they-foretold-the-future-1203176886/

How virtual reality could be the virtual end of hospitality

The biggest threat to the on-trade as we know it is here. And it’s goggle-shaped.

That, at least, is the hope of Larry Davies, MD of by the Cambridge-based technology firm VR Fictional. ‘The whole point of virtual reality is that it allows you to create your own narrative,’ he told Imbibe. ‘The universe that you inhabit isn’t pre-ordained.’

Davies has teamed up with top bars and restaurants all over the world to create a portfolio of ‘dream nights out’. Users simply download the venue, put on the company’s specially designed VR headsets – and are transported into the top bar or restaurant of their choice.

Food and drinks can be home-delivered by local establishments – perhaps even by the same ones that the user is ‘drinking’ or ‘eating’ in – for a fully immersive experience. What’s more, by linking VR systems, it’s possible for entire friendship groups to enjoy a virtual night out together without having to leave their homes. They need only ensure that their home fridges are stocked with vodka and Red Bull before they hit the virtual club.

See the full story here: http://imbibe.com/news-articles/general/virtual-reality-virtual-end-hospitality/

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.

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.

SPONSORS

Bose
Lenovo
Future Tech
Google

See the full story here: http://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2019/april/virtual-reality-experience-takes-audience-back-to-10-000-bc-at-t.html

Ever dream of controlling robot swarms? This new virtual reality headset could help

VR and gesture tracking are already popular tools for controlling robots, but the new approach—combining them so that users can directly interact with large numbers of robots—is uniquely intuitive, the researchers say. The new system allowed untrained operators to corral 50 free-roaming virtual robots into three different areas in about 5 minutes, they report this week on the preprint server arXiv. In surveys afterward, users were broadly positive about the system.

Real world applications still face many challenges, including capturing enough data to create realistic simulations and transmitting them quickly enough to prevent the simulation from lagging. But the researchers say forthcoming 5G mobile communication technology could be the missing ingredient.

See the full story here: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/03/ever-dream-controlling-robot-swarms-new-virtual-reality-headset-could-help

See the original paper here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.10064

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/

‘Trover Saves The Universe’ And ‘Five Nights Freddy’s’ Are Scary Funny on PlayStation VR

Arguably more frightening than Five Nights at Freddy’s though is the idea of Justin Roiland’s id unleashed. Rick and Morty gives us frequent glimpses into the animator/voice actor’s bonkers takes on comedy science-fiction. But Trover Saves The Universe, from Roiland’s VR dev team Squanch Games, is pure Roiland shot straight into our eyeballs.

The set-up is like something from Channel 101 or a Rick and Morty Interdimensional Cable episode, a kind of drunk and lazy improv sketch only half committed to. Because the player is stuck in a chair holding a normal DualShock 4, they play as an alien stuck in a chair called a “Chairorpian.” Most of the action is handled indirectly by Trover, a rebel who actually walks around wielding a sword looking for new babies to stick into his eye sockets.

Really the appeal is just hearing Roiland riff in a universe that isn’t Rick and Morty but might as well be, albeit just with the insane profanity and gross alien stuff without added human emotional depth. The art style is basically the same, just translated to 3D like the actual Rick and Morty VR game. It’s very funny and in your face, literally.

See the full story here: https://www.geek.com/games/trover-saves-the-universe-and-five-nights-freddys-are-scary-funny-on-playstation-vr-1780652/

Valve Headset

The Bellevue, Washington, game maker quietly posted an image to its website Friday showing what appears to be a new VR headset called the Valve Index. The site is light on details, other than to give a slight profile shot of the device, and the promise of more information in May. "Upgrade your experience," the image says.

See the full story here: https://www.cnet.com/news/valve-index-virtual-reality-headset-to-take-on-oculus-sony/

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.

See the full story here: http://www.virtualrealitypulse.com/edition/daily-leap-motion-oculus-2019-03-30?open-article-id=10133793&article-title=five-emotionally-draining-vr-films&blog-domain=vrscout.com&blog-title=vrscout