Using Augmented Reality to Teach Kids about Currency
The U.S. Currency Education Program used research, prototyping, and user-feedback to develop a mobile app to teach young students about money.
In 2016, the Federal Reserve Board’s U.S. Currency Education Program (CEP) began its search for an innovative way to teach young students about Federal Reserve notes. When researching how elementary-aged students learn new topics in the classroom, we noticed a strong trend in effective mobile-based instruction. We then identified which mobile technologies teachers use in American classrooms.
Money Adventure facilitates a playful learning environment, similar to Currency Academy, the CEP’s web-based classroom content. Students can explore the features of a virtual $20 note or embark on an augmented reality quest using the detailed artwork on the back of banknotes.
See the full story here: https://digital.gov/2019/03/05/using-augmented-reality-teach-kids-about-currency/
Oculus Quest ‘Significantly Faster’ Than Oculus Go, 6DoF Tracking ‘Doesn’t Affect’ Performance
Quest is significantly faster than Oculus Go from both a CPU and GPU perspective. Part of this is just the raw performance of the chipset itself, but a lot of it has to do with the effort we’ve put into the design of the headset and the core rendering architecture. Tracking isn’t in contention with and doesn’t affect the performance of your application.
Oculus Quest is essentially a VR games console. Like Go it is standalone with all the compute onboard, but unlike Go it has room scale tracking and Touch controllers.
Whereas Go features a Snapdragon 821 chipset, Quest uses the newer and faster Snapdragon 835. It’s around 30% more powerful, or can achieve the same performance with around 40% less energy.
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Thermal throttling is arguably the core flaw of smartphone VR. It can limit graphically intense experiences to a matter of minutes. To overcome this, Go used a heatpipe and the entire front is metal, allowing it to act as a heatsink.
This cooling system allowed Facebook to overclock the Snapdragon 821, and to sustain that performance for hours. The result was that Oculus Go performs “significantly better” than a Galaxy S7 using the same chip.
Quest goes even further with cooling by adding an active cooling fan.
tracking is not done on the CPU, but rather on the Hexagon DSP- digital signal processor.
Japanese startup aims to stem rural exodus with technology
As Japan's population continues to concentrate in greater Tokyo, one startup thinks it has parts of a solution for all the hometowns being abandoned by young people, telepresence.
The technology to fuse together two rooms in two locations anywhere in the world already exists, but it often fails to go beyond underwhelming conference systems. What Tonari, which means neighbor in Japanese, wants to do is bring down costs for commercial versions of wall-size portals, create a profitable business and use some of the proceeds to fund a nonprofit that will help Japan deal with the hollowing out of its rural communities.
Tonari's developers say their product, which goes by the same name, will make users feel like the rooms they are in have been fused into one. Installations will allow for entire walls to disappear, with high video and audio quality enhancing the illusion that two places have become a single space. The Tonari system will also allow for shared digital whiteboards, notification systems and collaboration tools.
Perhaps Tonari can make life in greater Tokyo itself a little easier, too. Over half of the metropolitan area's inhabitants commute more than two hours a day. The spread of telepresence suites could give them back those hours.
The startup is banking on the fact that large screens, 4K ultrahigh-definition projectors, cameras and other pieces of hardware are becoming cheaper and more available. Tonari is also benefiting from large investments in artificial intelligence and deep learning, which will help the company's system recognize people and faces and objects.
The company got on its feet in April, 2017. By the end of the same year, the team behind it was awarded a grant from the Nippon Foundation, a private NPO with a social mission. The grant, a result of winning the Social Innovator Excellence Award, pays Tonari 50 million yen ($450,000) per year for three consecutive years.
See the full story here: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Startups/Japanese-startup-aims-to-stem-rural-exodus-with-technology
Virtual reality needs spherical displays, say researchers
“It integrates high precision multi-projector calibration, perceptual viewpoint calibration, high fidelity motion tracking and active flicker glasses to create a high frame rate, high resolution spherical display capable of presenting a multi-person mixed reality experience.” Put simply, each player gets their own perspective-corrected 3D experience.
How does Crystal work?
Crystal uses four carefully calibrated high-speed Optoma GT750ST mini short-throw projectors to create the images, which fill a plexiglass sphere coated with translucent projection paint. It uses advanced calibration and graphics rendering techniques to produce a complete, distortion-free 3D image even when viewed from multiple angles.
That calibration is done using an OptiTrack optical tracking headset, so don't think of this as a hardware-killing invention. "We track a person's head so that the image on there looks correct from their perspective as they move around," says Sidney Fels, an electrical and computer engineering professor at UBC. "Using that, the person sees a beautiful 3D scene as they move around."
The researchers tested it over four day with multiple people cooperating in a ‘find the fish’ game, a 3D ping-pong game, and a cooperative apple-grabbing game. The players reported strong, believable 3D and motion parallax effects.
At CES 2019 in January, Belgian company Mimesys demoed a 5G-enabled holographic remote collaboration system with Intel using Magic Leap's mixed reality headsets (and also some awesome holographic business cards). It feels like you're in the room with someone, at least in a rudimentary way, because it overlays their image on to your surroundings.
Crystal is a similarly ambitious kind of mixed reality, and its makers have big plans....
They are now working on a four-person version, which would open up a lot more use-cases such as multiplayer VR gaming, virtual surgery and VR-aided learning.
See the full story here: https://www.techradar.com/news/virtual-reality-needs-spherical-displays-say-researchers
A comprehensive list of UX clichés
“You are not your user”
A reminder that you are not designing the product for people like yourself. Often used as a way to encourage more user research in a project.
“If Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted, they would have told him faster horses”
Used as a counterargument to the previous statement, when you start to realize you won’t have time or money to do enough user research.
See many more here: https://www.fastcompany.com/90313720/a-comprehensive-list-of-ux-cliches