Facebook Expands Its Takedown Powers Over Fake Content
Facebook has changed its policy to make it much easier to take down fraudulent pages and groups, in its efforts to suppress fake news and propaganda. Up until now, a troll has been able to create multiple fake pages and Facebook has had to close each page or group individually. Facebook stated, it “may now also remove other Pages and Groups with similar names that are maintained by the same person, even if that specific Page or Group has not met the threshold to be unpublished on its own.”
Wired reports that, “Facebook will also launch a new control panel Thursday for page managers, designed to make it easier and less confusing for them to understand when their posts have breached Facebook’s Community Standards.”
In this new process, Facebook’s “Page Quality tab will display content that [it] recently removed and will cite the rule it broke,” including “graphic violence, harassment, bullying, nudity, and sexual activity” (but not spam, clickbait, or IP violations). Also on Page Quality, managers will see if Associated Press, PolitiFact or other third party fact-checkers have rated their content “False,” “False Headline” or “Mixture.” With these ratings, “Facebook reduces how many people see them in their News Feed.”
See the full story here: http://www.etcentric.org/facebook-expands-its-takedown-powers-over-fake-content/
Dropbox, Google and Sony Debut Tech at Sundance Festival
“Instead of commenting ‘There’s a popping noise on the soundtrack about a minute in,’ reviewers can place a comment at the 0:51 mark that says, ‘Remove popping noise’,” explained the company’s blog post. Dropbox Professional Business Advanced, Enterprise or Education account users will be able to avail themselves of the new feature.
OpenCue, the tool launched by Google and Sony Pictures Imageworks, “helps studios to manage their rendering cues.” Code-named Cue when it was internal at Sony, the original project “has been used to render hundreds of movies across 150,000 cores, housed both in Sony’s own data center as well as in the Google Cloud.” OpenCue can also be used for on-premise rendering. As members of the Academy Software Foundation, Google and Sony open-sourced the project, which is available on Sony’s Github pages and was released under the Apache license.
TechCrunch adds that Google’s effort to “bring the Hollywood studios to its Cloud Platform” most recently included “the launch of its Los Angeles cloud region last year, as well as its acquisition of the Zync cloud renderer back in 2014.” At Imageworks, it says, “Cue 3 was actually [the company’s] internal queuing system, which is at least 15 years old.” Google worked with Imageworks to “open-source the system” and both companies scaled it to 150,000 cores.
See the full story here: http://www.etcentric.org/dropbox-google-and-sony-debut-tech-at-sundance-festival/
Thinking and behaviour differs in virtual reality and real life, study claims
“People expect VR experiences to mimic actual reality and thus induce similar forms of thought and behaviour,” said Alan Kingstone, a professor in UBC’s department of psychology and the study’s senior author. “This study shows that there’s a big separation between being in the real world and being in a VR world.”
Previous research has shown that ‘social presence’ deters contagious yawning, with people yawning less or resisting the urge to yawn when they believe they are being watched.
Collaborating with Andrew Gallup from State University of New York Polytechnic Institute, the team from UBC tried to bring about contagious yawning in a VR environment, with participants in the study wearing an immersive headset and being exposed to videos of people yawning.
Results showed that in those conditions, the rate of contagious yawning was 38 per cent, comparable to the average real-life rate of 30-60 per cent.
However when researchers introduced social presence in the virtual environment they found it had little effect, with the subjects yawning at the same rate, even while being watched by a virtual human avatar or a virtual webcam.
Researchers doing the study described the observations as an “interesting paradox”, saying that stimuli that trigger contagious yawns in real life did the same in virtual reality, but stimuli that suppress yawns in real life did not.
See the full story here: https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2019/01/thinking-and-behaviour-differs-in-virtual-reality-and-real-life-study-claims/
Smart Glasses Aren’t on the Streets, They’re on Factory Floors
But that changes if you look to the factory or the shop-room floor. In such settings, augmented-reality smart glasses are already being deployed across a wide swath of industries. The high price of smart glasses looks much less imposing when it’s seen as a capital expense to help make a workforce more capable. More importantly, some companies are finding that equipping workers with augmented-reality smart glasses is providing immediate and obvious returns on investment in both time and safety.
It seems possible that the adoption of smart glasses by consumers may resemble that of computers: The mainframes used in the early days of computing were extremely expensive, and were strictly owned by companies. But as technology improved, computers became increasingly ubiquitous at workers’ desks. The PC revolution completed the process, leading to computers being found in the vast majority of American homes.
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Enter the Microsoft Hololens, augmented-reality smart glasses capable of overlaying holograms on top of what the viewer sees. Instead of carefully applying the cardboard to each car, a tester could slip on a Hololens, which superimposed 500 dots in the same positions as the paper’s holes, and test for paint thickness.
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“If you drop and break a pair of Glasses, the worst-case scenario, it’s $1,500. If you buy a rugged tablet and drop it on the floor and run over it with a tractor, it’s $4,000. So, that was a pretty easy business case to bring to my leadership,” says Gulick.
A host of other companies beyond Microsoft and Alphabet have developed niches for augmented-reality smart glasses within the industrial world. Epson has built smart glasses designed for use by professional drone operators which allow them to keep an eye on the drone and also see what the drone itself is “seeing” in a single glance. Vuzix smart glasses are designed to help keep supply-chain information in front of workers’ eyes while they’re in the warehouse. The DAQRI Smart Helmet helps architects and designers visualize their work in 3-D space.
See the full story here: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/smart-glasses-arent-on-the-streets-theyre-in-factories.html
Microsoft’s patented augmented reality glasses are basically a miniaturized HoloLens
In non-patent speak, the AR glasses will be able to display and let you interact with digital content overlaid on the real world, much like HoloLens currently does. Where the glasses would set themselves apart is in size. Whereas HoloLens is currently a relatively bulky rig, Microsoft's proposal would pack the same capabilities into something the size of a large set of glasses.
See the full story here: https://www.windowscentral.com/microsofts-patented-augmented-reality-glasses-are-basically-miniaturized-hololens
Leap Motion Reveals Updated Project North Star AR Prototype Design
The Project North Star headset is bulky and largely impractical as a real product in its current form, but it’s designed primarily to be a platform that developers can use to experiment with the AR specs and features of tomorrow, today. Specifically, North Star offers a combined 100 degree field of view, 1,600 × 1,400 per-eye resolution at 120 FPS, and of course the company’s optical hand-tracking tech for input—far exceeding any standalone AR headset on the market today.
The latest update to the project, ‘Release 3’, was revealed this week offering a major design update which brings together “several months of research and insight into a new set of 3D files and drawings,” writes Leap Motion’s Florian Maurer. The updated design can be found at the Project North Star GitHub.
AiSolve launches WePlayVR at LA’s Two Bit Circus
WePlayVR is our flagship LBVR attraction designed as a free roaming, turn-key, single operator arena offering infinite immersive experiences in a compact, finite 10×10 space. With four experiential titles already in the WePlayVR catalogue, Two Bit Circus will be able to offer their guests a wide range of highly interactive and immersive games specifically developed to showcase thrilling experiences within the WePlayVR platform. We’ve previously deployed WePlayVR in thirty locations across the globe, with the Two Bit Circus activation marking the first appearance of the LBVR attraction in Southern California, where we have an office.
Guests visiting Two Bit Circus will have access to WePlayVR’s most popular titles including ALIEN INVASION, CLOCK TOWER AND STAR DEFENCE, which is AiSolve’s newest multi-player experience.
See the full story here: http://www.aisolve.com/aisolve-launches-weplayvr-at-las-two-bit-circus/?fbclid=IwAR0EiMZTv6q296yrtq5dbDpCL406fuEjAP6_jSgeWfFrtltpDBnTElDxhQ4