Virtual UI from Leap Motion
Keiichi Matsuda, creative director and VP design at Leap Motion, showed off the company’s augmented reality user interface prototype on Twitter on Thursday. In the video, a hand is seen through a special AR headset, and when flipped palm side up, three tabs appear on the hand. The tabs are interactive and can pull up a menu, but what’s interesting is that similar to a mouse on a computer screen, a finger can only interact with the virtual buttons at specific points. This interface could be the next step for smartphone and virtual reality device as it allows for the use of a device using just a pair of hands and empty space.
See the full story here: https://www.inverse.com/article/42830-virtual-wearables-augmented-reality
Exploring Virtual Reality in Dubai
Mission 828 is an interactive HTC Vive experience delivered in specially designed pods, which also add multi-sensory elements like spatial audio and simulated wind. These pods sit at the highest level of the tower which is accessible to the public...
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to prevent an impeding cyber attack by – you guessed it – climbing up the very tip of the needle-like structure using suction cups and one of those nifty hook-gun thingies Batman always had in his utility belt. During that climb, you’re artfully warned that it might be best not to look down.
Once you do manage to get to the top, you’ll need to align a special device with the approaching satellite in order to disable it. Job done, but what goes up must also come down… Luckily, there’s a nifty parachute at hand, so all you need to do is step off the edge and base jump to the ground. The whole thing only takes a few minutes, but it felt like a very long time, and I was definitely in need of recovery by the time I “landed.”
Overall it’s a really well designed experience made by British company Inition, which was also behind the vertigo-inducing experience where you can virtually slide down the Shard in London launched last year.
Just around the corner from the Burj Khalifa is a brand new 75,000 square foot VR & AR entertainment center which opened earlier this month. ....
This new VR Park is housed in the Dubai mall, which currently holds the record for being not only the largest, but also the most visited mall in the planet. Over 51 million people a year roaming its 1200 stores, which are spread over an area roughly the size of 50 football fields. ...
Currently in construction in the Emirate, for example, are the world’s longest indoor ski slope, and the Ain Dubai, the soon-to-be largest Ferris wheel anywhere. Not to mention they’re building a mountain (you heard that right) from all the construction rubble, which they also hope, will serve to increase rainfall in the region.
...the city will be hosting EXPO 2020,...
Otoy’s Octane 4 blends cinematic video and games using AI
Octane is a graphics-processing-unit (GPU) accelerated renderer, which uses the graphics card in a computer to render photorealistic images super fast. It can create high quality images at speeds up to 50 times faster than central-processing-unit renderers. It now supports the Unreal and Unity game engines, and Otoy is bringing its Brigade game engine into Octane 4.
“Now, you can get cinematic realistic effects in real-time graphics,” said Jules Urbach, CEO of Otoy, in an interview with GamesBeat. “All of it happens at 60 frames per second.”
Otoy has been using artificial intelligence to eliminate a lot of the noise that pops up in the images, and the latest version of Octane uses AI to remove the noise and complete the image without slowing down the graphics at all, Urbach said.
Otoy is also making it possible for developers to get their imagery rendered in the cloud using Amazon graphics-focused data center computers, Urbach said.
Separately, Otoy is also moving forward with a plan to use blockchain and peer-based technology to create a crowdsourced rendering engine that could make hundreds of thousands or millions of GPUs available to render images for customers. Those GPU owners would be paid in cryptocurrency, dubbed Render Token. You can now use the Render Token to render real work as part of beta testing for the platform.
See the full story with an 11 minute video here: https://venturebeat.com/2018/03/19/otoys-octane-4-blends-cinematic-video-and-games-using-ai/
Apple Goes to Hollywood. Will Its Story Have a Happy Ending?
“We don’t know anything about making television,” said Mr. Cue, a senior vice president who oversees the team in charge of the company’s original programming initiative. “So what skills does Apple bring to that? And the viewpoint is: very little. There’s other things we bring. We know how to create apps, we know how to do distribution, we know how to market. But we don’t really know how to create shows.”
Or, to be more precise: Culver City, Calif., the former home city of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where Apple is building a new 128,000-square-foot headquarters for its entertainment division.
...
the company has announced that it will reboot Mr. Spielberg’s “Amazing Stories” and has signed Ronald D. Moore, the producer of “Battlestar Galactica” and “Outlander,” for a new space drama. Apple also has deals in place for an animated series from the creator of Fox’s “Bob’s Burgers”; a comedy starring Ms. Wiig; a drama starring Ms. Spencer; and a documentary series about lavish homes from Matt Tyrnauer, who made the fashion documentary “Valentino: The Last Emperor.”
See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/25/business/media/apple-hollywood-streaming.html
Startup Using AI to Help Create Effects for Movies, TV, Games
Palo Alto-based startup Arraiy is developing methods for automating part of the often-tedious process of producing visual effects for movies, TV shows and video games. “Filmmakers can do this stuff, but they have to do it by hand,” said CTO Gary Bradski, who has worked with tech companies such as Intel and Magic Leap. The Arraiy team, led by Bradski and CEO Ethan Rublee, “are building computer algorithms that can learn design tasks by analyzing years of work by movie effects houses,” reports The New York Times. “That includes systems that learn to ‘rotoscope’ raw camera footage, carefully separating people and objects from their backgrounds so that they can be dropped onto new backgrounds.”
Arraiy has collected 10 years worth “of rotoscoping and other visual effects work from various design houses,” explains NYT.
See the full story here: http://www.etcentric.org/startup-using-ai-to-help-create-effects-for-movies-tv-games/
HTC Releases 3 ‘Ready Player One’ VR Experiences in ‘OASIS Beta’, Now Free on Viveport
Here’s the full list of mini-games available in Oasis Beta:
- Planet Gauntlet – Navigate through a seemingly endless dungeon while the undead seek to destroy you. Collecting gold will improve your score and eating food will restore your health, but only your bow skills will ensure that you make it our alive. Developer: Directive Games
- Planet Doom – Battle for the OASIS – Help to save the OASIS by defeating waves of IOI Sixers. Advance through the trenches of Planet Doom towards the snowy planes that surround Anorak’s Castle. With an arsenal of potent firepower, you must stop the Sixers from controlling the fate of the OASIS. Developer: Steel Wool Studios
- Planet Doom – Rise of the Gunters – Fight against a nearly invincible army of highly trained IOI Sixers alone OR with up to two of your friends! Proceed with caution as you defeat Sixers, collect their coins, find power ups and survive a merciless onslaught of hyper-explosive kinetic action for as long as you can survive. The OASIS is yours. Take it back from IOI by yourself or with up to two fellow Gunters! Developer: Drifter Entertainment, Inc.
The download is available for free from Viveport, although at least one of the games is launching on Steam soon—Drifter Entertainment’s Rise of the Gunters—which includes support for HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Windows “Mixed Reality” VR headsets.
If that’s not enough to satiate your need for Ready Player One goodness before the film officially launches on March 29th, social VR platforms Sansar is still hosting an Aech’s Garage experience, and TheWaveVR has reimagined the film/novel’s ‘Distracted Globe’ nightclub, replete with ’80s hits and plenty of nostalgia to keep you spinning like a record, baby.
Blockchain based Augmented Reality Surface Provider Lampix cryptocurrency UP 76%
Lampix (PIX), the first hardware and software solution that turns any surface into a smart, augmented reality surface, is offering the developer kit on Kickstarter. The kit is offered only to 100 early backers and already 37 are booked. Following the good response to the offering, the price of PIX, the native cryptocurrency of Lampix has gained 76% in the past 24 hours.
WHY PIX BLOCKCHAIN TOKEN SYSTEM?
To create powerful augmented reality, Lampix as well as any other AR system first needs to understand reality. This requires powerful computer vision and lots of training data. That’s why the developers created the PIX blockchain token system. PIX allows businesses and individuals to request and submit object reference images and category descriptions for the benefit of Lampix users and beyond. By building robust object recognition platform this way, the system is decentralized and open to all users and developers. This will help generate a vast, always growing database of images to power unique applications across industries.
Lampix
REFERENCE IMAGES AND REVENUE GENERATION BY DAPP CREATORS.
Lampix Developer Edition is made as open and simple as possible for developers to leverage the powerful object detection system with own HTML5 based apps. If a developer need reference images for app to recognize specific objects, then all that needs to be done is set a bounty and the community will offer the needed details. When the app is ready to hit the market, a developer can sell the apps for PIX tokens to generate revenue.
See the full story here: https://www.legalgamblingandthelaw.com/news/blockchain-based-augmented-reality-surface-provider-lampix-up-76/