In a tiny office in east Orange County, a company called Global Technology Integrators is creating thousands of smells meant to bring even more life to virtual reality.
The company’s products are helping amusement parks, military trainers and others bring scents into VR, a technology that mostly has focused on sight and sound so far.
Smells already are being used at the VR attraction called The Void at Disney Springs, as part of a scenario based on Disney’s huge movie franchise “Wreck-It Ralph.”
In a 15-minute scene, the player is immersed in a short battle with cartoon rabbits, which fling cupcakes at the screen. When they hit, players can actually smell the cupcakes through a sweet scent that comes into the room.
GTI gets its base smells from a French company that supplies the perfume industry. The company then adds other liquids with specific scents to make their final products.
One thing I wanted to check was if the feed was live or canned video content, and it turns out that it's as live as the Cheddar channel on Sling TV. In fact, I turned on the Cheddar channel on the Sling TV app and the video feeds were identical and perfectly in sync.
The headset is touted for its pair of 2,560 × 1,440 OLED displays, delivering what the company now claims is a 180 degree diagonal field of view—10 more degrees than the penultimate version.
“XTAL’s new non-fresnel lenses will deliver a wider field of view and binocular overlap, a bigger sweet spot, and much less distortion compared to the existing model,” explained Marek Polcak, CEO & Co-Founder of VRgineers. “This is critically important to our customers. When prototyping a new automobile design, for instance, they’ll be able to see more of the vehicle at once, and come closer than ever to a true-to-life image.
The company is specially targeting the professional and enterprise sectors with XTAL—at $5,800 so much is clear.
The Prague-based startup’s headset features some amazing specs: two Quad HD (2560 x 1440 resolution) OLED (organic LED) displays, and an impressive 180-degree field-of-view.
Researchers borrowed equations from calculus to redesign the core machinery of deep learning so it can model continuous processes like changes in health.
...data from medical records is kind of messy: throughout your life, you might visit the doctor at different times for different reasons, generating a smattering of measurements at arbitrary intervals. A traditional neural network struggles to handle this. Its design requires it to learn from data with clear stages of observation.
A traditional neural net is made up of stacked layers of simple computational nodes that work together to find patterns in data. The discrete layers are what keep it from effectively modeling continuous processes (we’ll get to that).
In response, Duvenaud’s design scraps the layers entirely.
Calculus gives you all these nice equations for how to calculate a series of changes across infinitesimal steps—in other words, it saves you from the nightmare of modeling continuous change in discrete units. This is the magic of Duvenaud’s paper: it replaces the layers with calculus equations.
The new method allows you to specify your desired accuracy first, and it will find the most efficient way to train itself within that margin of error.
In a new study, NJIT and Johns Hopkins researchers have used augmented reality technology to alter this link and unravel the mysterious dynamic between active sensing movement and sensory feedback. The findings report that subtle active sensing movements of a special species of weakly electric fish — known as the glass knifefish (Eigenmannia virescens) — are under sensory feedback control and serve to enhance the sensory information the fish receives. The study proposes the fish use a dual-control system for processing feedback from active sensing movements, a feature that may be ubiquitous in animals.
Researchers say the findings, published in the journal Current Biology, could have implications in the field of neuroscience as well as in the engineering of new artificial systems — from self-driving cars to cooperative robotics.
“What is most exciting is that this study has allowed us to explore feedback in ways that we have been dreaming about for over 10 years,” said Eric Fortune, associate professor of biology, who led the study at NJIT. “This is perhaps the first study where augmented reality has been used to probe, in real time, this fundamental process of movement-based active sensing, which nearly all animals use to perceive the environment around them.”
“We’ve known for a long time that these fish will follow the position of their refuge, but more recently we discovered that they generate small movements that reminded us of the tiny movements that are seen in human eyes,” said Fortune. “That led us to devise our augmented reality system and see if we could experimentally perturb the relationship between the sensory and motor systems of these fish without completely unlinking them.
To investigate, the researchers placed weakly electric fish inside an experimental tank with an artificial refuge enclosure, capable of automatically shuttling back and forth based on real time video tracking of the fish’s movement. The team studied how the fish’s behavior and movement in the refuge would be altered in two categories of experiments: “closed loop” experiments, whereby the fish’s movement is synced to the shuttle motion of the refuge; and “open loop” experiments, whereby motion of the refuge is “replayed” to the fish as if from a tape recorder. Notably, the researchers observed that the fish swam the farthest to gain sensory information during closed loop experiments when the augmented reality system’s positive “feedback gain” was turned up — or whenever the refuge position was made to mirror the movement of the fish.
See the full story here: https://news.njit.edu/electric-fish-augmented-reality-reveal-how-animals-actively-sense-world-around-them
Tesla’s new manufacturing concept disclosed in this application could be used by a robot or a human. A human could use the AR system to program a robot to better assemble parts. A human or a robot could then use AR to conduct quality control checks, perhaps using computer aided design information to compare what it “sees” with how it’s supposed to be. The AR could be aided by "reference markers” - something like, "a 3-D marker, a sticker, a QR code, or a radio-frequency identification tag” - on the items.
[Philip Lelyveld comment: we've seen this for years with in-game economies. The question is whether demand for cross-game and cross-experience economies will develop.]
Innovations in cryptocurrency market will in the near future, challenge traditional banking and finance systems, and bring virtual reality to either change or oust the status quo in this area.
It will most likely do this by becoming the preferred currency in virtual reality. That is the hypothesis and thought of Brian Armstrong, founder of Coinbase in his new blog titled Digital Currency Could Be Widely Used in VR.
In other words, when people trade in virtual worlds, it will no longer be fashionable- or perhaps even rude- to rely on or use the currency of one country. Digital currency at that material time will then become the currency that will be used in these virtual spaces.
video added to powerpoint deck. See the full story here: http://www.virtualrealitypulse.com/edition/daily-magic-leap-unity-2018-12-11?open-article-id=9394794&article-title=caltech-scientists-use-ar-to-help-the-blind-navigate&blog-domain=vrscout.com&blog-title=vrscout&fbclid=IwAR1f55vLT804BZl1hgCgBx8HAMb_98IdSkQd2yIsfYQESCFm928a3m8UMLI
The headset is touted for its pair of 2,560 × 1,440 OLED displays, delivering what the company now claims is a 180 degree diagonal field of view—10 more degrees than the penultimate version.
Researchers borrowed equations from calculus to redesign the core machinery of deep learning so it can model continuous processes like changes in health.
Tesla’s new manufacturing concept disclosed in this application could be used by a robot or a human. A human could use the AR system to program a robot to better assemble parts. A human or a robot could then use AR to conduct quality control checks, perhaps using computer aided design information to compare what it “sees” with how it’s supposed to be. The AR could be aided by "reference markers” - something like, "a 3-D marker, a sticker, a QR code, or a radio-frequency identification tag” - on the items.
[Philip Lelyveld comment: we've seen this for years with in-game economies. The question is whether demand for cross-game and cross-experience economies will develop.]