Exclusive: Augmented reality comes into focus at PTC
During CEO Jim Heppelmann’s keynote, for example, he was joined onstage by employees from defence, security, and aerospace giant, BAe Systems, which has created a visual training aid using PTC’s Vuforia AR technology and Microsoft’s HoloLens head-mounted display (HMD), to guide workers in manufacturing plants through the process of building a green bus battery.
In addition, attendees saw a lab technician from Sysmex America, a manufacturer of clinical laboratory equipment, being shown via an AR headset how to perform daily set-up procedures for machines that analyse blood.
That second example uses technology from Waypoint, a start-up recently acquired by PTC, which was launched out of MIT’s Media Lab. Waypoint will be integrated into PTC’s thriving AR business, which is worth around $20 million in annual revenues and is growing at 100 percent each year, according to Heppelmann.
See the full story here: https://internetofbusiness.com/exclusive-augmented-reality-comes-into-focus-at-ptc/
BBC launches property makeover show with virtual reality
The BBC has announced a new property makeover show featuring virtual reality.
Couples who disagree on the future look of their homes will be able to “step into” different plans dreamt up by architects.
The couples then choose which designs to take on and build themselves in the eight-part series on BBC Two, the former home of Changing Rooms and Ground Force.
See the full story here: https://home.bt.com/tech-gadgets/tech-news/bbc-launches-property-makeover-show-with-virtual-reality-11364280751048
AI Weekly: The growing importance of clear AI ethics policies
In a letter addressed to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, 19 groups of shareholders expressed concerns that Rekognition’s facial recognition capabilities will be misused in ways that “violate [the] civil and human rights” of “people of color, immigrants, and civil society organizations.” And they said that it set the stage for sales of the software to foreign governments and authoritarian regimes.
Amazon, for its part, said in a statement that it will “suspend … customer’s right to use … services [like Rekognition]” if it determines those services are being “abused.” It has so far declined, however, to define the bright-line rules that would trigger a suspension.
AI ethics is a nascent field. Consortia and think tanks like the Partnership on AI, Oxford University’s AI Code of Ethics project, Harvard University’s AI Initiative, and AI4All have worked to establish preliminary best practices and guidelines. But Francesca Rossi, IBM’s global leader for AI ethics, believes there’s more to be done.
“Each company should come up with its own principles,” she told VentureBeat in a phone interview. “They should spell out their principles according to the space that they’re in.”
See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/2018/06/22/ai-weekly-the-growing-importance-of-clear-ai-ethics-policies/
Pay Attention to Qualcomm’s Augmented and Virtual Reality Efforts
The Snapdragon 835 and 845
Last February, Qualcomm introduced the Snapdragon 835 VR development kit. The headset in that kit included a two-megapixel per eye display, 6-DoF (degrees of freedom) controls, monochromatic VGA global shutter cameras for eye tracking, Aqstic audio, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, 4GB or RAM, 64GB of storage, and an external trackpad.
Simply put, the reference design gave companies everything they needed to launch a stand-alone VR headset.
The Snapdragon XR1
In late May, Qualcomm launched the Snapdragon XR1, which it calls the "world's first dedicated XR (extended reality) platform." The chipset features 3-DoF and 6-DoF interactive controls, along with support for 4K video at 60fps, 3D overlays, and dual displays. It's also compatible with popular graphics APIs like OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan.
To stay on top of that market, Qualcomm partnered with Himax Technologies(NASDAQ:HIMX), which produces various optical components for AR and VR devices. Last August Qualcomm and Himax introduced a SLiM (structured light module) 3D sensing solution, which merges Qualcomm's Spectra image processor with Himax's optical components, drivers, and modules in a "total camera system solution" for depth-sensing smartphones.
See the full story here: https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/06/25/pay-attention-to-qualcomms-augmented-and-virtual-r.aspx
Augmented Reality Reporting from NY Times Shows That Military Perpetrated Syria Chemical Attack
See the full story here: https://mobile-ar.reality.news/news/augmented-reality-reporting-from-ny-times-shows-military-perpetrated-syria-chemical-attack-0185471/
Sony spinoff to screen virtual reality movies in Tokyo
Vaio and movie studio operator Toei Company Ltd. said they will show short films, including the popular Japanese animation series "Neon Genesis Evangelion" and a spinoff of "Osomatsu Kun," created by the late Japanese manga artist Fujio Akatsuka, in the Shinjuku Wald 9 theater. Tickets will cost 1,500 yen ($13.7).
See the full story here: https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2018/06/37fec4cd0430-vaio-to-screen-virtual-reality-movies-in-tokyo.html
Oculus’ VR television hub launches today on Oculus Go
Oculus is officially launching Oculus TV, its dedicated hub for watching flatscreen video in virtual reality, on the standalone Oculus Go headset. Oculus TV was announced at last month’s F8 conference, and it ties together a lot of existing VR video options, highlighting Oculus’ attempts to emphasize non-gaming uses of VR. The free app features a virtual home theater with what Oculus claims is the equivalent of a 180-inch TV screen. It offers access to several streaming video services, including subscription-based platforms like Showtime and free web television services like Pluto TV as well as video from Oculus’ parent company Facebook.
You can already watch a lot of non-VR video on Oculus Go; Showtime, Netflix, and Hulu have standalone apps, for instance.
See the full story here: https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/25/17500614/oculus-tv-vr-television-streaming-hub-launch
OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman on the transformative potential of artificial general intelligence
That lab grew into OpenAI, which counts Altman, Elon Musk, LinkedIn executive chairman Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, and other titans of industry as its backers. Its stated goal is to “build safe human-level AI,” and to advance the field of AI with groundbreaking research in robotics, games, and dataset generation.
There are three things that power all AI systems: data, compute, and algorithms. We live in a world where it’s all about these very rare, precious labeled datasets, and now we’re starting to see models like the one that [OpenAI] released for language that is able to consume unlabeled data. They read thousands of books and don’t require you to go and very carefully apply these labels, and in the end, give you a system that can read the internet and these massive corpora.
The second piece we’re doing on the data front is something like [the Dota 2-playing AI] OpenAI Five. It plays 180 years worth of games against itself every single day, which is an example of using compute to generate data.
On the compute front, in the past couple of months, we published a post looking at how much computing power had been thrown at deep learning models over the past six years. You can see that the largest AI training runs have been doubling every 3.5 months at a 300,000 times increase. To put that into perspective, it’s kind of like if in six years, smartphone batteries went from lasting one day to lasting 800 years.
That brings us to the algorithms. Everything we’ve made so far has involved simple ideas, but are these the right simple ideas? Are they going to go further? The truth is that we haven’t hit them all yet, so we don’t know — we don’t know whether they’ll break down … We’re in a bit of a fog, and we’re going to be in that fog until the landscape stops changing so rapidly.
VentureBeat: The idea of artificial general intelligence — so-called superintelligent AI — is concerning to some people.
I think it all boils down to one core idea: artificial general intelligence has the potential to cause extremely rapid change. And when you have rapid change, it’s hard for the policy machinery and social norms — how people relate and fit into the system — to keep up.
The most important thing for governments to be doing at the policy level is developing ways to measure it.
See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/2018/06/25/openai-cofounder-greg-brockman-on-the-transformative-potential-of-artificial-general-intelligence/
AUGMENTED REALITY COULD BE ‘BIGGER THAN THE WEB’, SAYS ADOBE EXECUTIVE
Belsky is in London to talk about the future of design. “We're sharing some research that when we talked to hiring managers at an assortment of top companies, 87 per cent of them say that UX designers are some of their most critical hires right now.
Belsky also talks a lot about something he calls experience design and a new app called Adobe XD. “Experience design to me is every interface in your life that you use to make a decision. So that could be an experience on a mobile device or on a web page or in an augmented reality space. And I would argue that every brand these days wants to create a consistent experience for their customers across every channel. It’s a different world than it was 10 years ago, where you were just building a website.”
Creating a new app must involve making choices as you build, introducing constraint along the way, surely?
“First of all, constraints empower creativity. I like the idea of building a product that solves a need and building off of it.
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Ethics will play a role, too: “There are a lot of issues that it opens up like for example who is allowed to place an augmented reality object where. Can someone from Burger King walk into a McDonald's and place a Burger King ad there? What are the rules? It's a whole new kind of field of consideration. Maybe we revert to the thousand years of property law: this is my property and you can be here if I invite you, maybe it's that or maybe it's based on relationship.
See the full story here: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/adobe-augmented-reality-project-aero-scott-belsky-ar-a8415596.html