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/
How VR Enhances the Business School Experience
[At MIT Sloan] Students may see their proposals lead to rising sea levels wiping out Shanghai or housing being lost in California and Florida. The climate simulation "teaches our business students skills such as improvising, negotiating and public speaking," he says. In addition, "it reinforces how their decisions can have consequences that last for decades."
The Stanford University Graduate School of Business has committed to virtual reality in its two online Learn, Engage, Accelerate, Disrupt – or LEAD – certificate programs, one in corporate innovation and the other in personal leadership.
Margaret Neale, a Stanford professor, says she is currently working with a company to develop a new virtual negotiation tool to further enhance learning. "Using either their smartphone or computer, students will be able to use a negotiation simulation that reads their facial expressions and offers feedback on how well they did in a simulated job interview," she says. Students will also be able to see an assessment of how they negotiated compared with their peers.
The Rady School of Management at the University of California—San Diego has found similar success using the VirBELA platform as the centerpiece of its global micro-MBA program in partnership with Waseda University in Tokyo.
The timing also coincides with the decision of various Fortune 500 businesses like Honeywell, Walmart, Volkswagen and United Parcel Service to integrate VR into their worker-education programs. As virtual reality tools gain a bigger foothold in more industries, experts say, graduates who have used these technologies as part of their curriculum will be prepared to help take their employers to the next level.
See the full story here: https://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/top-business-schools/articles/2019-03-28/how-virtual-reality-enhances-the-business-school-experience
Teaching With NYT Virtual Reality Across Subjects
In the following order, they researched:
A. Sharks, skates and cartilaginous fish
B. Bony fish
C. Are dolphins fish?
D. What is a cetacean?
E. Cetaceans and intelligence
F. Dolphin clicks and screeches
The student research created a runway to speak about echolocation. We asked students to demonstrate hearing as a spatial sense by making sounds in different parts of the room while another student tried to locate the sound with eyes closed, pointing in the direction of the sound. As another example, we asked them to click their tongues with their eyes closed.
...
“The Displaced” is a virtual reality experience that recognizes the nearly 60 million people who are currently displaced from their homes by war and persecution. Half are children. This NYT VR multimedia journey tells the stories of three children from eastern Ukraine, Syria and Sudan.
See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/learning/lesson-plans/teaching-with-nyt-virtual-reality-across-subjects.html
Immersive Digital Experiences Alliance (IDEA) to Create Specifications for Next-Gen Immersive Media, Including Light Field Technology
The Immersive Digital Experiences Alliance (IDEA) will launch at the 2019 NAB Show with the goal of creating a suite of royalty-free specifications that address all immersive media formats, including emerging light field technology. Founding members, including CableLabs®, Light Field Lab Inc, Otoy, and Visby, created IDEA to serve as an alliance of like-minded technology, infrastructure, and creative innovators working to facilitate the development of an end-to-end ecosystem for the capture, distribution, and display of immersive media.
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